2011-07-16/17 Sat/Sun - Dunwich Dynamo DD19

I thought you looked ace!

Thanks. Sadly the jersey is only a loan albeit a long term one ;) Shame you couldn't make it, hope to see you on a ride soon!

in the spirit of inclusiveness, a few personal lessons to add to all of these brilliant accounts:

today's persistent legache suggests a lot more training would be in order to make the trip back with sanity intact. the same goes for the delirious solo singalong that seemed to spill out of me all the way Ipswich.

• more real food and fewer energy bars. i had a bowl of pasta salad at the food stop, and then had to resort to power bars and caffeinated gels in order to stave off the nausea. by about four in the morning my mouth tasted like the bottom of a cat litter

• it's worth stopping to stow the valuable stuff. my sunglasses lasted twenty minutes in the back of my jersey then bounced out into the road. thanks to whomever it was who pointed this out in passing, although by the time i stopped and went back for them, there wasn't a whole lot left to pick up.

• was solo for a lot of it owing to knowing very few peeps, and getting a little bit addicted to passing people through the night. resolving to go to more forum drinks/rides to address the first point (starting with Herne Bay and possibly souths tonight) and am quietly whispering the word Dufus to myself to address the latter.

• turn off the garmin off when you get on the train
  [ame]http://connect.garmin.com/activity/100036858[/ame]

overall, fantastic. very enjoyable, and those people i did meet for the first time (bobbo, conker, tomk&d) were top drawer. now waiting for next year's thread to appear. well done to everyone for what must have been one of the greatest collective efforts (in calories) to have happened in the UK this weekend.
some photographic evidencez attached:

9 Attachments

That was me (Sam). Good riding with you, though still a bit surprised that you're not really called Crispin.

Hey man! Yeah that last stretch was great, my spirits rising with the sun.

Hey jogger, nice to see you, albeit fleetingly.

Shambolic, the last pic is of me:-)

^^Same jogger. You were there, then you weren't...

^^ Iain where are your pics? Also, what time did we arrive? Trying to remember the blur!

^^ Iain where are your pics?
I have hundreds... (well, about 170)

Ill post a few in the next day or two.

I didnt arrive with you guys as you disappeared into the distance. Somehow i lost everyone on the last leg and i dont know how.

ah shit sorry dude! I had to keep pushing or I felt like I was going to come to a complete standstill, had no idea where everyone else was. Looking forward to seeing pics.

You ran out of glowstick Iain, that's what happen.

You're useless without glowstick, you're just* 'Iain'* without them.

The group I was riding with kept seeing loads of glowsticks on the way there. Almost like they were breadcrumbs in case you got lost!

I wasn't going to post a full ride report, others have done a better job of that than I have and I'm still enjoying working my way through them. But I did want to chip in with a couple of observations and of course massive thanks to Katie-coo and jaitch for their magnificent work. Then it just sort of got out of hand, so you get one anyway...

There are so many ways to do the Dun Run but, as Skully Knows™ if you're not having fun you're doing it wrong. Unfortunately he failed to point this out until after the ride, leaving me to receive it, unprompted, as a revelation somewhere outside Sudbury. I don't blame him for this, he does his best and that is all we can ask of him.

That revelation came after chasing the gang away from the feed station. They (you) all went off a bit hot for me. I had been busting my gut repeatedly to get up to a wheel only to immediately get dropped again when I realised that I wasn't going to last long riding that way and more importantly I wasn't enjoying it. So I dropped off and spun at my own pace. I found could belt it for a bit then drop the pace right back for an on bike rest then pick it up again as and when I felt. It was working so well I resolved that my feet wouldn't touch the ground till dawn, which is why, in case any one nearby wondered, I was whistling “Here Comes the Sun” at 3 in the morning. Fortunately dawn arrived early, eschewed the usual “getting brighter” thing and instead opted to take the form of a magic tea stop. Maybe a little less magic than last year but still very tea stoppy and still doing that wonderful thing of giving you a cuppa in return for whatever change you have left in your pockets.

