Ride Across Britain 2010

A text message from Robert D. arrived; it changed everything. Did I want to be a driver for the Deloitte 'Ride Across Britain'? "Sounds interesting" thought I, but being an older and wiser soul than I once was, I wasn't about to plunge into anything daft. Over the next few hours however, I talked myself into it, my powers of reasoning compromised by my sense of adventure.

My role would be to drive the 'Broom Wagon', traditionally the last vehicle following a race, its purpose to sweep up the riders who cannot continue. I had visions of a crowd of us, maybe 25 or so, pedalling staunchly across Scotland, England and Wales while 'yours truly' appeared from time to time with a flask of soup, having read another chapter of War and Peace in a lay-by somewhere. I got a bit of a rude awakening, on that score at least, when I learned that over 600 people were participating in the event. Suddenly I realised that War and Peace would be too long for the available free time.

In fact, the broom wagon consisted of two vehicles. One was a Transit van in which I would be sharing the driving with Joe, a young man who is normally to be found working for the people who publish your Cycling Weekly. The other vehicle was a minibus, driven by Jeremy, Shane or Andy, members of Chippenham Wheelers all.

On the journey from Andy's house to John O'Groats (via Hamilton in southern Scotland) the minibus also carried a group of cyclists known as Andy's Angels. These were the chaperones, experienced riders who would accompany the riders in the Ride Across Britain, many of whom had little idea what they were actually doing! The chaperone group consisted of Paul, Gordon, Rob D, Nick, Mike, Richard, Shane, Jeremy and Andy from the Chippenham Wheelers and a group from the London area called Chippo, Tony and Rob W. The bikes and baggage travelled with us in the van.

For most of the trip we would be camping, and I suppose that I hadn't given much thought as to what the camp-sites would be like. I knew it would be colder that far north and had packed two sleeping bags which I used one inside the other. My jaw dropped as we entered John O'Groats and I took in the reality of a camp-site for over 700 people flung down in one of the wildest settlements in Britain. The circus had certainly come to town, that's for sure. There were some very large tents indeed, including a huge marquee for the kitchen and dining area, a giant treble wigwam containing TVs and a bar, a medical and massage tent, a drying-room tent, an office, a baggage tent, and the Halfords workshop. Of course there were the usual toilets and showers. A whole secure area had been set aside for the racking of 600 bicycles - well over a million pounds worth! Oh yes, and then there were the tents - rows and rows of green two-man tents and more rows of blue tents, bigger to hold four people. The tents were of the self erecting sort. Putting up all these tents would otherwise have been a monster task. It probably was anyway!
The daylight lasts all night in those northern latitudes and, having arrived in good time anyway, we set about exploring the metropolis which is John O'Groats. Five minutes later we had done with exploring, so we met in the cafe, the famous John O'Groats hotel being derelict and ringed with safety fencing. The weather was turning wet and the wind was rising, the nearby Orkney Islands disappearing and reappearing numerous times in the squally mist. (We told Joe the islands were Norway. He seemed happy with that.)
During the night the wind continued to rise and the temperature dropped. The scene in the entertainments tent was reminiscent of a disaster refugee camp with bodies huddled in blankets everywhere you looked. I went to bed, not in one of the tents, but in the van. Even in the van it was perishingly cold. The only things I took off were my shoes. The wind made the van rock; we moved it as close as possible to the minibus so that the two vehicles would shelter each other. During the night I was kept awake by a lot of swearing and shouting. At first I thought it was some brave souls partying at the edge of the earth. Later I realised that the Halfords workshop team had spent the night hanging on to their workshop tent to stop it lifting off and flying all the way to 'Norway'.

Morning came early to the Ride Across Britain. Reveillez was sounded on the public address system, a different rock song each day. Coming at about 5.30am, I failed to see anything amusing in it. However I had one personal ambition, to run at John O'Groats and I set off along the beach and out to Duncansby Head lighthouse. Along the way I passed primroses flowering. In southern England summer was in full spate. In northern Scotland it was still early spring.
On my return to the camp a journalist stopped me and asked if I was really jogging before a 1000 mile bike ride. I was tempted to bask in some sort of false glory but I admitted instead that I was just the driver and he lost interest in me in an instant.

