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!