Today was my last training ride, the next time I'll be doing more than a pop to the shops on two unpowered wheels is when I'm standing at John O' Groats with a bit of distance to go. Some people might say that I ought to have done a bit more training for this ride, that just a handful of 30-50 mile rides a week or two before hand isn't really adequate or even remotely near what I ought to have done. After today I'd agree.
In all fairness I'd have agreed beforehand too although now I will merrily add 'emphatically' to that statement. Today's journey was from Plymouth to Bugle near St Austell to pick up my van after a new suspension compressor had been fitted. For anyone who hasn't been there, St Austell is jokingly known as the centre of the Cornish Alps so you can guess that it's a touch on the hilly side although that does have something to do with the china clay mountains that are brought out of the mines. I chose the route to the garage as it included as few miles on A roads as possible because they can be particularly unpleasant in this part of the world, but it also meant I could practice my navigation skills. Having driven the route to the garage a fair few times (don't ever buy a French van...) if I rode the main route I could do it without thinking. I decided to use the same method in how we are planning to ride JoGLE, namely write a list of villages we expect to go through and tape the list on the top of the cross bar. Theoretically that's all you need to get along the back roads although a compass and a smartphone map helped once or twice.
The problem with this is twofold. Google maps (where I did my planning) is all well and good, but it classifies all the non A or B roads as just roads for better or for worse. Some of the roads I went along today were little more than frost ravaged cart tracks covered in mud and gravel, not the best thing for swift progress on skinny tyres. Secondly, the main roads are rarely the shortest route but they are often for a geographical point of view the path of least resistance. In 40 miles today I again climbed nearly 2500 feet and some of those inclines were 1 in 7's which after the first five or six I started to find less amusing. Cornwall is a big bunch of river valleys and you can often find yourself crossing the same river a mile upstream having ridden a mile up the side of the valley and then back down another muddy lane. At points you wonder why you don't take the more direct route and wade up river.
Anyway, I got to Bugle over four hours after I set off with one or two small nav errors, one puncture and an overwhelming feeling that a lot of the miles we are going to be riding will necessarily be on major roads. It didn't help that I was on my training bike with the mudguards that refuse to stop rubbing the wheels however much they are adjusted or cursed at, nor that I was riding into an 18 knot head wind either.
I'm sure that deep down on a cellular level I knew that the majority of miles will be head down and pedal away whilst on major roads, however up until this morning I had envisioned many a peaceful mile through gentle countryside with time to think and enjoy being outside.
So today was a rude awakening to the cat vomit of reality. Still, only four days to worry about it; it'll be too late after that...
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