Can I ride a 200km Audax 12 months in a row? Ride #7

September, and after leaving it until squeaky bum time last month I thought I’d get the seventh ride of the series in bright and early, on the first weekend of September. The Tour of Britain was coming to the Tumble, and that seemed like as good an opportunity as any for a day out. 

I’d already been over the Tumble in March with Jez, and I had him towing me again, at least as far as the summit. This time we didn’t have to do the Gospel Pass first, which (although it’s lovely up there) was a real bonus. That ride started in Chepstow, and getting there from Bath is easy enough: good traffic free paths a lot of the way, and flat, quiet roads the rest. 

After the bridge we snuck into Parsons for a bacon sarnie, and took the Tidenham Tunnel into the Wye Valley, which is only open in the summer to protect the bat population. They’re clearly not big fans of bright lights, because it’s pretty gloomy in there…

But it was a nice easy way into the valley which bypasses the busy climb out of Chepstow towards Tintern: you pop out just past the abbey after a gentle descent on good gravel. After nipping over the river on the Wireworks bridge the climb up Forge Road on the other side of the valley – past the 17th century Tintern Abbey Furnace – was a delight: quiet, gentle and pretty. 

By the time we’d smashed (in relative terms) along the basically flat Old Abergavenny Road which criss-crosses the new A40, we were ahead of schedule: two hours before the pros hit the Tumble for the first of two ascents, the second being the stage finish. So there was plenty of time for a nice sit down and a sausage roll in town before heading up the 450-odd metres of the climb, which was closed for the day. Which meant that you could forget about traffic (it’s a fairly fast and busy road normally) and just enjoy it. Mostly.

There were thousands of folks on the hill, and a good proportion of them were there to cheer Geraint Thomas on in his final professional race. The summit was completely mobbed, and in the end I set up camp by the flamme rouge, before the barriers, where it was still busy but a bit less frantic.

Then the race came through, and I was once again reminded of the gulf between myself and people that ride bikes for a living. G came through somewhere near the back, and you knew he was coming from about half a mile away as the big cheer rolled up the mountain, minutes after Evenepoel, Onley et al had smashed through chasing the break.

About an hour later they’d looped round through Usk and Abergavenny and were hitting the hill again, this time right at the front of proceedings, with Evenepoel taking the win but not distancing Romain Grégoire, who kept the lead and went on to win the whole thing. But everyone was waiting for Thomas again, to give him a second and final cheer. And true to form he grabbed a Jubel from the Welsh lads just down from us to celebrate his last ever professional race up the Welsh Alpe d’Huez*.

After that I just had to get home. Without Jez, who’d cadged a lift with the rest of his family. Including young Miles, who got one of the biggest cheers of the day climbing up to the finish on his tiny Islabike. I bumped into Liam off of road.cc YouTube on the way back in Usk, having been towed there in a train of very strong lads pushing into an increasingly potent headwind. Thanks for that, chaps! Sadly I didn’t get to do my turn, as one from the front of the line I turned right instead of left and realised that I’d routed myself up the same long and steep climb we’d done back to Chepstow in the March ride. Which I didn’t have fond memories of, and I didn’t make any new ones either.

It was blowy enough on the old Severn Bridge that you needed to pedal quite hard on the downhill side, but after fifteen minutes in Severn View Services (which is more than enough) and the climb out of the estuary it was just a case of ticking off the kilometres and slogging up the hill back to base. It took me longer than the August ride but some of that was just sitting around on the Tumble, and I wasn’t actively avoiding the hills this time. Plus I had to do a good chunk of it on my own. It was a great day out, and fantastic to see G on his second-to-last day as a pro rider. Diolch!

202km / 12h53m / 2,560m

*It’s not a great deal like Alpe d’Huez