Papermill Lock

Every cyclist is a weather prophet. They haunt websites for signs of a break in the cold; they share tips on where the most reliable forecasts reside; they invest in indoor/outdoor thermometers in the hope of gauging what they need to wear for their weekend jaunts. And still when they turn up for a ride half will claim to be under-dressed and the others will be over-heating.

The sun has decided to appear, the temperature is nudging towards double digits and the layers are slowly being peeled away. Like the first flowers of spring, those gaudy crocuses – the fair weather cyclists return to the fold, they have wintered out, gone skiing instead, gone jogging or just stayed in bed. The group has swelled once more and the good bikes are brought out of the bubble wrap.

However, there is still that ever present fear of the weather. The concern over the cold is replaced by bitter complaints about the spring winds. Half a ride can be spent disagreeing about which direction it is coming from, where it will be on the way home and the best route to take to avoid the worst of it. And yet the end of the ride is always spent breaking your heart into a howling gale on the sea front.

Then again there are the other times when the wind drops and we take off for somewhere new. Last weekend, we meet early, seven of us all with open ended passes. No need to rush back, kids taken care of by indulgent partners. We spin out past the usual routes, no Barling for us today. Instead it’s out to the north of the county. Before long we have the roads to ourselves, we ride two abreast, keeping an eye on the surfaces we roll along – the recent bad weather having opened up cavernous potholes which could snap a fork, puncture a tyre or even knock you off your bike.

We know it’s along one and for the first couple of hours we keep it sensible but it’s not long before CF charges off the front, then we are all scrambling to get a wheel the gentle 18 mph replaced by 24 and heavy breathing, the peleton spread all over the road and very few of us clear about where we are going.



Fortunately, we stop mid ride for a cuppa. The lads are good and merely have a teacake but I’m not turning down an opportunity to devour a rather delicious slice or two of Victoria sponge. The talk turns to the beauty of the location – Papermill Lock. A genuine working lock, complete with longboats and picture postcard looks. The only down side is that we are back down at sea level and have one of the largest hills in Essex to climb before we can even think about the next twenty-five miles home.

We lumber up, each picking a gear which will suffice – some go for the powering up approach, others go for the spinning gear – a big dinner plate on the back. All try to make sure it’s not their final gear – the granny gear still there in reserve. Then TLV decides to take off and it’s all on again. People swear as they clunk into the big chain ring and attempted to move from the slow regular rhythm of climbing into the high tempo churning of sprinting.

It is a devastation from which the peleton does not recover. We spend the next hour in pairs wondering where others have got to as we enter into the fourth and fifth hour of riding. CF and I put on a final spurt as we realise that no-one is near us. We push it through the lanes of Battlesbridge. Thighs now screaming with lactic build up. Laurent Fignon used to describe a particularly hard training ride as ‘Going to meet the man with the hammer’ and today I think I may well have glimpsed him as I finish my final water bottle and realise I am still forty minutes from home.

I stand up for the last slope, breathing deeply, my shoulders hurting as I start to grip the bike too hard and I hear CF’s chain come off. I slow turn to turn round but it’s not slipped off, it’s broken in two. The man with the hammer taking direct action. It’s some relief to stop and chat, eat a cereal bar and wait for Big D to turn up with his van. We review the ride, glorying in not merely doing the 70 miles but having such a lovely day to do it in.

The van arrives and I spurn the chance to put my bike in the back, instead I climb back on, the light of virtue in my eyes. I’m coming home under my own steam. Hammered but unbowed.

Stuff

"No, that'll do me fine." I said and CF just looked at me and laughed. He'd heard it all before. The novice cyclist claiming that the bike under him was just perfect, no alterations necessary. No need to get involved in the world of kit.

A few weeks after this exchange I found myself in a newsagents waiting for a train. I took down a copy of Cycling Weekly (otherwise known as the comic) and the die was cast. A mag full of kit, most of which I didn't fully know where it went on a bike. What was a bottom bracket? Stems? Seat posts? and why did people need ones different from the ones they got with their bikes? After all I had just spent the best part of £700 on my Trek 1200, surely it didn't need anything to make it any more lovely.