Each day of the ride had its own character but essentially they followed a pattern dictated by the role Joe and I were playing.
The day would start with that early morning call which blared out briefly and without regard to the poor souls who lived nearby. I slept through it most mornings. The van was light tight, sound tight and pretty nearly air-tight. Somehow we survived until each morning. Eventually my bladder would insist that I get up and wander across to the toilets. On the days when I was not frozen to the marrow I would have a shower. In the mornings the crew had priority in the showers, whereas the riders had priority in the evenings. The cleaners were eagerly dismantling the showers and the toilet blocks from an early hour so once the riders had left, the showers were unavailable. Same story to some extent with the food and the toilets. Luckily we were in a good position to divert from the route and use the toilets in such places as Tescos in Thurso. (A strange Tescos where I bought a bar of chocolate and a bottle of whisky. I told the lady that it was my breakfast. She showed no surprise.)
The food was generous, though to be honest a bit austere at times. Apparently it had been devised by some nutritionist to give enough calories to get through the day. Well I have news for him - I didn't think there were enough calories to get through the day even sitting behind the driving wheel, though to be fair I have been occasionally accused of gluttony. Many times I heard mutterings from the ranks, on one occasion a chaperone hitched a lift to an Indian restaurant, and twice Joe and I had fish and chips.

Departure times were variable, the chaperones left a long time after the main field, confident that they would soon catch the slower riders who they would accompany. We would see them off and then return to the food tent to get in the way of the dismantling of the catering facility and generally fill ourselves up with more tea and toast. (Yes; I suppose the gluttony thing may be founded in truth.)
Then we would tidy up the van and minibus and try, often in vain, to get off the camp site, the exit of which would probably be obstructed by the slow progress of a huge articulated lorry or a convoy of toilet blocks on trailers.

We would follow the route taken by the cyclists, each junction very well marked by arrows on large cards. Never did we encounter any ambiguity; you couldn't get lost. Behind us was the van containing two people whose job it was to take down the signs and any other items to do with the ride so that we didn't leave any litter. It was very important to let this van know if we were going 'off-piste' as he could get in front of us and we would be unable to follow the route. I made a point of trying to know the route in advance but in urban areas the signs were essential.

After about 15 miles we would catch up the last cyclist on the road. It was very important that we didn't get in front of any cyclist, or that if we did as was inevitable due to road conditions, we tried to count how many we had behind us and make sure that we had seen them all pass before proceeding. I didn't worry about the chaperones being behind me as we were all in touch by mobile phone, and the chaperones were all chosen for their experience and self-reliance.

The first day was very windy and the riders had set off into the face of a veritable gale, but I was surprised that we had our first Broom Wagon duties on only the 23rd mile of the 1050 miles we would eventually cover. By the time we reached the Kyle of Sutherland for the first nights rest we had taken on several more 'customers' and a worrying trend was starting to emerge.
We had begun to pick up riders who were troubled by stomach cramps, sickness and diarrhoea. Over the next few days, the minibus went from Sag Wagon to Plague Wagon and Jeremy had a quite unpleasant time of it dealing with passengers who were very unwell. The van itself smelled and we all became very aware that we were very exposed to the risk of catching it ourselves. There didn't seem to be a Plan B for the case where all the Broom Wagon drivers were too ill to perform. While we all had our days of feeling a bit off colour, luckily it never quite came to that. I knew I was in a privileged position having bicycles for passengers rather than the cyclists themselves. Even the bikes themselves were objects of suspicion though and I have never washed my hands so often!
About a third of the way into each days ride we would encounter the first Pit Stop, a chance for riders to stretch their legs and have a drink and a bite to eat. The feeds were designed by our old friend the nutritionist. After a few days you realise that life with him would probably be a dull affair. Doesn't he ever put the kettle on for a cuppa, or get stuck into a cheeseburger with chips? Most of the cyclists I know do!
As a result of these pit stops I NEVER want to see another tortilla wrap again, or a packet of Jelly Dinosaurs. I started to turn yellow from a surfeit of bananas. Odd to think that bananas were such an exotic luxury just a few years ago. I am sick of the sight of them.

