For the ride and powerful voodoo

I hadn’t been out for a social ride since the failed 600 with Dave, so I thought it would be good to organise something not too strenuous, where we could enjoy the cycling.

On a holiday to Bognor Regis earlier this summer (incidentally, the weekend where my old phone died), we had driven up the hill next to Goodwood racecourse. It seemed like a good cycling challenge, so I duly created a 100k around it: https://connect.garmin.com/activity/904881703.

All the planning almost came to grief when I got a cold on the Friday before the ride. I was feeling pretty crummy Saturday night, but decided I would start the ride and see how it went, against doctors (wife’s) advice. In the end, after a gentle start, I felt ok, so went through the whole ride. I felt abit weird Sunday afternoon.

Pretty much the whole ride, we had really strange temperature inversions. We’d be freezing in fog and mist, then go up a hill and feel warm gusts of air. My mirror and glasses would steam up, then we’d pop into blazing sunshine.

One of these sunny spots was the top of the Goodwood climb:

And closeup of our bikes:

You’ll notice my lovely lime green saddle in place of the Brooks. This is part of my lightweight scheme, which saves 500g over the Thudbuster & Brooks. Must say, the lack of comfort wouldn’t be worth it over more than 100k. Dave is still soldiering on with his broken front derailieur and tellingly, had it on the small chainring.

We started at 7am, which meant the outward leg on A roads was nice and quiet. Coming home, the roads were just starting to get busy at the point we popped off onto lanes through Selham and Lickfold. The final stretch through Milford, was busy, but bearable, because we were close to the finish.

In the end I think we went pretty quick, considering I wasn’t 100% and the amount of climbing on the route, just shy of 1300m.