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.