Reply To: Sunday ride, 7th April

[Sweaty Eds]

We met at 9 in a chilly and windswept Bloomfield car park, Huw, Pete, Beloved Chairman Rees, Dan, Flapjack, Matt G and my Sweaty self. At 9.02 Huw received a text from 2/3 of the Valley Road Crew pleading illness. At 9.05 the remaining member arrived. I suppose we should be grateful that they put their clocks forward last week in Valley Road, shame it wasn’t the full hour.

Anyway, this week Huw decided to spice up the club ride by assigning us all characters to play, similar to a Murder Mystery weekend crossed with a game of charades, and then everyone try to guess who everyone else had come as. Pete had come hopelessly underdressed for the almost freezing conditions, so it was obvious straight away that he had come as Gary. Huw tried to lead us up the garden path by arriving on a sleek and shiny black number, a Stealth Bomber, I thought. It was only when he went into his routine of ‘pretending’ to have lost the route, patting all his pockets and frantically skimming through his many Garmin menus, that I realised he had come as Mr Bean. We set off, briskly heading towards Ants waiting in either Clunderwen or Majorca (hard to tell from his forum posts). As we spied Ants in the distance, waiting with a similar hulking figure, Our Beloved Chairman revealed himself by pretending that Ants was waiting with wife, Jane. The exotic kit meant that the shadowing figure had to be Andrew ‘Ajax’ Wright and our chairman was Mr Magoo.

This mistaken identity raised a couple of points. Firstly, it is more believable that a man who cannot distinguish between slender Jane Rees and an unshaven hulking graphic designer could genuinely confuse equine and bovine. Secondly, the closeness and body language of the couple waiting in Clunderwen must mean that they had come as Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon from the 1968 smash comedy hit ‘The Odd Couple’.

When we approached the Crymych city limits we were averaging almost 15mph for the ride, all of us doing a very passable impression of a cycling club.

On the descent into Cardigan, Jonathon gave himself away. It’s not very often that you see someone fly down a hill at that speed, even less often that you realise that they are steering with their chin. Huw had obviously dealt him the Mad Doig Murdoch from the A Team card.

We stopped a couple of times in Cardigan due to Matt’s mechanicals, it was here that Dan went into character. He asked each of us in turn about our bikes, listened while we listed the pro’s and con’s, before scoffing and offering to sell us the bike we really should buy at a vastly inflated price. Easy one that.

Jon must’ve taken two cards because on the hill out of St. Dogmaels he toppled into a ditch, Mr Bump.

Ant’s mate, Mark had joined us in Crymych, he didn’t say much but it was only when he stopped in Llechryd and tied a fainting femme fatale to the railway tracks that I realised he’d come as a silent movie villain.

It was around this time that Matt really got into his role by having a second puncture. I was still unsure about his character until he announced that he’d actually burst his third inner tube before he had put the wheel back on his bike. He’d obviously come as Valleyman.

Flapjack was proving very difficult to guess as he remorselessly set the pace at the front. It was when we split into two groups with Mr Magoo, Mad Doig and myself joining Flapjack on a trip over the Bwlch and he suggested a three mile hilly addition to the route that I realised he’d come as Beelzebuub.

At New Inn we split again and I cycled home with Beloved Chairman Rees, no food and no water. It was after I’d struggled up Gelli and was looking at the hill at Pont Shan that I realised who I was. Totally Shagged.

Thanks everyone, great day.