The pedals were the first thing I replaced, I think I thought that they would be the only thing I needed, I had been getting a sore knee and the blokes nodded sagely and said "pedals", who was I to argue. Then someone was flogging a second hand pair of wheels cheap, I thought "Why not, everyone says that wheels and tyres are the key". And well, after that, if you are going to spend a long time on the bike, a decent saddle is important - what's £70 when your comfort is involved?

And well, it's not long before you're looking at that perfect bike and thinking, it's nice but it's really a winter bike. So that fateful day when I fell in love with the 5.2 Madone - in red. that last bit is important. It's not known by me as the Madone, although I regularly thank Mary for the beauty of it. No, it's the 'red bike' and it cost me close to £2000. It's called the Madone after a hill in Nice. I once went up part of it on a bus and nearly passed out from the vertiginous nature of the beast. Lance went up it in record time on the prototype of my bike. It's a good name, the BVM is supposed to be the patron saint of cyclists and when the legs are screaming it's worth remembering.

Of course even the perfection of the red bike needed some alteration - a new set of wheels (they were going cheap, I would have been a fool not to have snapped them up), a new stem and handlebar - carbon, ergonomically designed - obviously improving my performance no end. A new chain and cassette. I have got my eye on some new cranks.

But maybe the more extreme change in my attitude to kit is in the clothes. I used to turn up in Ultura gear - cheap and durable kit and quite frankly perfectly serviceable. However, the pressure of the peleton soon led me to start looking at the kit I had once winced at the prices of. I did buy a team kit - Saunier Duval top and shorts. I really thought that I had arrived. In my mind I was David Millar. It was only when MF said very loudly and quite cruelly, yet correctly, that he could see my pubes through the white front of the shorts that I realised why Mr Millar had chosen to jump ship and join a more sensibly trousered team.

But when the red bike arrived, everything changed. I needed kit to match the prestige of the bike. And it needed to be red. So now I entered the period where my gloves are red, my socks are red, my sunglasses are even red. But maybe more to the point I have discovered Rapha red.

Rapha are the acme of cycle clothes. In fact we are the ponces of the peleton. Overpriced and no longer made over here, Rapha likes to think of itself harking back to a golden age of tifosi. All merino wool and sans helmets. However, you have got to love the gear. I have a Rapha top, a Rapha jacket and am seriously looking at shorts and a jersey for the summer. What credit crunch? There's no point keeping the money in the bank. As I like to say to my wife, I could be out doing coke. Or even worse, playing golf.

Now I open the comic and think, hmm...maybe that's just waht i need, a carbon seat post clamp - it'll make all teh difference, then no more need for anymore kit. Honest, CF, honest.

Off and Abandon

Cycling and mucky weather. It's not for everyone. Lance, for example, has never had a go at Roubaix, the ride made famous by the fact that the tracks of northern France, where the ride ends, are made up of blocks of pave - cuboid chunks of cobble - which bounce cyclists off the road, crack front forks and leave riders peeing blood for days after. And that can be on a good day. Usually, of course, it's chucking it down with rain and the cobbles make pro riders look like dogs on wet lino. The Prince of Le Tour shakes his head when offered the chance to join cycling's immortals and maybe none of us should blame him.

So, it's been snowing this week, the thermometer by my bed hasn't shown a positive value all week, the little green light notifying possible icy conditions has been working overtime and schools have had to close for fear of the new bogey man - Health and Safety. Undeterred, a few of us roll up at 8 - big D in his road man's beard , CF, JF, K and NS. None too keen to get going we wait expecting others to arrive but they have all pulled their sheets over their heads today and it's just us.

A 45 seems like a good idea and as we roll out along the sea front the mood in the peleton is good. Lots of admiring glances at Big D's Mercian and chatter about the number of layers each of us is wearing.

