My Fifth Week as a Budding Author

Last week’s epic waste of five minutes of your life ended with this cliffhanger;

“Next week, a trip to Coventry, lots and lots of riding, a flirtation with the Tour de France, a desperate plea for a cycling model and a bit more discipline on the writing front” 

...and so I feel it is only fair to explain such an enigmatic yet promising sentence. First, the trip to Coventry. I’m sure that even the most committed non-cyclist will realise that Coventry is not exactly the heart of pulchritudinous (yes! yes! yes!) British bike ridin g. However, it is home to the Coventry History Centre where I spent a fascinating day researching further details of my cycling hero Tommy Godwin.

Tommy holds the record for the largest number of miles cycled in any single year, 75063 of them to be exact. That's almost three times round the world, including oceans, an average of over 200 miles every single day for 365 days of the year. Tommy carried this out in 1939 and his bike only had four gears and weighed about the same as my entire collection of steeds. I’ve now managed to piece together his entire year and will be winding this into the book I’m writing. 

Tommy’s achievement is stored firmly in my mind locked behind a safety release called “For Emergencies Only”. I use this section of memory for the moments on the bike when things become really desperate, in my case, usually 60 miles into a ride when I’ve been a silly boy and ridden beyond my capabilities. At these moments I’m usually chewing away at my handlebars and feeling desperately sorry for myself. I tend to slide down that self pitying slope imagining that nobody in the world can have suffered to the extent that I am at this present time. Then I smash the glass protector and pull the lever of the emergency safety release and Tommy’s ride comes flooding out.

I realise that he must have crossed this barrier daily for an entire year, I realise that I am suffering at a point where he had another 140 miles to go, I realise that I’ve got an armory of modern cycling weaponry and nutritional supplements at my disposal and all he had was a heavy steel bike, bread, cheese and milk. These simple facts keep the mobile phone in my pocket and remove the temptation to call Helen and feign some obscure and un-fixable mechanical problem with the bike. I can almost hear Tommy (or “The Whip” as his club mates called him) berating me to “Cyclist the F**k up” and get on with it.

And on Wednesday I reached for this lever.

I’d planned a route through Kent, a fantastic loop steeped in history and parts of which were used in the 1994 Tour de France on one of it’s fleeting trips to England. The major flaw in my planning was the cursory glance I made at the height profile. This glance should have been a long hard stare as I would have then realised that the route snaked over 7500 feet worth of climbing, or one quarter of the way up Mount Everest to give it some context. I must have failed to salute a magpie or something as my luck took a further dive the day of the ride. The wind decided to swing round and blow from the southwest knowing full well that the last 30 miles of the ride were heading in a southwesterly direction. 

Suffice to say I found the ride slightly challenging. No, scrub that, let’s tell it how it was, I completely and utterly died on my arse. I’m not really used to riding long distances over shed loads of hills this early in the year. Equally, if I am going to do a hard ride I make sure that the wind assists me on the return leg when I’m at my most shagged out. The height profile for the ride is shown below, look at the last few miles. There you can see the ultimate failure in my planning as it is a climb that goes on for a mile..and gets steeper at the end.

There was one brief comedy moment during this epic evidenced by the photo below. I encountered four riders proceeding at a pace that could only be described as “chatting” and taking up the entire road. I fumbled for my camera and managed to get a sneaky picture but it does not do them justice as they decided to change formation as I took it. Trust me they were four abreast.

I gave my usual merry shout of warning which they ignored completely. Luckily I was able to squeeze through on the right and make progress. Guess what? four women, every single one of them talking at the same time. Now I am fully aware that I have immediately alienated the very few women that have stumbled across these witterings. But can I please implore them to “have a word” (if they can get one in edgeways) as this little exhibition took the stereotype of “women drivers” and planted it firmly on the bike.

The rest of the week has been spent writing and I’m pleased to announce that I think I’ve found key to the art of being productive. Quite simply you have to sit down and do some work. This was quite a revelation to me when I found that my word count goes up if I actually do some typing. Often in life it is the simple most obvious solutions that provide the Eureka moment. And so I’m striding on towards thirteen thousands words worth of content, which is great progress and will be rewarded with the afternoon off today to go away with Helen and the kids in the van. As usual, this has coincided with severe weather warnings.

Anyone who has managed to read this far will have spotted that I’ve not covered the “cycling model”. I’m going to remain slightly enigmatic about that one for the moment, but will tentatively ask that if you look good in lycra, own a bike with two wheels and want to be featured within the pages of a book that will revolutionise cycling (or was that revolt cyclists?) then let me know.

Next week it’s a date with some cheese, a tussle with some spreadsheets, a major bike fettle and a bucket full of training,

Dave

4th February 2011

WEEK SIX >>>>>