Reply To: Sunday ride 23rd March

[Sweaty Eds]

Well, what an eventful day for some.

At the more sedate end of the peloton it was quite a different story. My Sweaty self and Kim missed the bunch sprint to Princes Gate but we passed the time on our own musing about when Valleyman would join us at the rear having not yet learnt his lesson about starting like Eddy Merckx and finishing like Eddie Waring. The hill out of Whitland was our answer.

We passed most of our clubmates in Tavernspite as they were looking for riders they’d lost already. A sign of things to come as it turns out.

Nothing of note happened for a few miles, nothing that is if you ignore the moment when a well-known Narberth GP decided to play chicken with the approaching traffic. In Whitland I betrayed my Sweaty Short Course/FlatEarth urgings and headed out towards the gentle undulations of the Blaenwaun road.

It was on the first of these gentle undulations that Ian and I compared notes on our winter training schedules. At the end of last Summer, Valleyman and I paid for some sessions from a local coach and were informed that a very important, and often overlooked, aspect of hard training is recovery. To this end we have been recovering almost every day since last September, these essential recovery sessions have only been broken once a fortnight by a social turbo session and some reasonably hard stair climbing once every evening on the way to bed. I congratulated him on his muscle mass and he me on my teak stomach.

Our ride continued more or less in slow motion. Rory left us to go home, caught us back up then left us again to go house hunting. His last words to us was that he was looking to find a route back to Tavernspite that avoided the hills. I’m hoping Vicki Broom Wagon rescued him as well.

Every hill was an adventure in our mini-peloton that formed after the split. Going down Adam, Andrew and myself had a certain gravitational advantage over the lightweights, Valleyman, Kim and Tom. Going up, however was a different story with me joining the recovering Valleyman at the rear whilst everyone else stormed skywards.

There were six in our group, and we stayed together until a couple of miles from home. At this point I think Adam thought that Kim, Ian and I must’ve stopped for lunch and Andrew Ajax and Tom took a detour to get their 50 in.

I really enjoyed the ride, great company, great route made all the more exciting by not being able to access it online. Thanks everyone.

Most asked question on the day; is this on the Daffodil Route?