Late, as in the Late Arthur Dent
I don't know why it happens this way. I had everything organised the
night before. I got out of bed in plenty of time. But somehow it was
ten minutes after the time I had intended that I finally left the
house; and, stopping to pick up my friend Marcus, somehow we took
fifteen minutes instead of the five I had budgeted. So we were
getting tight on time as I drove into the car-park of the Ayr Rugby
Club at Alloway, right in the middle of the Rabbie Burns theme
park. And somehow oor Rabbie was sort of a thread tying the whole
journey together, but I get ahead of myself.
We drove into the car park and found it full of cyclists - at least
fifty, possibly many more. I got the bikes out of the car and
assembled as quickly as I could, and ran to sign in. And as I came
back out the last of the peloton was disappearing down the lane, and
only Jon Senior had waited for us. Grabbing the last few things out of
the car, we left, last on the road as usual, and immediately I was
struggling.
I think Jon and Marcus both (very sensibly) wanted to catch up with
the rest of the group, and were trying to make a good pace. And, while
I wanted to as well, I wasn't cutting it. The landscape through which
we were travelling was green and well wooded, with rolling hills - but
we were on average steadily climbing, and each wooshing descent had
to be clawed back up the next hillside. At Crosshill we came up on our
first straggler, a man on a nice Trek wearing a plastic rain jacket
over an Ayrshire CTC jersey. For some time we rode on as two pairs,
Jon and Marcus a little ahead, myself and the chap on the Trek a
little behind. It wasn't desperately warm, but the steady climbing
into a headwind made me feel overdressed, so at the top of one green
brae I stopped to stuff my jersey into the back pocket of my
shirt. Marcus and Jon both waited for me, so we lost our straggler and
were again last on the road. But not for very long.
Soon we came to the first serious climbs, up to Straiton, and now
cyclists were strung in lines across the hillsides ahead of us,
gradually climbing into a lowering sky. And gradually we started to
catch, and even pass, some of them. As we climbed, the weather got
colder and more dreich. A thin rain was now leaking out of the
tattered clouds ahead.
Here comes the rain, again
Up on the top of the moor the road started to level out and become
more rolling, and although the headwind remained strong we were going
better. Marcus suggested stopping to put rain jackets on, and I
thought 'what is he talking about, it's only spitting'. But we
stopped, and after a slight internal debate I decided to put my rain
jacket on too.
Just as well.
The dirty, cheating, lying forecasters had promised sunshine and no
showers in Ayrshire, sunshine and some showers in Dumfrieshire. I
should have known. I'd packed my mudguards in the car, but, trusting
to that weather forecast, hadn't fitted them. I very nearly left my
rain jacket in the car, because it takes up a lot of space in my
bag. Very nearly. But I hadn't, and now I put it on. And before we'd
had time to get the zips up the water hit us, hurling out of the grey
wind, dense and heavy. We got back on the road, pushing into a wall of
wind and rain. Within minutes my shoes were soaked. My shorts were
saturated. My hair was plastered to my skull, and the view through my
sunglasses was virtually uninterpretable, so I had to push them up on
my head.
We rode on in a mist of spray, and that set the tone for the next
forty miles. It was gey weet. But now the road had peaked at 266
metres and was descending towards the headwaters of the Doon, and if
there's one aspect of cycling I'm good at it's descending. It was
still windy. It was still wet. It was still wild. But it was
definitely fun, and we ripped down the hill towards Dalmellington.
Ye banks and braes
The Bard - aye, verily, oor Rabbie himsel - wrote at great length of
the bonnie Doon. We may remember him now as a love poet, but in truth
when he was not writing political polemic he was primarily a poet of
landscape - and more than occasionally a polemicist of landscape. Few
landscapes have been as praised in poesy as these banks and
braes. What would he have said if he could see it noe - what could he
have said of a valley once so fair whose principal tourist attraction
is an old pithead overlooking bings and slagheaps, amongst the scars of
the still-active opencast pits? Rabbie, those banks and braes of yours,
this is how we praise them.
But praise them or not, we rode down to the valley floor on flowing
roads, now well up with the tail end of the pack. In Dalmellington
several other cyclists, including the one bent trike, were still at
the control when we arrived, and there were at least another two
clusters on the road behind us. Marcus was already looking cold and
unhappy, and I was concerned about him. We got our brevet cards
stamped and read our navigation, and, because I was in a hurry, I
formed a completely wrong idea of what we were doing next. I have no
excuse - I was practically on home territory and ought to know these
roads. So I took a wrong turning, and we had climbed steeply for
about half a mile before Jon very gently pointed this out to me. By
the time we got back onto the A713 no other cyclists were in sight.
