Major Plewes and the case of the exploding derailleur – 10 days to go

If you’ll forgive me for picking up on last week’s theme, according to a long-held theatre superstition, a bad dress rehearsal, means you'll have a terrific show; let’s hope so…

This week’s plan was to complete a couple of back to back 100+ mile rides to ensure bodies, bikes and kit were fit for the purpose. For Saturday’s ride we thought we’d have another look at Portsmouth. Graham planned a challenging route by literally drawing a straight line from Streatley to Portsmouth and then use every highway and byway to keep to that line. The result was a wonderful ride along tiny country lanes and through rustic, summer villages. Main roads tend to follow valleys of course; our route ignored this practicality and took us over lots of good big hills, hard work on what proved the hottest day of the year so far.

Now somewhere near Basingstoke Jeremy’s rear gear mechanism developed an interesting ‘click’. Thinking it wasn’t too serious; we agreed to continue slowly to the nearest bike shop. Big mistake - just outside the tiny village of Chidden the offending derailleur exploded in a shower of rather expensive carbon fibre. The bike was totally shagged, not only had the gears disintegrated, they had managed to bend the bike’s titanium frame as they departed this world. The only course of action was to remove what was left of the gears and set up a ‘fixed wheel’ arrangement to get us to the next village.

We made it to Hambledon and to cheer himself up Jeremy wandered off to the village shop to buy chocolate and regale a rather under whelmed Miranda Hart of Sport Relief Million Pound Bike Ride fame, with tales of his cycling heroics. As Chris, Graham and I studied what was left of the bike, we were joined by the remarkable Major Andy Plewes. By a stroke of luck the good Major who lives in the village, runs the Royal Marines Cycling club and there’s nothing he doesn’t know about the sport. After an exhaustive examination of the damage, the carefully considered verdict was handed down; the bike was indeed completely shagged and as he was just off to compete in a time trial, he offered to give both bike and rider a lift to the nearest station. We disentangled Jeremy from Miranda, loaded him into the Major’s personnel carrier and waved him a fond farewell.

Reports of Jeremy’s journey home are somewhat sketchy although it’s clear that after travelling for some hours he found himself back at the same small Hampshire railway station from which his journey had begun in the company of a young Romanian woman who only seemed capable of repeating “I have a boyfriend”

What was left of the team continued on down to Portsmouth and after the briefest of pauses at Gunwharf Quay which was packed with Saturday shoppers, we headed home. We followed the same route on the way back, stopping for some fairly ordinary baked potatoes at the The Harvest Home in Denmead. We got in shortly after six having covered 135 miles, climbing nearly 6000 feet at an average speed of slightly less than 15 mph. All in all a challenging day.

Now whilst Major Plewes clearly had a staring role in the adventure, if there’s a real hero of the piece it has to be Neal Bromley, owner of Trailjunkies, organiser of our huge local cycling community and purveyor of finest bicycles to the gentry. On Saturday evening we had been invited out to a dinner party and whilst we were enjoying the excellent food, the company and Chris’ utterly futile attempts to explain to his wife the benefits of having a husband who worked all week and then spent all weekend out cycling - somewhere in a nearby workshop Mr. Bromley was re-building Jeremy’s bike so that he would be able to make day two of our final training weekend. Sure enough, at six o’clock on Sunday morning with a very few hours sleep and stupendous hangovers, there was Jeremy with a completely re-built bike – Now how’s that for customer service!

Thankfully Sunday’s ride was rather less eventful, we headed South again towards the New Forest via Whitchurch stopping at Stockbridge for breakfast at Lillies a nice café with fair to middling scrambled egg and very small tea pots. We continued south to Dunbridge before turning for home. An excellent Lunch at the Shears Inn in Collingbourne Ducis then onto Hungerford and home. 115 miles at an average 15.5 mph.

A 250 mile weekend and some very good lessons learned which include; if your bike starts making an unwelcome and unexplained noise best stop until cause has been found and remedied. As this problem wasn’t one we could have really prevented, on reflection, we think it might be wise to compile a list of all the bike shops and taxi companies en route!

