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@Brommers
I did the LtB ride on Sunday, and due to the fact that I needed to have my car there on Sunday evening, so I could drive back to London first thing on Monday, I decided to drive down to London on Saturday morning, drop off a bag at my sister's house, drive to work to pick up other peoples' bags, then drive to Brighton, park the car near the hotel, and ride back to London on the reverse of the normal LtB route. So having packed up my bags, I downloaded the LtB gpx file, produce a reverse trip based using that file, and uploaded both to my Garmin.
For various reasons I was a bit late setting off from Brighton, so didn't leave the car park until half one. After a dickwad in a Mercedes A-class tried to kill me as soon as I left the car park, I set off following the Garmin route. I did think at one point that I didn't recognise the route from last year, but carried on anyway. After 7 miles I got to a dead end leading to a gravel track. It was at that point I realised I'd downloaded to LtB off-road route, and that trying to ride the off-road route on a fixed road bike would be potentially rather challenging.
By now it was two o'clock, so I just told the Garmin to take me to my sister's house in West Hampstead. Once I'd got out of Brighton the route it picked was actually rather good, although since the Garmin doesn't know about topology it was rather lumpier than I would've chosen for a fixed ride. By four o'clock it was clear I wasn't going to make it back for dinner at this rate (I'd cycling 12 miles before I even got out of Brighton, together with the late start), so I told the Garmin to take me to East Croydon train station instead. The route it picked included Titsey Hill, which I'd never done before, and which proved to be a bit of a challenge after having already done 50 miles. So much so that I did end up walking a very little bit of it. #hangsheadinshame
Got to East Croydon after 64 miles and hopped on the train to W Hampstead.
The next morning I met up with the colleagues I was doing the ride with, one of whom managed to have a SPD unclipping fall at some traffic lights before we even got to the start (it was only the third time he'd ever ridden with SPDs). Then it turned out one of the group hadn't realised he needed to bring his race number with him, so our 8am start turned into an 8.30am+ start. Still, we set off eventually, surrounded by the usual hordes of happy nodders, wobblers and ineptualists.
If anything the ride was even busier than last year. I'm pretty sure I was able to ride up Turner's Hill last year, whereas this year that definitely wasn't possible. Two more colleagues managed to fall off during the ride (including another SPD unclipping incident by someone using SPDs for the very first time). The rest of the ride was the usual effort to survive the swerving, wobbling and random behaviour. Didn't see anyone else do a shoulder check before violently swerving onto the other side of the road once. Still, I managed to ride up Ditchling Beacon again, which made me unbearably smug once again.
Then off to the hotel, and a rather good dinner before a horribly early start at 5.30am on Monday morning.