You are reading a single comment by @Brommers and its replies.
Click here to read the full conversation.
London Fixed Gear and Single-Speed is a community of predominantly fixed gear and single-speed cyclists in and around London, UK.
This site is supported almost exclusively by donations. Please consider donating a small amount regularly.
@Brommers
Cycliste and I also did the Dragon Ride Gran Fondo on Sunday. Things started fairly inauspiciously after we'd left the hotel (just off junction 43 of the M4) nice and early. We headed off towards junction 48 on the M4, where I believed the start to be. Cycliste commented on the large number of cars with bikes on their roofs going in the opposite direction. At junction 48 there was no sign of Margam Park, where the ride started. This was because Margam Park is at junction 38, not 48. So we turned round, drove past the hotel, and onto junction 38.
At junction 38 there was a long queue of traffic on the hard shoulder waiting to get into Margam Park. It was while we were sitting patiently in the queue of traffic that I realised that I'd left my cycling shoes at the hotel. So we turned round, and went back to the hotel, picked up my shoes, and then drove back to Margam Park, which was still at junction 38, but which no longer had a queue, which was nice. As a result of this serial ineptitude, we started at 8.40am rather than the half seven we'd been aiming for.
I'd decided that I'd ride with Cycliste, rather than doing my usual thing of charging off and then waiting for her at the end. Various reasons for this, not least of which being the fact that I had to drive back to the hotel so wouldn't have been able to have a post-ride beer while waiting for her. When I say 'ride with Cycliste', this is only partly true. I dislike having to climb at someone else's pace, so I did have to wait at the top of the climbs. And Cycliste is not so naturally gifted in the descending line as I am, so I had to wait at the bottom of the descents too. And when I tried to give her a wheel to follow on the flats, I kept on dropping her.
Still, we did at least see each other regularly during the ride, even if it wasn't exactly riding together. We took things at a fairly leisurely pace, even stopping for half an hour for lunch at the pub by the halfway feed station. It turned out the pub was doing bacon baps and coffee, so we both ordered one of each. The bacon bap turned out to be not the usual sort of bap, but an enormous great big flat bread circle about 8 inches in diameter. Hence the half hour we had to stop for lunch, because those baps took some eating.
We got very briefly showered upon after having spent most of the day in intermittent sunshine, and the last 30km of the ride did feature an unpleasantly large amount of dreary surburbia, apart from the last 10km which was more like riding through Gotham's slightly more industrial twin city. We finished in 10 hours 14 minutes, with Cycliste beating me by one whole second after a sneaky last-minute dash for the line. Despite this it was a very enjoyable day, although I do fancy trying the 300km 'Devil' route next year.
Oh, and my Garmin crashed after 130 miles, so on the 'if you didn't log it, it didn't happen' basis, I didn't finish at all.
tl;dr - forgot shoes, did ride, big bacon baps, got beaten by GF