Dress Rehearsals - 15 days to go

I think last week’s bit of storming contributed to making Sunday’s ride a hugely enjoyable day out in Sussex, the first time we have visited that fair county. To date our rides have taken us West to Dorset, East to Kent and North to Northamptonshire and I have to say, it’s one of the real joys of these rides that we get to really see and appreciate this sceptred Isle, this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England…!     

Pursuing the theatrical theme, I’m reminded that with 15 days to go we’re getting into the serious business of dress rehearsals. For this ride, we kitted our bikes out with all the gear we will be taking. Each of us will have nine litres of carrying capacity, a Topeak 2 litre handlebar bag and a seven litre Carradice saddle bag. With such limited space, we’ll be taking literally one tee shirt, a pair of shorts and ‘flip flops’ for the evening - there won’t be room for anything else by the time we’ve included spares and tools, waterproofs, mobiles, maps, first aid kit and other essentials. 

Our route took us south to Petersfield, where we had breakfast at the excellent Cloisters Café. En route we encountered a member of the lost Garmin user’s society. Claire had been wandering aimlessly through the lanes of Hampshire since her trip computer expired. In his inimitable style, Graham gave her directions to Southampton and we all went on our way. After Breakfast we headed for Midhurst before returning home via Liphook. A ride of 125 miles completed at just over 15.5 mph and with total ascents of 4,500 feet so pretty similar to one of our non-alpine riding days when we get to France.

We are pretty much all organised now. We managed to sort the route out just in time to get the accommodation we need, hotels were getting pretty full by the time we came to book. We’re all set apart from the first Saturday night, 5^thJune. Perhaps because this weekend sees the Journées des Jardins in France where thousands of public and private gardens are open for free visits, every hotel in the country appears full. We could only find two rooms (one with only a double bed!) in Dourdan, Jeremy is desperately praying for a cancellation or two!

So we have hotels, tickets, bikes and all the kit we need, we’ve even agreed how we are going to get our bikes back from Venice! Next week end will see our last serious training sessions with two back to back 130 milers, then we’ll take it easier until its time to go.      

A matter of 'Storming' - 24 days to go

We had a row this weekend. It was about how we were going to get our bikes back from Venice. Interesting I thought, after spending so much time together how we can still get all bent out of shape by something so trivial? And the answer, well I think we’re probably still “Storming”. Allow me to elucidate.

I thought that when a bunch of guys came together to do something like cycle to Venice; a strong cohesive team would quickly form. Well I was wrong; initially we were simply a group who shared a common purpose. Rather like being in a queue for a cash point machine; you all have a common objective, you’re prepared to follow a few rules and conventions so others around you don’t get upset, you might even have a nice chat to pass the time - but clearly you’re not in what I would call a team.

With cycling it’s possible to continue as a ‘group’ if that’s what you want, after all road biking’s a pretty individual business. Providing you’re organised enough to meet up in the morning, getting to the destination is mostly a matter of personal fitness - you don’t really need others to grind out the miles. It’s not until we started getting into each others’ motives, started having to support each other at the end of a 150 mile ride and began to share the work of planning and organising the trip that I noticed a move from ‘Group’ to ‘Team’.

In my dark and mysterious world of management consulting, there’s a model that helps understand the development of teams. A psychologist called Tuckman recognised that teams go through four stages of development; forming, storming, norming, and performing. I can’t help wondering what Mr. Tuckman might make of us, let’s see…

Step one was pretty straight forward, Graham, Chris and I were sitting in the pub one evening reminiscing about Land’s end to John O’Groats. We decided it would be fun to do something similar. We thought a mutual friend, Jeremy might be interested, he was and several curries later we had a plan to go to Venice, voilà we were formed!

The big picture is that we had to work through whether we all wanted enough of the same things to make the trip viable and enjoyable. It emerged that we all seem to share a central need for a big physical and mental challenge. We all have other requirements of course; ranging from sightseeing, through drinking wine to creating a different focus in life – but nothing so incompatible to raise the likelihood of the thing falling apart. Then comes the storming, which if you want to develop a sense of team, you leave out at your peril. Storming is about drinking beer, challenge and conflict. Hence, our row! It was actually quite tough to get a working set of objectives and agreement on who would do what with regard to planning and organisation. As we wrestle with these agreements, my sense of comfort around being in a team increases.