As the days unfolded we left the spartan wilds of Caithness far behind and via camps at Kyle of Sutherland, Fort William and East Kilbride we travelled the length of Scotland, seeing Glen Coe, Ben Nevis, Loch Ness, Urquhart Castle, the Caledonian Canal and Loch Lomond among other Scottish beauties. The weather got better, drier and warmer. This meant more midges, another great new experience.
These were big days too; several days in a row the riders covered 130 miles and the struggle to reach the evening stop repeated itself day after day. The chaperones became familiar with the same faces each day; the broom wagon drivers became familiar with the same backsides each day. Some notable heroes emerged such as Michelle who had vowed to cover the whole distance to raise £5000 for charity, Vaughan who wouldn't admit defeat either, many others who were getting weaker but seemingly more determined as we crossed the border to stay by Ullswater. The beautiful overnight stop in the Lake District was at the cost of a rude awakening as first light saw the last to arrive being first to leave as they tackled the majestic Kirkstone Pass before briefly riding on the east shore of Windermere.

Loch Linnhe
Fort William
East Kilbride
Ullswater
'Manchester'
Ludlow
'Cheddar'
Launceston
Land's End

I came home from the Ride Across Britain with the feeling that I had been lifted out of my normal life and placed down in a different world where nothing of my normal life existed any more. All of the old worries were, at worst, put on hold. This break from the tasks of everyday life was shatteringly exhausting. (And of course I wasn't even pedalling 130 miles per day!) It was by no means a holiday but the maxim that "A change is as good as a rest" couldn't have been truer.

The last day could have been an anti-climax.

It was. It was bound to be.

It was still a day of incredible pleasure as we made our way down to Sennen Cove for a hour or so of just sitting drinking coffee and wandering around the little fishing village with its short yellow beach and its famous lifeboat station, a new Tamar Class boat permanently poised on the sliding ways ready for the next rescue in the wild Atlantic.

The 'Neolithic'

The ‘Neolithic’ Marathon

One of the main fund raising events of the year for the Wiltshire Wildlife Trust is its annual 26 mile event from Avebury to Stonehenge. This is both a sponsored walk and a multi-terrain running race.

In 2003 my partner, Lynne and I walked the full distance. We were the first to start at about 6am and almost the last to finish but we had a very nice day strolling along through a variety of Wiltshire countryside. I was somewhat hampered by the fact that we had just returned from a walking holiday on the Isle of Man and whilst the airline had delivered us safely back to Bristol Airport it had seen fit to send my walking boots to Belfast instead. As all long distance runners will agree, you do need to be happy about your footwear. I found out that day what happens when you are not…

Shortly before the half-way point we began to be caught by the marathon runners; they had started several hours after us. Although I had run in races over the years, there was something about these madmen (and mad-ladies) that touched a nerve. I started to form a plan, which was that I would run in the marathon myself the next year.

The plan was not over-crowded with schemes to get fit in the preceding months. My records show me running the Slaughterford 9mile, (an excellent off-road mud-bath!) the Terminator (likewise, but 11 miles) and the London Half Marathon in the weeks before the big day. I continued to run in the hills around the University at Bath much as I had done for the previous twenty years, rather oblivious to fellow runners doing their weekend long runs to prepare for the London Marathon etc., and as for such technicalities as a ‘taper’… wassat? I also continued to enjoy such training aids as chips, long bicycle rides and freezing days in bird-watching hides. Still, with my malt & hop-derived muscle stimulant (aka beer), how can I go wrong?

On a rather misty May morning I find myself in the oddest bus queue of all time, all of Great Britain’s greatest eccentrics gathered together in one place and catching a bus from Stonehenge at dawn. We are taking advantage of the bus service which ferries runners (and walkers) from various finish points to their chosen point of starting. Obviously all the full marathon runners want to start in Avebury but to find their car waiting for them at Stonehenge. Most of the participants are just like me, but on our bus one runner stands out as somewhat more impressive. Together with his ‘buddy’ he is going to run 26 multi-terrain miles without the benefit of eyesight. I feel rather humble at that point!

