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£49.95 each

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Glorious Chairman. Please include me in your booking for dinner.

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Hi Julie

Everyone is welcome. Meet at Bloomfield top car park. We leave at 6.

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Mine still available, Mark.

Call me 07747793644

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It’s gorgeous, Tim.

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On a glorious Spring morning seven of us, Patrick, Dan, Gary, Pete, Martin Mac, my Sweaty self and Our Beloved Chairman met at Bloomfield. Martin betrayed his novice clubman status almost immediately by making let’s get moving noises at 9am. Beloved Chairman explained about the Valley Road Crew and we set off bang on time at 5 past the hour.

It was great to see Gary back in the fold. Obviously, he was in the skimpiest of shorts and gloveless. An interesting new twist was his lack of any sort of refreshment, not even water. He’s so Zen.

As usual, Patrick showed us a clean pair of heels on every hill. Martin chased him up past The Grove and into Jeffreston but had wised up before the rise to the Ridgeway and watched from afar with the rest of us.

Pete, who has recently started dressing like a pirate, rugged yet lustrous beard, bandana, cutlass and eyepatch, noticed that Dan wasn’t on his usual steed. Broken bottom bracket, explained our legal guardian, that’ll be all that cadence, replied Capt Pete. I hope this bike coped better with his whizzing legs because Dan left us after Pembroke heading for Angle. At least that’s what he told us. You don’t think he has got a taste for adventure after his brush with the law on the new bypass and he was actually aiming to set a subversive KOM on the tank range at Castlemartin?

Dr Mac and Our Beloved Chairman spent a good deal of the ride deep in conversation. Obviously, they were a fair way ahead of me most of the time but I did hear little snippets, mainly from Martin.

Haemocrit….VO2 max……..red blood cells……..maximum oxygen capacity……muscle bulk v endurance

I thought that our Beloved Chairman, the crafty fellow, was getting some free expert medical advice ahead of his main training load before the Summer. This illusion was shattered when I heard him ask who Martin thought he’d get the best chops from, Merckx or Wiggins.

I really enjoyed the ride today, great company, perfect weather and a fantastic route. I must confess that I did suggest one or two improvements to Huw’s posted ride, took out a hill or two, put in a potential pint stop that sort of thing. I know it’s wrong and I promise to chant my punishment mantra 100 times before bed…

I am not Mat G, I am a very naughty boy.

Thanks everyone, great ride.

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I also have an entry to the Carten that I am unable to use. I am not starting a new job, my step-mother is 70. I have explained to her that it is inconvenient but she refuses to change her birthday.

Please post here if you’re interested in having the place. I paid £40 for the entry.

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Ok mate. Give me a ring on 07747793644. I’ll need to enter your details on the website.

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Sorry, I can’t make that weekend

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Frank Admission. In Response, Everyone Needs Open Unambiguous Glorious Honesty.

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Things we have learnt this week.

1. Valleyman’s winter training schedule of rest and red wine is finally beginning to pay off.

It’s easy to follow the herd and engage in the grunt and grind of Tuesday Turbo and I’m sure we have all benefited, to a greater or lesser extent, from monitoring our heart rate, increasing our cadence and weighing our poos. But it takes a brave man, a visionary of Obree-esque proportions, to turn his back on modern scientific training methods and plough the lone furrow of radical volte-face extremism with regard to fitness as Ian has done.

I’m sure I do not speak alone when I offer him my congratulations on his KOM, the first of many I would suppose. I look forward to his assault on the Strava Classics, Tanners Lane, Narberth Hill and the Valley Road TT.

One thing bothers me though, the name Valleyman reflects his old ways, the late arriving, latern rouge carrying, work from homing, veggie. I think he needs a new name, one that better identifies him as the man with the hammer, a ruthless assassin intent only on inflicting pain whatever the cost. I propose he now be known as ‘Badass’.

2. Matt G is using the forum to secretly communicate with the Russians.

Matt G.’s random posts have long confused me. At various times I have tried to explain them to myself by assuming he types them in the dark. If we suppose that he actually has no windows or artificial light in his house it would also explain the way he dresses. But his wife and daughter dress quite normally so that can’t be it. Another thought was that he has extremely chubby fingers and cannot quite work the keyboard. Counting against this theory is the fact that he is tall and slim and his fingers are elegant frankfurters compared to my stubby chipolatas. Ultimately, it was Jonny Mad Doig who explained the seemingly incoherent offerings to me.

JMD pointed out that if you looked at Matt’s last few posts and took the first letter from each word of the Pub Quiz entry and then add the same from the Roberson weather and then the big noises bullies entries you end up with ‘INVADE CRIMEA’. Spooky!

Looking further back his Alpine Adventure write up gives you ‘ROGER ENJOYS THE SHAME OF WALKING’ and his many posts regarding The Worzels can be interpreted as ‘WHERE IS THE CLUB KIT?’.

You can’t really argue with the message, well maybe the bit about invading Crimea, but just what are we going to do about Roger’s insistence on the walk of shame in full club kit whenever he’s not leading? Maybe Badass could guide us.

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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?

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I’m going but not whole loop.

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Possibly

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Just a reminder about the club social tomorrow, 6 in the Ivy. All welcome.

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