audax
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Meridian Hills [AAA Brevet des Grimpeurs du Sud 200km audax perm]
Meeting friends on a cold dark petrol station forecourt. Sunrise viewed from up the hill by the golf course, a huge orange disc seemingly rising from the silver sea. Down on the weald frozen puddles and glistening hedgerow. Icy bends in the hollows, cornering by trying not to steer, a foot unclipped and leg held…
![Meridian Hills [AAA Brevet des Grimpeurs du Sud 200km audax perm]](https://themanfromicon.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/img_20161227_202410_894.jpg?w=1024)
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Down to Downs [AAA Brevet des Grimpeurs du Sud audax perm]
We start the climb up to Black Hill in darkness, up through Five Hundred Akre Wood, a tunnel of trees lit by the many lumens of our front lights. With few leaves on the trees the ridge of the Ashdown Forest can be seen shadowed ominously against the last remnants of twilight. It’s a long…
![Down to Downs [AAA Brevet des Grimpeurs du Sud audax perm]](https://themanfromicon.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/wp-1480428867785.jpg?w=1024)
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Here to There to Here
“Spoke to Andrew at TiC who wants to know when we’re going up to say hello?” Within a few minutes we’ve planned to ride to Cambridge and back in a weekend. Two hundred and twenty odd kilometres each way. The idea to enter the 2017 Transcontinental race as a team means it doesn’t take much…
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Cogidubnus Cheese and Cake Double Century
“Please take a banana. I hate them.” I chase wheels through the southwest fringes of London, from Richmond station over the Thames, out through Bushy Park and over the Thames again by Hampton Court Palace and then through leafy suburbia. I know that I am riding a bit harder than I want to be and…
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Scuffing the edges
Riding on the edge. Not the ragged edge but the blurred edge of what I think is possible. Travelling along ancient ways, drove roads and holloways. Ignoring the red and yellow lines on the map, following the narrow white lines left behind, the back roads and short cuts. Forgoing busy thoroughfares as if using a…
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Kingdom of the East Saxons
a tour of Essex with forays over the border into Hertfordshire, Cambridgeshire, and Suffolk biplanes over rolling Cambridgeshire fields, skylark song the aural equivalent to the shapes of the wind in the crops outrunning thundering clouds along the northern edge of Essex an ancient Ford Escort smelling of spliffs and knackered gaskets rainbow fringed clouds…
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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…
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The Shark [Brevet des Grimpeurs du Sud 2016 ride #2]
Waiting in an underground car park early in the morning as rain falls outside. So starts my first 200km audax of the year, the second ride of this year’s Grimpeurs du Sud campaign (this ride has over 3000m of climbing). Technically the fourth, but I didn’t make the start of the first, or finish the…
![The Shark [Brevet des Grimpeurs du Sud 2016 ride #2]](https://themanfromicon.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/shark-0383.jpg?w=1024)
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Kent Invicta Grimpeur [Brevet des Grimpeurs du Sud 2016 ride #1]
A quiet, pretty corner of Kent, lanes tucked away between interlocking major roads. Two laps of the same circuit, first clockwise, then anti-clockwise. A tight loop, repeating place names on signposts, never reached and pointed in different directions. Identical roads, the same hills, but dissimilar when approached from the opposite direction. Those fast sweeping drops…
![Kent Invicta Grimpeur [Brevet des Grimpeurs du Sud 2016 ride #1]](https://themanfromicon.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/tweaked-0027.jpg?w=1024)
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Mid Sussex Hilly [Brevet des Grimpeur du Sud ride #7]
Sat in a village hall, with a slices of cake and cups of tea in mismatching china, whilst they tidy up around us, getting ready for the whist drive in later that evening.
![Mid Sussex Hilly [Brevet des Grimpeur du Sud ride #7]](https://themanfromicon.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/msh11.jpg?w=1024)
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