The bus arrives in Avebury in very good time for the start and I am able to enjoy the normal good cheer which passes between competitors. To be fair this is the only time that I will see most of them.

Soon we are being hushed to hear the advice of the starter and the words of some dignitary who is probably saying what brave buffoons we all are; I can’t hear. On the other hand he may be telling us that his pit-bull terrier hasn’t been fed since Thursday and if we don’t leave Avebury immediately… Either way, we soon leave town and head out along the narrow road to the west and into a series of paths and tracks.

Upon reaching the main A4 we are hugely amused to discover half of the field approaching us from the opposite direction, so clearly some of the marshalling will be ‘iffy’! The road crossing at Beckhampton is well controlled though and we cross in safety and start along the path which will lead to the Marlborough Downs. This is a considerable climb which is mostly on field-edge tracks of the sort made ‘smooth’ by the passage of several dozen tractors each year. The top of this hill is the highest point in Wiltshire, Tan Hill at 294 metres, a climb of about 140m. from the start-line. Near the top, the ancient earthwork, Wansdyke is crossed, followed by a sharp drop and then a sharp climb to the hill-fort of Rybury Camp. There follows a tricky descent to the lane near All Cannings Cross. Here there are water and toilets, mostly for the benefit of the sponsored walkers.

The next section is a series of lowland tracks leading to the main street of All Cannings, a pretty thatched village where the villagers put on a feast of sausage sandwiches for the walkers. Next time I run I’ll carry money for one; it’ll be worth the time lost.

All Cannings is left behind as one plods through a not-very-nice quagmire caused by the route coinciding with the main commuter route for 200 Friesians. It doesn’t last for long though and there soon follows one of the few tarmac sections. It's nice easy running that feels madly fast after the off-road section. There’s some nice surfaced bridle-path and then a boggy section which includes a couple of stiles. At this point is something I have yet to encounter in any other running race. You cross a 125mph railway-line. “Stop, look and listen.” says the sign… Damned right you do!

More pleasant countryside passes and then suddenly the A342 is encountered. After this is crossed, the route is tarmac surfaced for nearly 2 miles. Don’t think this is some sort of holiday as in the distance can be seen Redhorn Hill, a 75 metre climb and a steep walk for most competitors.

At the top is a crowded area of tents and tea vans where most of the walkers will stop for a bite and a rest. Hard to drag myself past these attractions but apart from filling up my water bottle I don’t pause.

The route turns left here; ahead are army firing ranges. Our path is a shingle path of varying quality and often crowded with walkers and their dogs plus the vehicles of various participants all heading east in a voluntary one-way system. A place called Charlton Clumps is reached, the start of the half-marathon, and for us, the halfway point. There is a water station there and other ‘facilities’, plus the litter of 400 half-marathoners.

At times the road turns nasty and has a few climbs. These climbs seem visible from miles back so by the time you get to them, your resolve has melted away. However for every up there is a down and progress is made after all. One of the most significant climbs of the day comes after Casterley Camp, another Iron Age hill fort, at about 15 miles. The track climbs out of Water Dean Bottom. It’s an excuse for a walk for many. From the top of that climb though, the trend is generally downhill for the rest of the way to Wexland Farm where runners take a sharp right into the heart of the military training zone. The next four miles are, frankly, dull, very slightly uphill and quite featureless. At least along that section you can concentrate properly on the suffering. Eventually the junction with the old coach road appears though, where a left turn is made and a rather forlorn pub, the Bustard Inn, stands surrounded by a permanent caravan site and various military ‘street furniture’. Sadly the pub must be shunned on this occasion though I have been glad of its presence on many a cold winter’s day whilst cycling. Ahead of me I see Lynne, and her friend Debbie, walking in the sponsored walk from Redhorn Hill to Stonehenge. I can’t resist clowning and empty my water bottle over Lynne as I jog past.

The road becomes tarmac for a mile then the fast road to Larkhill is reached and the course takes to the grass track alongside. Soon a marshal sends us across the road and onto a private drive for a mile.

