Hard Day In January '19 - 10th Anniversary Edition

Report for HDIJ 2019.

It’s now Sunday afternoon and I can see that my report is almost redundant since Jaeyukdapbap’s covers most points well – even so I hope I can add something.

It’s certainly true that this group rode well together. You were brave enough to ride two abreast (not so common nowadays) but looked ‘tidy’ from behind. It sounds as though on the headwind return trip the work at the front was equitably shared between the stronger riders – I was impressed to hear that you averaged 17 mph on the last leg from Twyford to Staines, all the more so that this had been achieved without dropping anyone.

Waiting at the top of the Christmas Common climb I was expecting to photograph at least some on foot pushing their bikes, but this didn’t happen. It seems to be a feature of single gear riding that you can nearly always manage…….somehow. This is a great mystery to the many who have always used variable gears.

It was very disappointing for me to lose the group on the way back. On the way into Wallingford I overtook because I felt it was necessary to check where the heavily advertised ‘Road Closed’ was, and to see whether the riders could get through so that I could calculate where I might find them again after I’d had to drive the long way round. As it turned out there was no road closure at all and I took what seemed to be the natural route. Somehow I got behind the group when I thought I was in front of it and so wasted time waiting when I should have been chasing. This is always a risk when following – it’s worth pointing out that when there was a puncture stop at Twyford I must have been fairly close and a text message would have made me turn up pretty quickly. I suspect there is an error in the cue sheet but I’ll take that up with YAL later.

I think one reason the group worked well was that about half of you had been on previous HDIJ’s and in any case were experienced group riders. Another factor was that you had chosen generally similar gearing, about 71” * being the most usual. An exception here was Swiss Chap on 76.6 which I would have thought too high but clearly, if you’re strong enough, you can cope, as he proved by doing a lot of work towards the end. Respect! Second highest gear was Camel Toe at 74.8 which I think he was finding tough going, especially in the last few miles. The lowest gear was Pastry bot at 65.6 and as mentioned before he again seemed the most stylish rider, so this may be a connection worth noting. I have rounded off all these numbers to one decimal place and taken the wheel size as 26.5” which is typical of 700’s with 23mm tyres. One significance of this is that Scrabble’s 49 x 18 (72.1) should just scrape past a machine check for a 72” Medium Gear time trial, whereas the traditional 48 x 18 only gives 70.7 and this could show up on the result board!

This brings me to racing and I know I’m repeating myself a bit here, but this is for the benefit of new readers – I think there must be at least some of those. When I was doing this sort of riding there was always the idea that we were preparing to race and that was the incentive to take a battering (as most of us did) week after week. What might have been termed the ‘Training Run Season’ lasted from early January until mid March and by that stage it would have seemed a criminal waste of effort not to enter some actual races. From what I saw yesterday I’m sure many of you could race with at least some success. It seems that only Pastry bot is actually competing (cyclocross, but may consider other disciplines). Among the others Camel toe said he hoped to race this year and Ruserius (who would have won King of the Mountains if there had been a prize) hopes to ride Paris Brest Paris, which although not strictly speaking a race, is certainly a much higher aspiration than doing a couple of 25’s.

So, speaking as some one who rather regrets being past it, my message to the rest of you is: go out and race while you’ve got youth and fitness and there are still some events left to enter. If you don’t, I fear you may regret it later on.

My pictures are a bit disappointing, but some will follow.

• It’s worth calculating your gear rather than just quoting the sprocket sizes – otherwise you won’t know, for example, which is the biggest gear out of 39x13, 48 x 16 or 54 x18. (they are all identical).