The Roquefort Files are currently on holiday tour with Coba Fynn in Australia. More on that soon, but first a post about my first cyclocross race. You might want to skip this one if the bike blogging isn’t up your alley!

As I stood by the chip van with a lorne sausage roll in one hand and a styrofoam cup of coffee in the other, I wondered what I’d let myself in for. I was with Brian (one of the Sunday regulars from the ERC) and his wife in Plean Country Park near Stirling, and we were waiting for our race to start. Our first cyclocross race, to be exact. I was all nerves, jittering in the cold partly to keep warm and partly because my system was buzzing with Lucozade and banana and energy bars.

In cycling terms, ’cross racing is ancient. Legend has it that to keep fit during the winter, fin-de-sièle French cyclists would race from town to town across the intervening fields, churning through the earth, throwing their bikes over fences and fording streams along the way. And despite the carbon fibre and titanium on show in the paddock at Plean, cyclocross clings to tradition like mud clings to a tubular tyre: slender frames and drop handlebars ape their road racing forebears, wheels ride on skinny tyres with decades-old tread patterns, and the whole shebang is brought to an eventual halt by finicky and primitive cantilever brakes prized for their mud clearance over any pretense of stopping power.

We made nervous small talk and glanced around at the other cyclists. Aside from the mountain bikers — already we were subtly prejudiced against the mountain bikers, who in our eyes had brought the cycling equivalent of knives to a gunfight — the other ’cross racers arrayed about the starting area seemed distinctly professional in their aspect, all one-piece liveried skinsuits and set-jawed determination.

I warmed up as the penultimate race of the day (women, veterans and youths) came to a close, and Brian and I followed a six-pack of our grim-faced competitors out onto the course for a sighting lap. Plean seemed to me (judging from my extensive personal YouTube experience) to be a fairly representative course, mixing grass, tarmac and hardpack surfaces with narrow singletrack sections and wide-open straights. One of the hallmarks of ’cross racing is the deliberate inclusion of unrideable sections, and here we were forced off our bikes for a muddy scramble up an earthy bank and again later for a standard-issue ‘obstacle’, a pair of wooden planks a few strides apart. A few exposed tree roots and muddy corners rounded things out and brought us back to the start-finish straight where the riders were congregating in advance of the start.

The commissaire moved down the knot of racers, calling the genuine contenders to the front and separating us into four-abreast lines. Brian and I ended up midway down the pack with another couple of ERC riders in our row; I found myself on the outside, with a muddy ditch to my right. I’d forgotten my HRM, but I could feel my heart rate mounting: we were standing still, but my body had started the race already.

The commissaire climbed onto a grassy bank beside us. He reminded us of the rules of the game and announced: “I’ll start the race by blowing this whistle sometime in the next thirty seconds.”

“Good luck,” we told each other.

A second later and the whistle blew. There was a gentle crunch as fifty left feet propelled their owners off the line, then fifty clicks as cleats met pedals, and the race was on.

Or rather, it wasn’t. The field was so dense that there was no way to make a move without ploughing into the back of another rider. Up ahead the leaders were leaving us for dead, and there wasn’t a thing we could do about it. Content to be upright and not actually going backwards, I kept station in the centre of the pack and waited for things to thin out.

The chance to open things up came as the track took us through an open gate before heading off into the woods. The pack squeezed through like toothpaste from a tube, and when my turn came I stood up in the pedals and hit it as hard as I could. Almost immediately I overtook a big guy wearing shorts emblazoned with the words ‘Royal Marine Commando’, and I thought to myself:

What if I can actually beat this guy?

It turns out that there’s nothing like dropping a trained killer to galvanise one’s vestigial competitive instincts. At exactly this point my vague plan from the start of the race — to pace myself until the final lap — was smartly defenestrated, and was instantly replaced by “Destroy! Destroy!” For the next hour I went hell for leather (at least in relative terms), determined to roll home ahead of my first scalp.

Without the ability to sit inside a wind-defeating peloton or to reach the speeds where drafting other riders becomes an option, ’cross racing boils down to outright fitness and bike-handling skills. A well-timed dismount-portage-remount is enough to overtake another rider, while a botched manoeuvre will rob you of your momentum or even pitch you off the bike and into the undergrowth. The race reduces to a series of mini battles, hopping from wheel to wheel when the terrain allows it and your energy levels cooperate.