The first sign that maybe things are not quite right is when the puddles at the edge of the road look like the bottoms of beer glasses - thick ice, undisturbed by any sun for quite some days. The talk turns to times we have fallen off. I point out to JF the place where I hit CF's back wheel and slid half way across the road in my new jacket. How I spent that night in a fever of speculation on how much worse the accident could have been - a broken collarbone at the very least, a cracked wrist or a thud into an oncoming car.

As we turn off the main road and past the duckpond, the temperature drops as if we have gone through a frozen curtain and these least used roads are much icier. I slow down and move to the back of the group and try and find a clean line through. We always joke about this stretch as being like a mini Belgium - open fields, a cruel wind and rotten roads. Roubaix in Essex.

When someone goes down it is no surprise, one of us was due a tumble. The surprise is that it is not me and that it is Big D. And being at the back, I have the perfect view. His front tyre rolls over the ice before he can even see it but his back tyre isn't straight and there it is, he's over. Luckily, he lands firmly on his thigh, and maybe more luckily, he doesn't rip any of his clothes. He stands there and takes our sympathy but you can see he is annoyed with himself. The off a judgement on his ability and while this is not true it is very difficult not to feel that you could have done more, you could have prevented it. But really he couldn't have, not today, not even the great Mercyx - the Cannibal of Roubaix could have stopped that spill.

From that moment on the group is silent, every corner a potential disaster, the shoulders tighten, the handling stiffens and every patch of black on the road is possible ice. When I finally shout that I am heading back, my nerve gone, it is not long before the others agree. The ride back is slow, no idle chatter on the seafront now. An abandon is serious business. We only get out twice a week at this time of the year and having to come back home in all our gear after less than an hour's worth of riding is a depressing thing indeed.

Still, there is always tomorrow, I hear the forecast is supposed to be better...

Hoe Lane

Not every ride is a Barling in disguise. Every week there is some one agitating for a longer ride. A ride that has something more to offer than the flat expanse of littorial Essex. When those voices win, we go out to Hoe Lane.

Essentially we head away to the old A130. Winding our way down lanes towards the antique shops selling pine stripped boxes and over pricedfrills of ancient lace in Battlesbridge. Out to the nightmare of the Rettenden turnpike, a major junction with cars coming from all directions like something from the start of the Wacky Races and suddenly up into the peace and genuine countryside of a deserted road which once used to carry all the traffic to Chelmsford.

The thing about a Hoe Lane is that not only is it a longer ride, it is a much harder ride - proper hills that sap the legs. It's a ride where you always need to save a bit because otherwise it's not long before you feel that horrible burn in the thighs, the wheels get harder to turn and it's become a long way from home.

A Hoe Lane is, though, the best of all rides. Traffic free, every time we're out there, it's a different . Either over the Hanningfield Reservoir and on to Stock with its dainty windmill. Alternatively, it's on over the A12 and out to Manningtree. Whatever the way it's where we feel we're really away from the urban. The variety of wildlife increases, trees crowd the road like soemthing out of a Samuel Palmer and the colours of verdant nature startl. Us untutored lot gasp as we ride onto a crest and see all of South Essex below. The lungs open up and we feel like we're really breathing at last.

Cycling does many things but one that always surprises me is the way in which you understand geography so much more intimately - every rise must, somewhere, be balanced out by a fall. The very geology of the land apparant with each turn of the pedals. Riding a ridge, you feel the pressures beneath the earth which created this upsurge of land. Coming into a valley you understand why a village is here and not elsewhere as you glide over an old stone bridge, a dribble of a stream still persisting. You follow the lines of ancient tracks that many have a wheeled a cart or shouldered a load before you.

Now the villages we ride through are double garaged with Mercs and Beamers. These well fed burghers all Barbours and Huskies smile slightly bemused at us as they go to collect their Mails and Telegraphs in the local shop. Their pointers and black labs waiting for their daily muddy adventure.