Over the border
The long climb up to the Galloway border runs up a glen which is in
places more of a ravine, with steep scree laden slopes climbing into
the mist, and the river and the road twisting around each other in the
constrained space of the bottom. And it's a climb: a long steady slog
up to 283 metres at the watershed. Jon and Marcus were again climbing
faster than I was, and went ahead together. I climbed at my own rate,
but as the road levelled at the top quickly caught up with them. And
now the views opened out, with a marvellously clear view over Loch
Doon, even though the high hills were lost in grey murk. I'd hoped -
we'd all hoped, I think - that things would be easier once we were
south of the watershed. The rain was not so hard, but the wind in our
teeth was every bit as strong, and although we descended 100 metres
over the five or six miles into Carsphairn, most of that distance was
earned.
Now it was Marcus who was behind and struggling. His back was hurting,
and he clearly wasn't enjoying himself. And really, I had every
sympathy. We were all droukit. It was cold. We were completely out of
touch with even the slowest of the other riders. And the wind and the
persistent rain were gruelling. So at Carsphairn Marcus phoned home,
and decided to bail. Jon and I headed on, eighteen miles across the
south slope of the hills towards Moniaive.
And then there were two
And the truth is this was a most enjoyable section. It should not have
been. Jon would stop periodically to wring about a gallon of water out
of each of his gloves. My front deraileur was giving problems - the
cable clamp bolt appeared to have slipped a bit. There was little let
up in the rain - it was getting gradually lighter, but no less
persistent. The wind, however, had ceased to be such a nuisance,
partly because we were now more or less broadside to it. And the
gradients were not at all bad. That's surprising, because looking a
the map I see that it was on this section we reached our highest
point, at 309 metres crossing out of the Glenkens into Nithsdale. But
the long descent into Moniaive was just fun - a rush - and our average
speed was beginning to creep slowly back up.
Then in Moniaive we rounded a corner and found the control - a cafe
with its yard crowded with wet, filthy, expensive bikes. And a sign
saying BACON ROLLS. There were plenty of other things on the sign, but
those two words stood out. Bacon rolls. I could have thought of
nothing more pleasant - more vital - to the well being of a soaked
cyclist. And so we parked up the bikes and went in, to find the cafe
crowded with equally soaked cyclists with the same idea. Bacon rolls
(and coffee). Heaven.
I Lift Up Mine Eyes
And after heaven, hell. Or Tynron Brae, whichever is the more
unpleasant. In a sense this must be seen as divine retribution. Only
two days before, I had been saying on uk.rec.cycling that any normal
person could climb almost any road hill in Britain on a bike with a
fairly modest range of gears - one with a lowest gear of 37.1
inches. My lowest gear is slightly higher, at 39.2 inches...
And Tynron Brae is a wicked little hill. The house at the bottom was
warning enough. You know houses, you drew houses at primary
school. Houses have a door in the middle, and a window on either side.
The house at the bottom of Tynron Brae was just like that. Door in the
middle, one window on either side of it. The only minor eccentricity
being that the window on the right of the door was on the ground
floor, and the window on the left of the door...
Uh huh. That steep. And that was before you got onto the climb
proper. And what added insult to injury were nice little council
erected signs marking it as a cycle route!
Well, I ground up it, very slowly. Ahead of me several other cyclists
were grinding up it, each at their own pace. My pace was 2 miles per
hour. Not 2.1, not 2.2, two. Arthur Clune posted, in response to my
claim that you could climb any hill on a bike with modest gearing,
that my calculations meant a cadence of 24, and that any cadence
'below 40 gets very painful and [you] can't do it for long...' He's
right. My cadence was ten, and that is not at all pleasant. I wanted
to get off. I really wanted to get off. The only thing which stopped
me getting off and walking...
...was the fear that if I stopped pedalling long enough to unclip I
should undoubtedly topple over.
Up ahead I could see a steep, grassy bank at the side of the road and
I began to promise myself that if I could only get up that far I'd
allow myself to come to a stop alongside it and gently topple onto
it... the idea was just so pleasant. I heaved the cranks over, one
great effort after another, and stared at that grassy bank.
