Audax rides

It's a question that gets asked a lot on the audax forum in YACF and there are always a lot of helpful solutions and bodges that get suggested. The bottom line though is that when you get to the level of audaxing that takes you outside of "usual business hours", you have to be prepared for the fact that you may experience catastrophic mechanical failure or similar. It's not so much what you have to do in response that gets to people but the fact that it has happened in the first place.

At the risk of stating something fairly obvious I suppose this is part of the modern anxiety around accepting risk or uncertainty or inconvenience and which mobile phones have only served to encourage. Funny that it should still crop up in an audax context though, given the stress on self reliance...

There was a time not all that long ago when people in rural areas would happily walk many miles to get to work, school, or even the pub - my grandad talked about walking overnight to get to a dance for example, and I've heard someone else mention regularly doing the same, over some very remote roads, to get to football matches - so perhaps it's only recently the thought of being stuck ten miles from the nearest inner tube has seemed daunting