It is along this drive that a pile of very ancient rocks appears on the horizon for the first time and a grin replaces a grimace for the first time. The end is in sight. The last mile is an agony and an ecstasy and the last hundred yards a delirious dream. I achieve something for the first time in my life; I finish a marathon. Sitting down near the finish line I do something else for the first time in my life. I fall asleep in a public place. A marshal wakes me up to give me my finisher’s medal. I find the car and continue my snooze in the boot of the car.

The run has taken its toll. Somewhere at about the 18 mile point I had felt the pressure on my increasingly sore right foot ease off, accompanied by a damp feeling. A vast blister had burst. Both feet had suffered but the marathon has really exposed the weakness in my right foot and by the end I had lost three toe-nails. (To say I had lost them is a bit inaccurate. I knew precisely where they were – somewhere in my sock!)
With the benefit of hindsight I would have run in road shoes. I had run in off-road shoes, well suited to the Marlborough Downs section early in the race but hopelessly lacking in cushioning for the majority of the miles.

I took 4-22-35 to finish and a further 11 months to enter my next race, a doddle round the woods called the Chedworth Roman Trail.

The Neolithic is no place to be if you want to do a ‘personal best time’ and some aspects of it lack the polish of events run by experienced running clubs, but over the years it is improving. It remains one of my most cherished memories. I’m sure I will run in it again one day, hopefully soon.