During norming the objectives and agreements become a working reality, you find ways of coping with people’s eccentric behaviours; Chris going off on a political rant every time we go past an election poster, Graham’s determination to keep wearing the most revolting pair of see-through shorts known to man, Jeremy’s inability to communicate with any woman under the age of 50 or his remarkable views on quantitative easing. Then there are the problems and frustrations caused by bad or missing equipment, there’s agreeing to take on each others’ tasks when you’re simply over stretched, perhaps a question over someone’s fitness or motivation. Gradually as we work through these trials, our communication improves and consensus and cooperation becomes the central theme and we start to perform as a team.

Last Sunday saw the 9th annual running of the Hairy Legs Challenge, a local competition consisting for a 5k run a 20k mountain bike ride and another 5k run. Whilst we’ve all endured this ritual torture, this year only Chris and Jeremy chose to participate. To save our comrades legs for the trials of the following day we agreed we should keep Saturday’s ride to a gentle 100 miler. Winchester for breakfast at the excellent Café Monde returning via, you guessed it, Overton! Kingsclere and Newbury.

Helpful advice from a forebear - 31 days to go

I was wandering through the less visited byways of amazon.com recently and discovered a book entitled “The road to a healthy old age: Eassys Lay and Medical” written by my Great Grandfather and published in 1914. Intrigued, I purchased a copy and discovered this 19th century Bournemouth physician to be a man of wit and wisdom. On the subject of cycling, he considered it “good if done very carefully, but cycling up stiff hills and against strong head winds to be very dangerous”. If today’s ride was anything to go by, I feel I’d have been something of a disappointment to him. We rode the 50 miles to Chipping Norton into a strong North Westerly and completed this 95 mile ride by climbing the dreaded 16% gradient of Streatley Hill and they don’t come much “stiffer” than that.

The trip to Chipping Norton was our second ride for this Bank Holiday weekend. On Saturday, with Jeremy still in Russia, Chris, Graham and I had decided to head south. There’s a café at Newlands Corner in the Surrey Hills where the quality of the scrambled egg is only equalled by the breathtaking views of the surrounding countryside. Needless to say when we got there it was closed so desolated, we continued onto Godalming where as it turned out, we found some equally good eggs served by a delightful Czech girl with no front teeth. The return via Aldershot and Hartley Wintney completed the first of these two 95 mile rides, both at an average speed of 16.5 mph.

In the light of my Great Grandfathers advice to stay away from “violent exercise and unguarded strains”, I thought with a month to go until our departure, I’d take a moment to reflect on the programme to date. In February we put in 396 training miles, in March 717 miles and in April 851 miles. This reasonably gradual build up seems to have been effective in allowing us to return to a serious cycling regime without incurring any major injuries.

When we trained for the Land’s End to John O’Groats ride, as relative newcomers to the sport we put in too many long rides too early and paid the price with a series of ailments from inflamed Achilles tendons and several episodes patellofemoral syndrome, or ‘cyclists knee’. Thankfully, a brilliant local sports physiotherapist called Amanda Watt kept all our parts in reasonable working order on that occasion. This time we have had less cause to occupy her waiting room, although we haven’t been complete strangers. I’ve had to be helped through the after affects of last year’s back operation on a slipped disc, Jeremy’s shoulder seizes up from time to time as it has more metal in it than a Sherman tank after a skiing accident and Chris has had to get a hand and arm sorted out after a rabbit chose to decapitate itself in his front wheel causing him to describe a gentle arc into a hedge.

So ‘health’ seems to be holding up and ‘fitness’ is getting there, in fact it’s been interesting to see the increasing efficiency of the ‘system’ by monitoring calories burned per mile over the past few weeks. Although we’re not there yet, if we put in some high mileage with lots of hill training over the next three weeks, become a little more conscientious when it comes to diet and nutrition and tempting though it is, ignore my forebear’s advice to consume lots of good port wine as it “keeps up the heat and helps the flagging appetite”- we should be OK...



Well that’s about it for this week apart from disappointing news on the hotel booking front. Our preferred hotel near Belfort is full and the one in Weesen only has a couple of “Romantical” doubles available. I think I’ll be staying with the bikes on that particular evening.