From being alone I discovered that you're never really alone on the Dynamo. I think I saw and spoke to more people while riding “alone”. Plenty of forum faces to say hello and goodbye to as I overtook and was overtaken. Plenty of strangers to share a word a joke or and observation with. Plenty of miss-recognition in the dark, I was swapping places back and forth with a hipster spoked wheel for a good while only to finally realise it was Chainbreaker when his dulcet tones shattered the dark (he was in disguise, using a waterproof to hide his jersey). The jerseys, love them or hate them (and I love them because so many hate them) the are distinctive and did make spotting folk easy as we passed very fast like ships in the night or cars in a contraflow system.

At the tea stop I was reunited with Prancer and Ramaye who I had left the feed station with, who I was dropped by and who I must have overtaken again while they were on one of their detours, having a piss stop or up to some other shenanigans. We had a great run in, energy levels waxing and waning at different times for each of us giving the impression that our little group was bound by a very loose bit of elastic. One would briefly disappear over the horizon before being reeled back while another might drop out the back only to come storming through a minute or two later.

I'd spent most of the first half with Prancer and we had a cracking ride to the feed stop. Actually I started out with most of the forum but had lost all except Ian well before Whips Cross. Perhaps it was when I tried to take the group round Tesco and through the tunnel to avoid the Mare Street mayhem, or in the traffic on the Lea Bridge Road, we even waited at the garage on Epping New Road but the only person to appear was Prancer.

I'll say thanks again for the coach. Sweating like a (insert simile of your choice) with a near bursting bladder while crawling through Essex traffic wasn't fun but the coach banter made it bearable, especially the increasing prospect of skully, back seat driver extrodinaire, finally snapping and charging up the front to wrest control of the coach from the driver. Rolled home from Smithfields with Rod Munch, although it took me almost the whole way to realise who he was, synapses really refusing to fire by then, it didn't rain in the north and I arrived as dry as when I left the afternoon before.

Oh, and Prancer and I spotted this chap...

Hi all, bit late to this mainly due to falling soundly asleep as soon as I got home yesterday! Most things of note have already been noted, but wanted to add my thanks to jaitch and katie for running the (elite) forumobiles spectacularly, and congrats to econodog for his epic bb ride! Nice to meet some of you and put a few faces to names. It was my first DD, no dramas beyond a spoke snapping in my rear wheel 35 miles in, knees hurt a bit yesterday but feeling pretty well recovered now so must have done something right!

And everybody who enjoyed the DD should clear their diary for this:

http://www.lfgss.com/thread59098.html

It's great, a bit like riding the Dynamo must have been when it wasn't so popular yet.

Sounds like fun, checking schedule now....

I was tired, i was sore, i was suffering and all i wanted to do was quit. But i didnt. I forced out something that wasnt there. Pushed through the numbness. It hurt.

.

...as we passed very fast like ships in the night or cars in a contraflow system.
[URL="http://bikepure.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/fat1.jpg"][/URL]

Aha, thank you for that! That's one Billy Bragg line that I never managed to understand until I saw it spelt out there. That's possibly over 20 years of uncertainty and doubt brought to a happy conclusion.

Oh and any idea why the hell my garmin did this? What the hell is that straight line all about? I got the train from Norwich to London (I know for a fact it was turned off. If I turned it on in Norwich then turned it off then turned it back on in London fields would that result in the big fucking straight line?

[ame]http://connect.garmin.com/activity/99757669[/ame]

We aim to please. (I had to look it up recently which is why it is stuck in my head).

you didn't reset it at the start of your journey, it logged the beginning of a journey up in Norwich or wherever, and then continued it when you turned your unit on in London

Didn't go home and sleep after the ride, working on the basis that it's wiped me out when I did that before. Didn't get to bed until after midnight, in fact. Haven't died of exhaustion yet.

gah beaten by your ninja. yes. other possible option, if there was no time delay, would be that you pressed 'start' before the unit had found your current location and was working on last known.

you didn't reset it at the start of your journey, it logged the beginning of a journey up in Norwich or wherever, and then continued it when you turned your unit on in London

Ah shit. How do I do that then?

press and hold 'lap' for three seconds (it'll give you a countdown). voila, previous journey saved to memory, a new one ready to be started :)
(took me a week of ownership to realise that)

Ah great.

I admit I haven't even owned it a week yet!

we picked up the lost sumo and later the lost cyclotron3k.

I wasn't lost, I was doing laps.