Little moments stand out: a Contador episode when I shot past a rider with a dropped chain (“bad luck!” I told him as I passed by; he replied only with a baleful glare); a thundering descent towards the dismount for the earthen bank, only to brake too late and come to a juddering halt with the rear wheel spinning in the air; the recurring nightmare of a muddy descent-corner-ascent where the bike slithered around almost uncontrollably but which I managed to pull off lap after lap.

By the last lap, signalled by a ringing bell, I was almost out of energy — sliced sausage, banana and Clif Bars had been overwhelmed by an hour of all-out effort. My Commando nemesis had been steadily making up lost time, and as we ground up the long climb before the barriers and then the finish line, he inched slowly by me and then disappeared off round the corner at the top. I was too tired to be angry, and by the time I reached the barriers myself I barely had the energy to lift the bike over them and remount on the other side. After that all that remained was a mercifully easy downhill and a final cheeky bunny hop over the speed bump just before the finish line. I rolled to a halt on the grass beyond the line, dropped my bike and collapsed on the ground. I was absolutely wrung out.

The results came out a few days later. I’d finished 20^th of 53, one lap down on the leaders and one place behind the Commando. The race had been a revelation: exhilarating, terrifying and gruelling. And we’re supposed to do this every weekend for three months?

As a branding strategy, it is pretentious to the nth degree. It is pretentious even to me, a 32-year-old man who wears cardigans in an unironic way and who reads The Guardian website on his smartphone at lunchtime, as often as not sipping from a cappuccino in a poncy café as he does so. That is to say, it’s off the pretension scale.

Irritatingly, though, Rapha’s retro-King-of-the-Mountains schtick is — just occasionally — bang on the money. Sometimes, when you’re grunting up a hill and there are no more gears left to make life easier, it rings true.

A month or so ago I rolled up to Portobello High School on a grim, grey morning to join ERC’s ‘advanced beginners cycle’. Only five of us turned up that day, and things were not looking promising: the sky was a solid blanket of cloud, the air was damp, the usual ride leader hadn’t turned up and no-one seemed to have much idea of where we should be going. We sat around with the heat ebbing out of us until one of the older guys seized the initiative and led us off in more or less in a random direction.

What an incredible cycle. The clouds dissolved as we headed inland, and within half an hour the sun was beating down on us and we had endlessly rolling, smooth country roads to ourselves. We skirted a couple of small hills, rocky pimples on the wrinkled landscape, and finally hit a couple of decent climbs as we approached North Berwick. This is one of those few situation in which it pays to be a skinny freak, and I shot up each hill as the others toiled along behind. For a split second at the crest of each hill, I threw off the bonds of critical thinking and revelled in a moment of unadulterated Rapha-style glory. I was king of these very small mountains. My only regret was that there was no photographer there to capture the moment in gritty monochrome.

We ate lunch in North Berwick, lowering the tone at a prim tennis club’s café. The Forth was still covered in a dense bank of fog, but our little patio of young families and sweaty cyclists was baking in the afternoon sun. Again: what a great ride.

* * *

Later that week I competed in my first race, and while it was a novel, exciting experience, it shows exactly what’s missing from Rapha’s exercise in branding: cyclists who are better than you are. You can wear merino jerseys patterned after the shirts of Eddy Merckx and Bernard Hinault all you like, but any mind’s-eye-visions of heroic ascents of lonely Pyrenean peaks you happen to entertain are blown away the instant some 17-year-old on a mountain bike leaves you for dead.

Guess what happened during the race? A 17-year-old girl on a mountain bike left me for dead. To be fair, she was wearing a British Cycling ‘Olympic Development Programme’ jersey, but still, it was a rude awakening. I finished two places behind her in 21^st (of 36 finishers) with 9 laps under my belt, two fewer than the winner.

Another great ride — scary, breathless and challenging — and I can’t wait for the next one.

* Rapha attracts a bit of heat for their preference for cycling caps rather than cycle helmets. Their defence — “you’re an adult, choose for yourself”, basically — seems to me to be a bit disingenuous. One unlucky fall is all it takes to transform you from a Mamil into an organ donor.

