Audax rides

My brief version of what happened on BCM...

Had an unexpectedly good first few hours - Kept up quite a high pace, pleasantly surprised to find the climbs were of a gradient where I could manage to stay with groups. By the first control I was surprised to find I was making pretty good time and started to imagine actually getting a reasonable amount of sleep.

About 120km in I was going up a long-ish hill and my garmin speed reading started stopping and starting repeatedly and the back of the bike felt a bit wobbly. After a bit of examination I discovered the driveside dropout had become detached from the chainstay... at this point my mood turned rather dark (I apologise to anyone that stopped to talk to me at this point). Had no mobile reception. One of the riders who stopped to talk to me mentioned a bike shop in the next town. I knew the chances of them having anything that could fix this were minimal, but short of any other options I could think of, I rigged up a cable tie between the chainstay cable stop and dropout and started riding again. This actually felt pretty solid, but I knew it wouldn't stop me having to abandon ride. I got to Rhayader and found the bike shop. They were sympathetic, but could only suggest a taxi to the nearest station, which they proceeded to help arrange. It was sounding like it would be an expensive and depressing end to my ride. In between phone calls I asked the shop owner if he knew of anywhere with welding equipment in town. He said there was a 4x4 garage up the road. This is what happened next... (apologies for large photos, have embedded from facebook and can't work out how to size them)

After roughly 1.5 hours I was back on the road. Realised I was now at the back of the field and it wasn't until the evening that I started to catch up with people again.
I'd love to say everything was great from this point on. Actually I spent an unnecessary amount of time worrying about the weld holding; mostly avoided riding in groups in case someone failed to point out a pothole or my frame collapsed and I took someone else out with me and got particularly stressed around Snowdonia as would have been a long cold walk to civilisation if something had gone wrong. But, I'd have been a lot more miserable if I'd had to abandon the ride. In the end I was finished by 8 on Sunday and got an hour or so's sleep, so can't complain. I actually completed it quicker than my last 600 where I didn't break anything (but wasted a load of time failing to sleep).

I do wonder if I could have made it round with cable ties and jubilee clips and avoided what's now going to require the whole chainstay to be replaced. However I don't think I'd have risked the more remote bits of the ride with that.

Anyway, it's a valuable lesson in not giving up.
Or alternately, a lesson in always carefully checking your frame after you hit a massive pothole the week before doing a 600k. I'm not sure which.