Martin Thomas's blog

I’m beginning to wonder if I made a rather expensive mistake last year.

In September I realised that my Campag Centaur chain, cassette and rings were wearing out so I treated myself to two TA Nerius 110 PCD chainrings (50 & 34) and a KMC 10-speed SL chain, together with a new Centaur cassette. 

I managed to squeeze in a 100km ride with just two days to go this month, keeping me in the running to complete this year’s metric century challenge by the wispiest of whiskers.

Yesterday’s ride was one of the toughest since I was bitten by the MCC bug thanks to the combination of the weather (cold and wet) and my level of fitness (low, compounded by some kind of seasonal malaise plus an ongoing hangover I’ve been living with for at least a week now).

I have been mildly obsessed with road.cc’s Metric Century Challenge since I spotted it in March.

It came along just when I was struggling to keep on top of my training commitments as I tried to build fitness for this summer’s Race Against Time LEJOG. I just couldn’t see how I was going to be able to stay on the bike for upwards of 15 hours a week without going mad. But somehow the idea of doing it in 100k chunks – and notching up points in the process – appealed a whole lot more, so I thought I’d give it a go.

I'm a road cyclist who uses an Apple computer, so why is it that I have fallen in barely controllable lust with two objects that would seem to fly in the face of everything I stand for?

Like any self-respecting MAMIL I spend a little too much time trawling the internet in search of bikes to long for. The Enigma and Cervélo sites get more than their fair share of attention from me and I'm only slightly embarrassed to admit it.

There were ten of us I think, cycling two abreast in a reasonably tight group along a country road that was nearly too wide to qualify as a lane.

We’d been making steady progress for about 30 miles, trying to ignore the dense mist and relentless drizzle. Everyone was soaked through but we were happy enough because it must have been 19 or 20 degrees.

The roads were surprisingly slippery though – I saw skinny back wheels slide out several times, only to be caught just in time by jolted riders.

I left you at the top of Helmsdale with me crowing in a triumphant and doubtless rather vulgar way about my unprecedented fitness levels. A man of my age should have known it’s unwise to crow.

Just around the corner from Helmsdale is its evil twin, Berriedale, a shorter but sharper ascent that some might say is a bit of an unnecessary additional climb but others would probably describe as the true test of hilly manliness. I suppose the way a cyclist would describe it might depend on whether they raced up it and, if so, whether they won.

Our last day was also our longest – some kind of sick joke there on the part of the organisers. We had 157 miles to cover, with another very long post-lunch blast of 80 miles.

I’m not sure what we were expecting really. By this stage we’d all gone through various pain barriers, come out the other side and found new ones to deal with. We knew there would be the thought of that finish line sustaining us but would its attraction prove strong enough? There was only one way to find out…

First, an apology: I was defeated by technology, tiredness and triumphalism over the past few nights so didn’t update this blog. Even if I had found it in me to seek out connections and stay up that bit later to get down my thoughts, they would have been pretty incoherent ones so I’m playing the quality control card too.

I must warn you: this blog entry could be gibberish from start to finish. I’m shattered, the cold has turned nasty and I can hardly string a sentence together. So I’m going to keep it short and sweet. Today’s numbers: 137 miles at 15.2mph average, 6000 feet climbed. We started in Kendal and finished in Edinburgh and thankfully didn’t have much urban riding to contend with like we did yesterday.

Day three of The Race Against Time took us from Telford to Kendall – that’s 136 miles with a relatively modest 3,000 feet or so of climbing that we covered at an average of around 15.5mph. That brings our total mileage to something like 445, which means we're more than halfway there.