Earlier tonight I did my first cycle race, the Edinburgh 48 in Craigmillar Country Park. My shins are covered in nettle rash, my hands are midge-bitten and my muscles are utterly void of energy. My brain, however, is fizzing with nervous energy — this racing business is a lot of fun — and it demands to be occupied, and so I stick on some headphones and plug myself into some sprawling Glaswegian post-rock.

Also, I’ve joined Facebook. This is less exciting.

(A real post is in the works!)

On Sunday I’d gone on a ride out to Haddington and back, organised by Edinburgh Road Club, and one of the more serious road cyclists shepherding the rest of us along was in recruiting mode. “You should come along to the Kirky 10 time trial on Wednesday nights. It’s easy to get into, and you’re really only racing yourself.”

Excellent, I thought — I’m an inherently lazy bastard, so I should be easy to beat. So it was that last Wednesday night I arrived sweaty and breathless at Kirkliston sports centre at 6.45pm. I signed on the dotted line as directed by one of the marshals, who explained what I had to do.

“You’re number 17, so you’ll be starting at 17 minutes past seven. The numbers are in that box down there — find your one and pin it to the back of your jersey. The start is out by the roundabout; it’s five miles straight out, a U-turn in the road (make sure you check for cars first) and then five miles straight back. You’ll see a marshal at the turn. Shout out your number as you cross the line so the timekeeper hears you.”

Ten miles as fast as you can, and don’t get run over: this is the essence of a time trial.

Having sorted myself out, I headed down to the start with a couple of other new faces from the Sunday ride. The knot of cyclists hanging around the start were a mixed bunch: granted, the demographics of the group didn’t veer far from ‘white male ABC1’, but the bikes themselves (and the associated levels of seriousness) ranged from sleek carbon time trial machines through normal road bikes to an elongated cargo bike whose rack was laden with bungee-corded barbell weights.

“Are you having a laugh?” I asked its rider.

“Training bike,” he replied jovially. “Makes a normal bike feel fast!”

The minutes ticked down, with a rider being sent off each minute until I was next. I rolled up to the spray-painted start line and steadied myself as the fitness instructor-alike starter reeled off more instructions, smoothly punctuating them with a countdown read off his stopwatch.

“Okay, are you twenty seconds ready to go? Remember, go hard on the way out but keep something for the way back and fifteen seconds call out your number as you pass the ten seconds timekeeper.”

Another marshal, this time a curious older chap wearing a three-piece tweed suit and a flat cap (I never found out the story there — he was utterly incongruous in amongst all the lycra and tracksuits), held my bike steady as I clipped in my free foot. I wobbled a bit. Only now was I starting to get nervous. The starter counted down from ten seconds.

“…one. Go!”

The old chap gave me a rather feeble shove and I wobbled slowly off the line. Not quite the blistering acceleration I would have liked. Both he and the starter seemed concerned that I was going to fall off.

“Are you okay? Go! Go now!” barked the starter.

“Pedal!” the old guy added.

“I’m fine, I’m going,” I muttered back petulantly, steering unsteadily away from the kerb then standing up and getting some power into the pedals. I wound up to what I thought was a reasonable cruising speed, got into the drops and put my head down with my eyes flicking between the heart rate monitor on the handlebars and the road ahead.

Turns out it’s a disingenuous to talk about ‘tactics’ for a time trial. It’s just you versus the course and the elements, and other than moderating your effort to varying degrees there’s little else to do other than to keep grinding away at it. Even should you find yourself in the fortunate position of overtaking another rider, the rules preclude you from drafting behind them to gain any advantage.

My vague plan had been to stay within a particular range of effort for the first two miles, then move up a gear for the next three and finally blitz the return leg in an all-out blaze of glory to shoot speedily over the finish line with fists punching the air. Unfortunately, I’d failed to take into account the two-mile climb and unrelenting headwind that confronted me as soon as I’d started. My heart rate immediately shot through the roof and my legs were burning within minutes. My three-part strategy degenerated into just keep going and the next eight miles were an exercise in gritted teeth, running nose and streaming eyes.

I crossed the line in 29 minutes and 53 seconds, having averaged almost exactly 20 mph over the ten miles: my first time trial had been a deeply meh performance, but I’d enjoyed it nonetheless. And like I said, I’m going to be very easy to beat next time round.

