I planned to go on a bit of a coker ride today. I’d worked out a route and everything. Quite a long route, about 70-80 miles I think.
Now I have this rule, which is that if I say I’m going on a ride, unless I’m dead or something close, I go out riding.
The only problem was that we had a severe weather warning last night, warning of gales across the country, torrential rain etc. etc.
So of course I ignored this and went out for a pootle from Nottingham to Melton Mowbray, Rutland and Leicester (intending originally to head right out to Rutland Water and to ride back home from Leicester.
It was amazing, I’ve only seen wind that hard once before and that was in the middle of the sea. Seing that kind of wind on land was incredible, it was hard to walk at times.
Things I’ve discovered today:-
80 miles is a lot to do in a winters day when the wind is gusting at 38mph. I had to cut it short at 50 miles and catch a train after 6 hours solid riding.
When you’re riding along in horizontal hail and insane winds, it’s jolly scary to come across a shoot in progress and be suddenly surrounded by gunshot noises.
It’s jolly hard to mount a coker facing into a gale.
If you fall off the back of a coker whilst riding with the gale, and are very lucky, you get blown back on before you hit the ground.
Planning a cunning route that does 25 miles heading west is fine, although possibly less cunning when there’s a gale coming from the west.
Having to pedal hard just to get down hills isn’t fair.
Really big winds are great fun when they’re behind you.
Riding in a sidewind really knackers your upper body.
If you turn your body right in a sidewind you can sometimes ‘sail’ the uni and get help with riding forwards.
If your girlfriend is away, start your ride super early, so that when she phones up to say “you’re not going out in this are you?” it’s already a done deal.
You can ride an awful long way on a packet of 8 Chocalate Honeycomb Energy Matrices(*).
Joe
(*)Those are crunchy bars to you. This message is brought to you in association with Cadburys.
Wow, sounds like you had a tiime of your life. You should turn this story into a book, called “80 miles cut short” the story of a man on a wheel. I would buy it. Although it sounded a bit frustraing the ridesounded a bit fun… Who doesn’t like being surrounded with gunshot noises in the middle of a storm?
Brilliant Joe, it makes my ride yesterday sound like a walk in the park. I did about 10 miles along the thames, and thought I’d be cunning by riding west to east (with the wind). Needless to say it didn’t help much and I spent most of the ride battling a headwind or cross wind. The 10 minutes I was riding with a tailwind was blissful though.
Aside from the wind it was a glorious day, blue sky, sunshine, and not too cold.
I’m quite worried now. I’m going to end up following two weeks of being chained to my desk (exams/revision) with going for a ride with someone who cut a ride ‘short’ to 50 miles…
I really did get blown back on, the unicycle hit a little pothole and fell in front of me, I fell off to the back and just as I was falling off, I get blown back on.
As Paul pointed out, riding in a sidewind is hard as well as a headwind, so you’re only gaining 25% of the time when it’s windy assuming you ride a circular route, so wind karma doesn’t really work on a unicycle.
It was one hell of a ride, pretty fun. I’m going to do it again when it’s less windy and try and get to Rutland Water and then back round to Nottingham again.
I had to ride 15 miles on my way to work this morning as I had an errand to do up in the north of Nottingham, that was a bit of a shock.
John - 50 miles isn’t much in a whole day on a coker with silly cranks. You should just think of the revision weeks as ‘recovery weeks’ in your training schedule towards riding a hundred miler* in the summer when the days are long.
Joe
which obviously you’ll decide you really want to do.
What an excellent ride. And I do believe you when you said you got blown back on. It reminds me of a ride I did on a coker on Long Beach Island, New York last year. It was extremly windy on the island but I guarantee your ride was a lot more eventfull than mine.
Good effort Mr. Marshall.
I shudder to think what impact this ‘short’ 50 mile ride will have on your hockey skills tomorrow night. I suspect you’ll be whizzing around all over the place as normal (assuming we don’t get the frost we got last week and that the wind has died down).
I think if I’d had the scary 90mph winds, I might just have stayed at home!
I find I go on longer rides if I plan them using a road atlas rather than an OS map, because everything looks so much closer on the map then and I only ever bother measuring distance when I get back. I accidentally rode 60 miles once when I was only intending about 30 because I forgot about the larger scale map I was using. You can tell I’m a professional map person*.
I’m trying to do 80 mile rides at the moment as part of a little bit of training for a particularly long ride I’m thinking of doing later in the year. I don’t want 140 miles over two days to kill me.
I’m amazed at the difference the 110 cranks make, I’m not incredibly faster over a distance, but the amount of effort involved is so much less.
riding 50 miles… in hail… and wind… are you nuts? That’s dedication and then some.
The wind I can relate to, trust me, you don’t know wind until you’ve experienced a Southern Alberta chinook. The hail though… hail is bad enough without wind.
Sounds, errr both fun and exhausting. Well i braved with snow and wind today. Although it was only about a mile to a play audition. I unied instead of walking cause i was running late. I didnt want to cause of all the ice, and now im wishing i didnt cause on the way home it was pitch black and i hit a patch of wet ice. Needless to say i dont think i’ll be riding for a couple of weeks. Not quite sure what i did to my ankle. Not swelling or turning blue, but the bones stick out a bit furthur now and i can feel it in the bottom of my shin. weeeeeeee pain I have to say i admire your perserverance!
I have to say i admire your perserverance!