The coldest conditions I’ve ridden in in the UK: Can I ride a 200km Audax 12 months in a row? Ride #9

That was a cold one.

Into the business end of Randonneur Round the Year (a 200km ride every month for 12 months in a row) now, and three things are going to happen. Firstly, conditions will deteriorate: less daylight, more chance of some weather. Secondly, there just aren’t as many calendar events over the winter, and that coupled with the third thing – Christmas is a busy old time – means I’m more likely to be on my own doing DIY routes, or at least with a select band of idiots.

I chose a Friday and told myself I’d stick to it unless the weather looked properly bad. And for a while it did, until the windows shifted about and I found myself setting off in total darkness, but with the prospect of a sunny day ahead. A sunny day that was going to be really, really, REALLY cold. This was that cold snap. Remember that cold snap? That.

It was well below freezing when I set off on my DIY route that involved a 90km loop around Devizes and Westbury and Frome, picking up Iwein for the second bit and looping around Bristol and over the suspension bridge before heading home. It was cold enough that if I hadn’t committed to this endeavour and been nearly three quarters of the way through, I would one hundred percent have stayed under the covers.

The first loop was, by design, mostly on bigger roads that had been gritted. It had been dry for a couple of days so even the few lanes to join up the loop were mostly ok, with a few bits of tiptoeing over the frozen run-off from the fields. I’d stuck my big seatpack on to hold my down jacket when I was warm enough to take it off. It was five hours before I needed it. Progress was not swift.

Damn, it was cold. I think it’s maybe the coldest conditions I’ve ridden in in the UK. There was ice in my beard. My bottles turned to slush and the valves froze. Not that I was sweating out a lot of water that I needed to replenish, luckily. I think I got through a bottle and a half in twelve hours. 

After sitting in front of Iwein’s fire for half an hour and getting some feeling back into my toes we knocked off the second lap – which was probably the easier of the two despite being longer – without much incident, or much pace.

It was a bit warmer with the winter sun on our backs, although I don’t think we got much past low single figures. By the time we’d necked our chips by the side of Chew Valley Lake the sun had set and the mercury had dropped again, and I finished the day how I started it: in the dark, a bit chilly.

This ride also marks the switch to the winter bike. The NEW winter bike, kind of. My trusty Kinesis Tripster ATR v1 from [checks notes] 2012 has got a crack in the downtube, and so I’ve moved over to this beauty, pictured here next to some fly-tipped art under an M5 bridge… 

If you’ve really been paying attention you might recognise this as my DWARD Design custom singlespeed…

And it was that, but I got Ed to make me a new sliding dropout with a gear hanger, and since the frame was built to match the dimensions of my Tripster it’s more or less a straight swap. There are no holes for anything save the rear hose, so I’m running SRAM Rival XPLR with a single 40T chainring and a 10-44 cassette, which is great: plenty of climbing gears and enough fast gears for the kind of fast I’ll be doing on this bike: not that fast.

It’s running the same SON Dynamo lights as ever (albeit with some new Hunt dyno wheels I’m reviewing) and it’s a great rig for long distances. First big ride: no notes. Three more to complete: in December and January it looks like the stars might possibly align for a calendar event, although that might also coincide with some weather, so I’m torn between finding some company and taking a chance on the conditions, or picking a nice day and doing it on my own. We’ll see.

207km / 2,360m / 12h03m