The next morning, goaded out of bed about four hours earlier than my hangover would have liked, I had some tea and toast for breakfast, then suited up and jumped on my bike. Today was a manifold experiment: how long would Buckhaven to Edinburgh take along the Fife Coastal Path? Would a heart-rate monitor/cycle computer be useful? And most importantly, would the one-two punch of a Tunnock’s Caramel Wafer and a Stuart’s scotch pie be the match of 60 kilometres of winding coastline?

This final question was an ad hoc addition to the day’s challenges, brought about by my complete failure to bring any cycling-friendly snacks with me in the first place. The caramel wafer was provided at my Gran’s house a mile or so along the road — a distance just far enough to warm up, followed by a tea break just long enough to cool down again — and the pie was safely ensconced in my backpack, bought at Stuart’s in Buckhaven before I left and ready for consumption somewhere down the road. A cup of tea, a chocolate biscuit, a pie and some lycra: my loins were girded.

I hit the coastal path just beyond Kinghorn, exchanging fast but worrisome B-roads for gravel paths and startled pedestrians for the next fifteen miles. It was a great day: cloudy but bright; cold but not windy, and I gradually forgot where I was as the miles rolled by. I’ve always been a bit less than enthusiastic about the south coast of Fife (familiarity breeding contempt, maybe) but it was a lovely cycle; the harbours, fishing cottages, old woods and train lines, with the quiet rustle and slap of the dark water of the Forth behind it all, put me in mind of a highland lochside.

I climbed up and over the Forth Road Bridge and freewheeled down into South Queensferry about an hour and three quarters after having left Buckhaven, rested my bike against a wall and collapsed, sweaty and smelly, onto a bench in the shadow of the rail bridge. My pie was calling.

This was no ordinary pie: Stuart’s are the founders of the World Scotch Pie Championships, and have won it countless times; their arch-nemeses W.F. Stark face them across College Street and snatched the crown a couple of years ago. This was a pie whose shell bore the weight of history, expectation and tradition. The fat had frozen into little white pools on the top of the crust, and yet this only made it more appealing. It was a glistening, golden-brown cylinder of meaty joy, and I ate it with gusto. And a coffee from a café over the road.

God, it was excellent. 500-odd calories of bakery genius, a smart-bomb of beef, mutton and lard, and it propelled me home over the last 15 kilometres. My heart-rate monitor told the full story: 60 kilometres, two and three-quarter hours and not one but four pies’ worth of calories expended. I was ravenous for the next two days.

You may recall that I bought an old Peugeot racing bike in Vancouver with the object of converting it to singlespeed. Well, the path to singlespeed enlightenment does not always run smooth, as I found out to my cost. (I will admit that I did not bear that cost alone: you bore it with me, dear reader, in the form of two thousand words of bicycle-related self-flagellation.) To recap: I’d found the last singlespeed French freewheel in the world, hooked it up with two spliced-together BMX chains, and replaced the original drop bars with a pair of hipster-ready bullhorns.

I started to commute by bike, a lovely trip through Vancouver’s leafy suburbs and across the Fraser River to Richmond. The weather was uniformly balmy, and over my couple of months of cycling to work I even acquired what might reasonably be called a suntan.

Unfortunately, the bike did not fare so well. In short order, both of the original 27″ wheels were knocked quite badly out of true; the bearings in the last French freewheel in the world gave up shortly afterwards and the pedal bearings followed. To ride the bike was to be assaulted by the scraping of brake pads against wobbling rims and the grinding of shafted ball bearings.

In repairing her, I caved. I drank the hipster Kool-Aid. I took the blue pill. More specifically, I bought deep-V track wheels, blue-striped tyres to match the frame, an indestructible Shimano freewheel, extremely awesome keirin-style pedals, and matching toe clips*. My bike was indistinguishable from a Commercial Drive hipster chariot, and my journey to the dark side was complete.

It was brilliant. For my last six weeks in Vancouver I descended (even further) into the domain of the bike nerd, taking part in a couple of Critical Masses, a couple of rides with the Vancouver Bicycle Club and one Midnight Mass, a small-hours ride around the traffic free city in the company of various bike messengers, fixie riders and sundry other ‘alternative’ types.