A three hour ride out here really is what it is all about. The reason we set the alarm and sneak out to meet at a second hand car lot in drizzle. The reason we can laugh at each others' blackened faces as the unmudguarded among us spray up all manner of scurf from the road and the reason we want to do it all again next week.

Showing me how it is done

One of the great things about cycling is the quality of writing on the subject.

On the Rapha website, there's a rather fine piece by one of my favourites - Matt Seaton. One time Guardian columnist, author of Two Wheels and The Escape Artist. Here he shows how to write about riding in the winter.

http://www.rapha.cc/index.php?page=599

How cold is too cold?

A question well worth asking after the start to 2009. Wing Co DJ reckons you should always feel slightly cold when you start off otherwise you'll overheat on the ride.

Others swear by neoprene boots which keep out the chill arctic breeze. Some say two pairs of gloves and still others say fleece backed lycra full body tights.

However, it seems to me that you can wear all of these things (and I do) and still feel the cold. Yet, we're still out there. Is this a case of machismo? An unwillingness to be the first to quit in the face of adverse conditions? A frivolous disregard for own health and welfare? Or just a desperate need to get out and exercise?

Well maybe a bit of all of these things.

Last Saturday six of us met (The Twins, MF, NS and D) for what must have been the coldest ride I have ever taken part in. Most of the chat before hand revolved around the kinds of gloves we were wearing, how many gloves we had on, base layers and overshoes. MF informed us all that it was minus 3.He knows because he has a remote thermometer by his bedside which gives him a digital read for the temperature outside (I'll examine the esoteric world of gadgetry and cycling another time!)

By the time we hit the seafront I had lost sensation in my fingers, by the end of the cycle path I could no longer wiggle my toes and by the time I had reached Barling I thought my ears were going to fall off.

And yet, and yet.

It was great ride, we joked about those who had bottled out and stayed in bed, how they would be kicking themselves for missing out. There was the habitual brief charge along the sea front and a quick plunge into the warmth of the cafe to watch steam rise from our clothes and the tea seep into those freezing extremities.

Pub Dave

I managed to get Pub Dave out on a ride today, just a Barling but I got him out and that's a bit of achievement. He's not really one of the group, despite my constant hectoring, but he is a very important person in my cycling life. To put it bluntly, without Pub Dave I wouldn't be cycling. As the name suggests PD is not your usual sporting inspiration but nonetheless he is.

PD and I watch football down the pub - he's Liverpool, I am Spurs. Obviously over the last ten years we have spent more time applauding his team and bemoaning mine. PD is a genuine scouser and not one of those southern reds who regularly opine in pubs with polished vowels which have never graced the Kop.

It was PD who started cycling first with a bloke he knew called Mick. I didn't really pay any attention to his new hobby - I liked the Tour on the telly but I didn't expect to ever have a skinny bike again, my last one had been stolen from our garden shed when I was about seventeen. Anyway, PD finally convinced me to do a local sponsored ride on my old hybrid. 30 miles later we agreed that we really ought to do it again. And so began the getting up early to ride.

PD, however, has never been a man to forgo the Saturday night pint and the packet of fags that goes with it. Prodigiously gifted at sport - National Squash champ at school, handy footie player, dab hand at golf, phenomenal table football player... you get the idea. But he does love his bed.

Two years ago, it was my 40th birthday, the previous year I had broken my knee in a freakish accident involving a puddle of orange juice on a lino floor. And a plan was hatched in the pub, where else? The Tour was due to arrive in Paris on the 29th July, my birthday was on the 28th, wouldn't it be cool to be in Paris on my 40th? Wouldn't it be cool to cycle into Paris on my birthday and watch the arrival of the peleton the next day? As I say, pub talk, and what with PD's inertia, no more.

I couldn't have been more wrong. PD and I went out one Sunday and worked out how he could ride the 20 miles to work without getting squashed by text messaging truckers and within a week he was putting in 200 miles a week.

The story of how we got to Paris can be saved for another day, suffice it to say we got to Paris on our bikes and it was all down to PD.