Life before the Harriers

“There he is!” exclaimed my Dad, pointing to a grey smudge on the screen. It is the earliest recollection I have of the sport of running, the first time I realised that running wasn’t just something you did to get away from the psychotic kids at school. (I did a lot of running at that school.)
Dad’s friend Hugh, a fellow member of his cycling club, doubled as a runner when he wasn’t testing the local ale. He must have been quite good as we were watching him ‘on the telly’ in some event at Crystal Palace. Dad knew it was Hugh because a man called David Coleman had just read his name out, though how he could have told one runner from another I have no idea as it seemed that all the runners wore grey. Also the grass was grey, the sky was grey (It was south London in the sixties; what did you expect?) and the spectators were grey. These were the days of ‘black and white’ television, a misnomer if ever there was one – nothing on the TV was black or white just grey, and very, very fuzzy. A 405 lines TV makes the screen on the back of your mobile phone look like HD, just as if the picture had been painted by Turner on one of his gloomier days.
We’d only just got our first TV so it must have been about 1963. I still remember Dad tuning the thing and adjusting the aerial while I sat glued to the image of the ITV test-card and my dinner got increasingly cold. By the time he had a good picture the food was just about frigid.
The test-card in those days was a photograph of the Houses of Parliament, an omen if ever there was one. Little did I know that I would be limping pathetically through the same scene less than 43 years later, trying to look dignified despite being beaten hollow by four pantomime rhinos and about 60 eccentrics who had all had the same hilarious notion to run the London Marathon dressed as Sponge Bob Square Pants.
I say it was the same scene, but I was disappointed to discover in 2007 that the barrage balloons had been removed from around Parliament.
The TV came just in time for us to see such varied but earth changing events as JFK’s failure to duck in time in Dallas and also the baffling reports of one Valentina Tereshkova becoming the first woman in space. Presumably the cosmonauts had given up on their plan to fit Soyuz craft with a reverse gear. Maybe parking isn’t an issue when you are the only person up there. Much was made of this event, which followed the entry into space of the presumably bold but barking mad Yuri Gagarin who obviously hadn’t learned much from the fate of Laika, the first dog in space. On quiet nights in the Ukraine you can still hear him yipping as he passes over his kennel every 80 minutes. Obviously Yuri Gagarin paid extra and got the return ticket.
I can’t recall how Hugh got on in his televised running race but he wasn’t invited to run in the Tokyo Olympics with the big boys, so maybe not too good then. Or maybe the other runners were a bit suspicious of those odd shoes he ran in, the ones with the nails sticking out of the bottoms of them. Those shoes must have been popular on the bus to Crystal Palace …
Also in those early years I remember being taken to watch a race, ‘Cyclists versus Harriers’, which was held annually on common land on the North Downs. Such was the mud that most years the harriers would win. It was surprising what those spiked shoes could do to a bike tyre.
We moved to Westwood near Bradford on Avon in 1965. Handy, as I was able to start reccying the Over The Hills course even before the current organiser was born. At the same time I was given my first bicycle and I set about exploring the locality on blissfully traffic free roads. The main danger came from the local Royal Enfield factory which periodically sent out its maddest employees to test the products. It was perfectly normal to be overtaken by some nutter doing about 90 on a gleaming new motorcycle, just out on its maiden run before being fitted with boring stuff like brakes.
My new school was a bit of a shock. No longer necessary to dodge the scarier boys at playtime, my main run of the week was chasing the cows up to one end of the field so that we could have our weekly games lesson. This was football in a minefield of cow-pats.
I don’t know why we chased the cows off. If we’d let the cows stay we’d have had enough players for a decent game, and at least half of them would have been better players than me.
With a field like that, cricket wasn’t played at our school. (Besides, have you seen a Friesian catch a ball? – blooming hopeless!) By the time I got to Trowbridge High School in 1968 I had developed into one of those kids who gets picked last for teams. (I thought I was quite good holding out until the end each week!) I tolerated the team games stoically every week but when you aren’t very good you get nagged at a lot and I wasn’t keen to sample married life at 12.
Rugby was the best of the games I suffered; it seemed to involve lots of anarchic milling about and I could go all afternoon without holding the ball. Best of all was the look of pleasure on my Mum’s face when I went home with such clean kit. If I found myself in possession of the ball I found that the best course of action was to run like hell, especially as all those psychotic kids seemed to have found me at last and were hell-bent on flattening me.
Eventually the games teacher must have spotted that if I couldn’t play, at least I could run away. One of my school reports of the era says “Ian shows potential as a middle distance runner.” Of course no-one thought to mention this to me at the time. Maybe they knew that they couldn’t count on the Second XV to show up on race days to chase me round the 1500 metres.
We had a rather unusual road run which I used to actually enjoy, a circuit of about 4km. (The kilometre hadn’t actually been invented yet. We made do with miles) A group of us used to run the circuit against the clock and I made such good progress that by the time I was fifteen I had become almost feeble, and not many of us were that good!
Of course it wasn’t long before a new teacher spotted how much pleasure we derived from our running, so just to spur us on and make the whole experience more satisfying, he made us run the circuit bare-foot. Initially I was horrified, having visions of cuts and blisters and, even worse, having to walk like you do on the beach. You know; as if the Home Guard had sprinkled anti-personnel carpet tacks amongst the shingle. Surprisingly though, running barefoot was a doddle. It really didn’t hurt, and the savings in shoe leather have appealed to the economist in me to this day. Our times round the circuit were no slower, rising to the dizzy heights of ‘pathetic’ on a good day.
I don’t think I ran again until I was an apprentice and we were pressed into taking part in the Civil Service sports day. In those days I had ‘Wally’ tattoed across my forehead, or so it seemed, as I was deemed the most suitable lad to run the 5000 metres. I was fit as I had been riding a lot of bike races at the time. As a tactic I had learned that you need to be at the front around the first corner. This tactic is not as suitable for long running races. For a start, a race around an oval track is one long corner so my starting effort was a bit of a long one, but not having run for about three years left me vulnerable to the more experienced runners who started at the correct speed, ran the middle of the event at the correct speed and, more importantly, reached the finish line without a spell of lying down gasping. DNF.
When I started working at the university I was still obsessed with cycle-racing but gradually began to run with work-mates, running in our lunch-hour. (Another misnomer - lunch-hour!) The university is well placed for runners, with plenty of footpaths and tracks both on Claverton Down and in the surrounding countryside. Most runs require a climb back up to the campus and I soon realised that off-road running, preferably as hilly as possible, was a great aid to getting some sleep in the afternoons.
Then one fateful day we all entered a running race. It was organised by a club called ‘Chippenham Harriers’. I was doomed…