-
It was just one day
There was a girl I never met. She rode bikes and lived in the same town as me, but it was before I returned to cycling. By the time I became friends with her friends she had moved away. We had the occasional interaction online but we didn’t really know each other. People that knew us…
-
The Man of Kent 300
Start, kilometre 0 – Tonbridge, Saturday 20:30 Proof of passage: Sainsbury till receipt, 2 litre bottle of Evian Preparations for this overnight perm haven’t exactly been perfect. Last night George and I went to watch some crit racing in Hove Park and necked a couple of beers. That would have been fine but we then…
-
The Sussex Spring Classic
A couple of years ago I planned a ride for the Sunday of Paris-Roubaix incorporating some inappropriate sections for road bikes on skinny tyres. There are no cobbles or secteurs of pave in Sussex (except maybe a few metres here and there) but there are a lot of bridleways, gravel paths, farm tracks and tiny…
-
Vuelta de Los Picos // Dia 6 // Oviedo to Asturias Airport
The alarms go off at 7am. Today should be a relatively easy day but we’re flying home tonight so to avoid any panic later in the day we’ve decided to get on the road early. There is going to be some faff as we need to ride the wrong way initially, in order to get…
-
Vuelta de Los Picos // Dia 5 // Riaño to Oviedo
We wake up to a very different view out of the window to yesterday. Cloud hides the tips of the mountains all around us, just the lower slopes sliding into the lake are visible, their reflections bouncing back at them from the silver mirror like surface. The world is still and quiet. It’s a shame…
-
Vuelta de Los Picos // Dia 4 // Riaño to Cain de Valdeón to Riaño
We wake up to sunlight streaming through the apartment windows. It is an absolutely glorious morning, but on opening a window we realise it is really very cold. Then we remember that we’re up above 1000 metres. We put on all of the layers to pop out to get coffee back at the hotel bar,…
-
Vuelta de Los Picos // Dia 3 // Potes to Riaño
The original plan for today was to ride up to Fuente De in the morning before returning to Potes for the ride to Riaño. However the last couple of days have been quite hard and the riding time is longer than expected, and I know there is a lot of climbing yet to come this…
-
Vuelta de Los Picos // Dia 2 // Cangas de Onis to Potes
Whilst I breakfast on bread, ham and cheese and watch the weather forecast on Spanish telly, George is fiddling with allen keys and his crankset. The day before leaving the UK, whilst suffering with a fever and tiredness, he replaced the inner ring and accidentally bolted it on the wrong way round. He spent the whole…
-
Vuelta de Los Picos // Dia 1 // Asturias airport to Cangas de Onis
As our flight descends over the Atlantic Ocean towards the Spanish coast our quarry is clearly visible from the window, the Picos de Europa piercing distant cloud. Three limestone massifs covering the corners of Asturias, Cantabria and Castilla y León, the Picos are the highest point of the Cordillera Cantábrica, the mountain range that runs…
-
Bespoked 2016 weekender
Since first visiting the Bespoked Handmade Bicycle Show in Bristol a few years back the thought of riding to (and maybe from) the show has been floating around my head. I finally got around to it this year. One reason was that my friend Jo did a framebuilding course (that link is part one, the…
-
Subscribe
Subscribed
Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
the man from icon 