But when I got to the grassy bank the top was in sight, and somehow I
struggled on. The full 128 metres of the climb were over about 1.25
kilometres horizontally, but 80 metres of that climb are packed into
just half a kilometre. It's an evil little hill. At the top I passed a
man on a lovely Cannondale in Team Saeco colours, but I didn't have
enough breath left to do more than gasp 'nice bike'.
What goes up, of course, must come down, and if there's one bit of
cycling I'd claim to be good at it's descending. But the east side of
Tynron Brae is just insane, if possible worse than the west, twisting
down vertiginously through a wood. It was pure mountain bike
descending, [censored] out of the saddle and hung out over the back wheel,
clinging onto the brake levers, easing the bike gently round tight
turns on a dreadful, broken surface. What makes this worse, of course,
was that I knew perfectly well that if we'd taken a short cut by the A
702 round the bottom of the hill not only would we have cut a few
hundred yards off our distance, we would not have climbed more than
five metres in the process. Sadists, these audax organisers.
And so to Tynron, and then Penpont, and then powering down through the
flat carse lands where the Shinnel Water flows into the Nith.
Where it all began
The smithy came up before I expected it. I'd been here before, of
course, and had some memory of trees. I saw the little white building
on the right of the road, and another about three hundred yards
further on, and thought I recognised the second as our goal. But as we
flashed past the first I recognised the plaques on the wall and
shouted Woah!
The birthplace of the bicycle is a strange sight. You'd expect... I'm
not sure what you'd expect. In the United States I'm sure it would be
a glitzy museum. In England, a carefully tended National Trust
property, with tidy, over-restored forge tools, and pea-gravel
outside. In Scotland it's a half-dilapidated, not very well
maintained, firmly closed wee building at the side of the road,
untended, unremarkable except for two old stone plaques and one newer
painted plaque, already peeling. No exhibit, no gift shop, no theme
park, no museum. A little, abandoned, deserted, locked building at the
side of a side road.
This? For an invention that changed the world? For a machine which
gave people mobility? It's madness - that, or Scotland.
There, and back again
We were now halfway, not only at our turning point but also halfway in
terms of distance. We crossed the Shinnel Water and turned back on a
'National Byway' following the west bank of the Nith, now in a
bunch of about seven cyclists. The rain had stopped, and the cloud
base was getting higher. Slowly, we started to dry out. On the flat
Jon and I were going a little faster than the rest of the group, but
navigation stops tended to keep the group together. My route sheet, in
my mapcase on top of my bar bag, was still clearly legible, but I
couldn't read it without digging my reading glasses out of the
bag. Jon doesn't need reading glasses, but his route-sheet, despite
its plastic bag, was now an oddly shaped wodge of papier mache. So at
each junction we would stop, Jon would read my route sheet, and the
rest of the pack would catch us up and follow our lead.
But past Drumlanrig the road started to climb again, and gaps opened
up. For a long while I was climbing alongside a man on a nice Airborne
Carpe Diem, but at the top he started to pull away, joining a little
group who had managed better on the climb. Jon had waited for me, so
we, together with two guys on Thorns, formed a group for a while. Then,
as the route started to descend again, they waved us past, and Jon and
I were again by ourselves. Looking at the map the next section is
actually quite long, but it isn't long in my memory. We were climbing,
but only very slightly; what wind there was in the mainly wooded
valley bottom was favourable; the weather was increasingly pleasant;
and Jon is damned good company on a long cycle. I'd stripped off my
rain jacket again now, and was just enjoying the ride.
All good things come to an end at last, and as we came again over the
spine of the Southern Uplands into Ayrshire the little quiet
side-roads came to an end and we had to join the main A76. Which was
less than wonderful. It's a fast main trunk road with quite a lot of
traffic; as it crosses the border into Ayrshire it's running across
the grain of some really quite hilly land so although it is overall
descending there's a lot of climbing to do. And there was some
spectacularly awful driving, particularly when an articulated tanker
started to overtake Jon on a bend, met a car coming the other way, and
pulled in sharply with Jon on his inside.
When at last we reached New Cumnock it came as some relief.
Among thy green braes
New Cumnock again is in lands which Burns praised, and at New Cumnock
you can still see why; it is still a rich and verdant landscape, despite
the ravages of mineral extraction. The architecture of the town,
courtesy National Coal Board 1950-1970, adds a piquant contrast. Or
something.
