That was a bit of an anticlimax really. A day just to knuckle down and grind out the hours without really enjoying it all that much. Even so, the answer to the question, “Can I do a 200km ride every month for a year?” is: yes. Yes, I can.
An early start and hop up the M5 to Tewkesbury for Benjamin Allen’s Spring Tonic, with the promise of some different roads at least. Organiser Mark Rigby had sent out a revised route the day before to keep us, and I quote, “out of as much shit as possible”, but there’s only so much you can do when you’re riding on a flood plain in a yellow rain warning. Tewkesbury felt like an island and we were careful to stick the car in the highest bit of the car park, with the road out of town past it disappearing down into the river.
Mostly this was attritional stuff, with periods of heavy rain interspersed with periods of normal rain. We saw the sun twice, for a total of about a minute, in our ten and half hours out of doors. The first half was mostly A-roads which started quiet and damp and got increasingly busy and wet, with the odd full flood for good measure: one hiding a giant pothole that forced a stop to reset my handlebars to the horizontal. I slipped on a greasy bit of crossing at the cafe in Hay on Wye and managed to land in a heap on the pavement, tweaking my gear hanger so that my low gears didn’t mesh properly for the last 110km. Luckily the bigger climb out of Hay had been surrendered to the weather.
We crossed the Wye, swollen and muddy, and then had to ride through a bit of it where it had made it as far as the road, before the long draggy climb from Lydbrook up to Hopewell Colliery and a well-earned Cornish Pasty as the rain pelted down. Of all the bits that were not fun the next bit was probably the most not fun: inching up the double header climbs to Cinderford while jostling for road space with the Forest’s seemingly-ever-present population of angry men in shit hatchbacks: the rain, it seems, does not deter them. The only positive was that the climbing was basically done: back down to the Severn flood plain in the gathering gloom and a last smash along the B4211 before heading back into Tewkesbury the way we’d left ten-and-a-bit hours previously.
And we’re done. At some point I’ll apply for my cloth badge and I can stick it in the shed next to my Super Randonneur one. Once again: I wanted to do the thing, and I did the thing, so hooray. I’m pretty confident in my ability to ride 200km on any given day so as much as anything I guess this is a logistical challenge: with a day job and family commitments, twelve full days in a year you can go out and ride dawn to dusk (or more) without messing up any other plans aren’t necessarily easy to find. Some people do a 200km every week. Some people do a Super Randonneur series (200, 300, 400, 600km) every month. How anyone finds the time to do that is entirely beyond me. But I’m happy with my modest achievement.
What’s next? Well, 2027 is a Paris-Brest-Paris year. I’m as confident in my ability to knock out 200km as I am that right now, 1,200km in one go is probably beyond me. But eighteen months is a long time.
201km / 2,050m / 10h30
2 thoughts on “The damp finale: Can I ride a 200km Audax 12 months in a row? Ride #12”
I’m just impressed that there’s evidence of some salad with your mid-ride pasty. Whether you eat it is of course a different matter.
all the available calories went down me neck 🙂