Then, of course, came the end of my stay in Vancouver, and I had to decide what to do the bike. Short of lugging it all the way down the west coast of the ‘States, there wasn’t much I could do other than leave it with someone in the city. Monica’s boyfriend Pete, a stand-up type of fellow with a keen cycling glint in his eye, offered to become the bike’s foster carer and so I left it in his capable hands. He has promised to keep ‘er oiled till I return, and I can’t ask for more than that.

* There’s a weird hero-worship within the singlespeed world for Japanese keirin components, which are stamped with the letters ‘NJS’. This says nothing about quality or suitability for purpose, only that they’re unlikely to spontaneously disintegrate, and yet an NJS-branded part will inevitably cost more and inspire a larger degree of singlespeeder lust. Hilariously, my NJS toe-clips were race approved, even if the rest of the bike emphatically was not.

• Me
• Chris
• Neil
• Devon
• Jesus
• my Dad
• 2010

In amongst all this, Coba Fynn have been recording an album; I built a cyclocross bike and then abjectly failed to enter any cyclocross races; the Project is finally under way again; and just the other day we took the Antiquary pub quiz by the scruff of its neck and gave it a thorough hiding. Good times! (And though that sounds sarcastic, it is not meant to be so.)

I’d met a guy called John at lunch in the office a few times. We’d chatted a bit about the Tour de France as it had been going on through August, and he’d mentioned that nearby Burnaby sported a fully enclosed velodrome. “I’ve been meaning to organise some beginners’ track lessons there, but we’ve always been one person short. Would you be interested?”

You’re damn skippy I was interested.

I turned up at the track after work on Friday, parked the car and pushed through the revolving doors*. The wooden track takes up the centre of the dome, leaving enough space at one side for changing rooms, offices and the like, but the corridor narrows down to barely a shoulder-width as it curves at the end. I followed voices along the curve under the eaves of the track, passing racks and racks of track bikes locked up under the banked corner, to find Pete, Monica and John already being fitted for their rental bikes. We were all kitted out in hilariously overcompensatory cycling clothing, and we were all shitting ourselves.

Claire, our instructor for the evening, picked out a bike for each of us — incredibly light Treks like this — and we wheeled them out through an underpass and into the centre of the track.

This was going to be scary.

The track is 200m long (too short for the Olympics, apparently) and is banked at 47° at each end. It’s the steepest track in North America, and if you don’t cycle at something like 30km/h around the corners then you fall off. It’s as simple as that. There were a few riders up there already, caning round and round to an astonishing cacophony of noises: tyres hummed over the lacquered wood, and the track creaked and groaned as the riders flew over it.

Claire explained the markings on the track to us: the côte d’azur, or ‘on-ramp’ at the bottom; just above it, the metre-wide sprinter’s lane bordered by a pair of red and black lines, and the blue stayer’s line about halfway further up. It seemed impossibly distant. “That’s where you wait during the Madison,” she told us. “Don’t worry, we’ll get you up there — and a bit higher — before the end of the night.”

We had a few laps of the côte d’azur to get used to our brakeless, fixed-gear bikes. The rationale here is that if track bikes did have brakes, all it would take is one twitchy rider in the pack to brake suddenly and there would be a massive pile-up. The consequence is that slowing down is much, much harder; you have to let your legs continue to move with the pedals but apply a bit of pressure as they come up from bottom dead centre. It’s possible to just lock your legs up, but do it with enough determination and the still-rotating pedals will catapult you up and over the handlebars†. I came close a couple of times.

After that we were encouraged up onto the straights, then back to the côte d’azur for the corners and eventually, once we felt we had enough speed, up onto the track for the whole lap. The sensation is exhilarating, and mortifying. With ten or twelve beginners on the track, our speeds were all over the place: some riders were caning round as if to the velodrome born; others were creeping around with tyres squeaking in protest at the lack of speed in the corners. Claire had explained some track racing etiquette — call out “Stick!” as you approach someone to overtake, or let them know whether you’re passing them on the inside or outside, for example — and rounding a corner was terrifying mixture of wall-of-death speed and dodgem manoeuvering. “Stick!” I’d yell. “Jesus — stick!” as a laggard ambled round in front of me, barely fast enough to keep from sliding off the track. All the while, the more gung ho riders shot by with an airy whoosh and occasionally a whoop of glee.