At the control when we arrived the group that got ahead of
us at Drumlanrig were all there, as was the bent trike, but they left
while we were getting our cards stamped and eating ham rolls, so again
we hit the road alone. We had now completed more than three quarters
of our journey and were following quiet minor roads around the
north-west flank of the Kyle hills; the country was green and
pleasant, and no more than gently rolling. We were both of us still
going well, and I think, enjoying ourselves. Some blue was beginning
to appear in the sky. The wind, which I had privately bet would drop
as soon as we turned back west had, if anything, strengthened and was
definitely helping us. We ate the last of my malt loaf and cycled on.
Around us now were opencast sites, and the road twice crossed railway
tracks. The ground was dropping west towards the sea. On one glorious
swooping turn I missed a junction, and having overshot it by a mile
the struggle back to it into the teeth of the wind showed us how much
assistance we were getting. And then for no apparent good reason we
were routed back down onto the A70, which was about as much fun as the
A76.
You are in a maze of twisty little lanes
The truth is we were now both tired. Jon's bike was tired too, making
a distinctive 'oil me now' sound. We'd reached ninety miles, and we
kept making optimistic assessments of how far we had left to run. And
so the last few miles of routing were... a little frustrating. I mean,
I'm grateful to the organisers for keeping us as much as possible off
the main roads. I appreciate the difficulty of routing tired audaxers
at the end of the day through a conurbation. But navigating a route
around the town across the grain of the land and the roads on little
twisty lanes almost completely without signposts was not easy.
And, I suddenly realised, I was on the edge of a sugar crash. I was
getting to the point where I just didn't have energy to turn the
pedals, when we were so close to the end - when we could see the sea,
and actual sunlight glinting on it. I ate a couple of cereal bars and
drank the last of my energy drink, and quickly felt better. Crossing
the A713 just east of the hospital where I recovered after breaking my
back, we passed the magic hundred miles. And then very quickly it was
all over. We descended to the A77, crossed it, turned into Alloway,
and quickly found the lane down by the old Brig o Doon, where Tam o
Shanter's mare lost its tail.
His hat was a hundred and two feet wide
We signed in and had our brevet cards stamped at 6.44, after nine and
three quarter hours on the road, eight hours and twenty minutes
actually cycling, for an official distance of 102 miles, and a
travelled distance of at most a couple of miles more. A century. The
furthest I've ridden in one day in more than thirty years, and the
second furthest I've ever ridden. Average speed 12.4 mph, against the
13 I had originally targeted. At the end I didn't feel especially
tired, although I'm not sure how many miles I had left. I could have
done some more; after a meal I could probably have done quite a bit
more. Two hundred Km does not now look impossible.
What's amazing is how close we must have been to other cyclists most
of the day, considering how rarely we saw any. While we never saw the
fast boys after the start, about twenty people were still packing up
when we got to the finish. We were the last in apart from the two
Thorns we'd left just north of Drumlanrig, and they walked in while we
were still doing our end-of-ride paperwork.
Happiness is a filthy bicycle
I rode (or course) the Dolan. And while I bought the Dolan frame as an
impulse purchase driven more by aesthetics than practicality, I've
built it up and equipped it primarily as an audax bike. This was it's
first real audax: how did it perform? Well, brilliantly. Apart from
minor trouble with the front deraileur, no mechanical
problems. Despite my ongoing uncertainty about the ultra-light SLR
saddle (and other people's mockery of the 20mm tyres), no comfort
problems, apart from slight stiffness in my lower back. Leaving the
mudguards off proved, as the day turned out, to be a mistake - but not
a critical one. Leaving the taillight on was a good decision - I had
it on in flashing mode all the way from Straiton to Moniaive, and more
than one person said it improved visibility. We didn't encounter any
hill I couldn't manage with the double chainring, although Tynron Brae
was definitely the limit and people with triples clearly benefitted
there; in retrospect, it would have been worth fitting a 13-29
cassette for this occasion.
The Dolan is sitting now, unbelievably filthy, in the dining room,
still awaiting the clean I meant to give it today. But it has proved
itself. It's not only a ridiculously beautiful bike; it's also one I
can ride in comfort for any distance.
And that's really all there is to say, apart from thanks to David
Lawrie for organising, and to Marcus and particularly Jon for being
such good companions on the ride.
--
[email hidden] (Simon Brooke) http://www.jasmine.org.uk/~simon/
Morning had broken, and there was nothing left for us to do
but pick up the pieces.