cake

*Ping*

E-mail from friend, usual suspects in the cc. Want to do this? Pedal to the Lewes Wanderers Reliability Ride that starts about 25 miles away, do that, ride home, stop for some cake somewhere in the middle, should be about 80 miles all in all.

Sounds just like a Sunday ride then, but a little bit different, a good day out.

Yes.

We're happily freewheeling skittish down a rubbly farmtrack on our cyclo-cross bikes when a brace of burly mountainbikes speed past us, I think one of them might have even "hooned" as he overtook. That's enough for the red mist to descend and all of a sudden the game's afoot, we follow our spirits, crank hard three times on the pedals and follow their wheels down the rocky, rutted greasy descent, gently muttering the 'cross bike mantra of "don'tpuncture, don'tpuncture, don'tpuncture, don'tpuncture, don'tpuncture, don'tpuncture, don'tpuncture..." under our breaths all the way down. The look on the mountainbikers faces as we reach the bottom and they look round to see us right on their arses, smiling, to instantly overhaul them on the following climb with cheery, almost gay hello's makes it worth the pinball hanging on.

    Which is why we do it.

    Obviously.

    It's the last weekend in March and I guess it's happened enough times now to be a diary-bookmark tradition - the "Happy 100". A time to celebrate the changing of the clocks and the hopeful start of Spring by cracking off a swift hundred with friends round the lanes of Sussex. That's miles not kilometres, we have no patience for fake centuries here.

 A long lost but not forgotten piece of dusty cycling history has just found it's way into my possession, an item that time, memory and rose-tinted Oakleys had elevated to some sort of two-wheeled folklore, spoken of only in hushed and wondrous tones whilst peering through steamed-up cafe windows.