We went on to experiment with pace lines, where a team of four cyclists circle the track in single file, the front rider each lap peeling off to the back of the pack. We yo-yo’d forward and back like a horizontal slinky; no brakes might prevent sudden stops but it doesn’t make it any easier to keep a constant speed. After that, Claire led the entire gaggle up to the top of the track for a flying 200 metres, where you hurtle down to the sprinter’s lane by the infield for a flying lap. These were exercising enough, but finally we moved onto Madison drills.

The Madison is a slightly bizarre race between teams of two riders: one rider rests above the blue stayer’s line, cycling slowly to conserve their energy, while the other races around the sprinter’s lane at the bottom. When the pair swap over, the racing rider transfers some of his momentum to his teammate by linking hands and slinging him forward. We weren’t going to try this (most of us were still astonished by every lap we managed to complete without injury or mishap), but we were going to get part of the way there. First, Claire told us, “You’re going to be riding with your hands in the drops. No using the flat bits on top. Take one hand off the bars on the straights, then put it back on for the corners. When you’re happy with that, try riding an entire lap with just one hand. Then do the same with the other.”

Okay, okay, we nodded.

“And then, you’re going to pair up. One rider is going to stay on the black line” — as in, the 2-inch-wide strip of black tape at the top of the metre-wide sprinter’s lane — “and the other has the whole of the sprinter’s lane to move around in. The second rider will stay slightly behind the first, and rest their right hand on the first rider’s back. For one whole lap.”

I know this doesn’t sound difficult. Reading it now, it sounds like a piece of cake. But on that track, where the illusion of a smooth surface at a distance was replaced by a rippling, creaking, tramlining mass of wooden boards, and where the 47° banking had you almost more horizontal than vertical in the turns, it seemed like an impossibility. The riders in each pair would have to speed up and slow down respectively in the corners to make up for the different radii of their turns; the outside rider had to quite literally toe the line with as little deviation as possible, and the inside rider had the awful task of making it round the track one-handed at 20 miles per hour just to avoid falling over by default.

Pete and I paired up and gingerly headed off. A few laps in I could complete a circuit one-handed, staring fixedly at the boards in front of me and pedalling like it was the only thing keeping me from smashing painfully into the blue paint of the côte d’azur, because that’s exactly what it was. A few laps after that I held to the black line as Pete steadied himself in the sprinter’s lane with his hand on my back, and a few laps after that we swapped over and managed a second paired lap, this time with me wobbling along below and slightly behind him, managing to keep my hand planted on his back for one complete lap. We had all the coordination, grace and assurance of newborn calves on an ice rink, but we did it. We came down to the infield sweating with nerves, and, if I remember rightly, actually high-fived each other without even a hint of irony. Claire congratulated us, and we were happy.

I can now say without a shadow of a doubt that velodromes are awesome.

* The pair of fire doors next to the main entrance have a big sign on them: “Do Not Open Both Doors at Once!” I asked Claire the instructor about this and she told me that the ’drome has an air-supported roof — it’s basically a huge balloon which is kept rigid only by fans maintaining positive pressure inside it. Unfortunately, air-supported domes have certain problems, like collapsing when it snows.

† Fixed gear riders on the street get round this by doing a little hop: they lock up their legs as the back wheel comes off the ground and skid to a halt when it lands.

By the time I got to the starting line a mile or so away at Science World, the rain was belting down, and it continued to do so solidly for the next four hours. I met up with Monica & Pete, grabbed a free coffee and waited for our turn to start. We were off! The three of us stuck together for the first few kilometres, but Monica & Pete were only planning to do the 30-kilometre course (Pete had, of course, already cycled 80 kilometres that day before I’d even crawled out of bed) and so I made an effort to speed up and latch onto some semi-serious looking roadies who I presumed were going for the 60k.

