Iwein says

I only heard about this 100 mile tour of the Cotswolds the Thursday before the event. A few other forum members from Another Cycling Forum were doing at as well, amongst which was LambO. He turned out to live only down the road from me, so we shared a lift.

I was determined not to make the same mistake as last week. So I prepared properly this time. I made some pasta the night before to have both before and after the event, I made sure I had assorted snacks in my back pockets: fruesli bars, oatcakes, homemade bananacake, a sandwich with ham and salted cashew nuts.

We set off from Bath at 6:30am. When we arrived and assembled our bikes a buckle had miraculously appeared in my front wheel. It wasn’t there when i cycled to LambO’s house less than 2 hours before and the wheel was on top of everything else in the car. A miracle? Some improvised wheel truing was in order. I must have had some inkling this was going to happen as I had packed my spoke key in my saddle bag. Lucky or what.

We met Dave, Adam and Nick at the start who had come up from Bristol. Dave had also done the Dragon Ride the week before, but had finished way ahead of me.

We started off just before 9am, probably one of the last people to start. All went rather well. I restrained myself to not go off to quickly, helped enormously by not having had coffee that morning. I did have to stop after half a mile after I noticed that my saddle was pointing at eleven o’clock rather than twelve and decided I couldn’t live with that for another 99 miles, and so had to catch the rest of our little bunch up.
A couple of miles later the zip on my saddle bag split open and scattered some of the contents of my saddle bag over the road. ‘Catch us up?’ Adam called. Not again, I thought. Not much choice though.

There was another event going on following roughly the same route, largely recreational cyclists and families. Normally I make a point of ‘helloing’ every rider I see, but this was a bit too much. Great to see so many people out cycling though.

Around this time LambO noticed that Nick had dropped off the back. Dave and Adam seemed to think this was not a problem so we carried on.

The first feed station appeared after 25 miles, and boy was it better than last week. A large varieties of bars, and luvverly flapjack. Got our card stamped, bottles filled, quick dash behind the bushes and on our way again.

We missed one of the signs for the first time after the first checkpoint. The arrows were made out of white plastic, with red dots. They measured maybe 20 by 3 inches. NOT conspicuous at all. Very easy to miss. Organisers, it was a fine event. A lovely route. Very well feed stationed, but the signs were crap. We would miss signs twice after this, adding about 7 miles on the 100. Not what you want. Not that big a problem either though.

Each time we were about to miss a sign post would be preceded by us overtaking a group of riders from Hemel Hempstead. It was almost an omen. Everytime we missed a sign they would overtake us again. We overtook them 4 times in total during the ride.

At the last feed station Dave and Adam left slightly before LambO and myself. We took it relatively easy for the last 25 miles (probably not entirely voluntarily it has to be said). About 10 miles from the end it was the Hemel Hempstead boys’ turn to overtake us. The big Hemel Hoover. I spotted the colours behind me and shouted to LambO ‘The Hemel boys are here’. Luckily the Hemel boy behind me found this amusing.

The last 10 miles were a bit of a blur. I found my second wind, and took the front for a bit. Between LambO and myself we managed to do just that, at well above 20mph, for most of the last bit, into a small headwind. I was baffled that I had this kind of energy left.

The guy with the tattoo on his left leg from Hemel Hempstead did a few explosions at the front, and after 8 miles, with 2 to go both me and lambO dropped off. Now we were really spent. The 1 mile to go sign was very welcome indeed. It’s quite clear that the Hemel boys are a bunch of excellent cyclists, are used to cycling together and had some energy left when we hadn’t.

A cup of tea and a piece of cake later we concluded that it had indeed been a pleasant tour. It had all gone a lot better than last week. I’d only started feeling knackered at a point where one would expect it.

We clocked 107 miles in total. Average speed of 16.3 mph. Took us just over 7 hours including stops, 6 and a half hours riding time.

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