The ride went by surprisingly quickly: I crossed the 30k mark thinking I’d done only half that, and my adopted peloton of roadies were dropping off faster than people wearing replica Team Astana kit had any right to do so. “Eat my single gear ratio,” I crowed to myself, although my triumph was short lived as I dropped my water bottle and had to U-turn to pick it up. I passed most of that same group again a few kilometres later and settled down to keep pace with a middle aged guy who seemed to be going at a reasonable rate. We blethered for a bit, out on our own now, and pushed on through the gritty rain.

We heard the finish before we saw it, with lots of volunteers and spectators clapping, whooping and clanging cowbells as people crossed the line. Now having just watched the final few stages of the Tour de France, I couldn’t help but feel the urge to top things off with a little Cav-esque dash to the finish.

“Mind if I go for it?” I nodded at the line to my companion.

“Be my guest!” he replied, and I got up on the pedals for the last hundred metres or so, grunting and gurning across the line in a pale imitation of a sprint finish. One of the clapping ladies shook her head sadly, clearly disappointed by my perversion of this charity ride into a solo TdF reenactment. “Young people today,” I could hear her think. “What a bunch of tools.”

Monica & Pete turned up a few minutes later, Monica having caught a flat tire soon after I’d left them. We wolfed down burgers at the free barbeque as the rain continued and then went our separate ways. By the time I stepped out of the shower at the flat an hour later, it had stopped raining and the sun came out. My sopping clothes were steaming themselves dry in the sun on the balcony.

Thank you all for sponsoring me! It was a great day despite the pouring rain, and doing it for a good cause made it that much more worthwhile.

On the downtown side, the bridge juts out from a lofty cliff and the ascent from there to the crest of the span is short and fairly innocuous. On the north side, though, you’re confronted with a steep, kilometre-long descent which disgorges you onto the shoulder of a busy freeway. We shot down it at ludicrous speed, the river two hundred feet below on the one side and 60 km/h traffic on the other, wheels thudding over the expansion joints and holding on for dear life. Having screwed my bike together myself, I had absolutely no confidence that it was going to hold together. How would it fail, I wondered? Would the bars come off in my hands? Would a brake cable snap? It was an interesting time: tyres humming, wind roaring in my ears, outraged pedestrians backed into the barriers and every clenchable part of my anatomy at maximum clench.

We whipped down onto the freeway shoulder intact, regrouped, and doubled back under the bridge onto the rolling coastal road to Horseshoe Bay. The sun gradually warmed things up, and I was sweating freely into my ludicrous new shorts by the time we careered down an equally terrifying hill into Horseshoe Bay itself. The 40-minute ferry ride to Langdale over on BC’s Sunshine Coast let us decompress a bit, and we set off again at a more sensible pace once we arrived.

The Sunshine Coast is nice little place, a strip of leafy coastline northwest of Vancouver which easily conforms to my “all picturesque scenery must look like the Scottish Highlands” test of aesthetics. It’s on mainland BC but the intervening terrain is too rugged for roads and so it’s accessible only by boat or floatplane. According to the guys on the ride, the inhabitants are mostly retirees, farmers, holidaymakers and a few demented Vancouver commuters. We stopped briefly in the town of Gibsons to refill our water bottles — it has a public well dispensing the one-time best drinking water in the world — and also so that I could have a brief, cathartic rant about the obvious lack of a bloody apostrophe.

We stopped for lunch at a place called The Gumboot Café. The nearby town, Roberts Creek (named, happily, after a man named Roberts and not the result of some typographical butchery), was once a staunch hippie hangout, and the smell of good old BC weed still filled the air of the patio. We sank a couple of beers and headed home as the sun reached its peak, shaded at times by overhanging trees, but otherwise sweating like bastards at each hill. I crawled into the apartment’s parking garage having done about 80 kilometres over the day, knackered but as smug as hell. Then I emailed Andy Birkett about it, and he told me that he averaged 65 miles per day for three weeks to cycle from Land’s End to John o’ Groats. My smugness evaporated.

Cycling’s an odd sport/hobby/pastime. Although everyone rides together, it’s difficult to chat much because of the need to stay in single file, and the hills inevitably mean that the train gets broken up as the faster and slower riders spread out; then, everyone stops for a break and the pent-up chat just tumbles out. It manages to be competitive and cooperative, personal and social all at the same time. In case my incessant writing about it hasn’t already made it clear, I kind of like it that way.

* This is almost the last Vancouver+cycling related post. I promise.