Labelled as the 'Tour of inclusivity' because of my pre-tour whining  about not being able to keep up anymore, this trip was always going to be a bit of a test.

I'd stuck to a fairly structured training plan for the previous 18 or so weeks so felt like I was ready and in reasonable shape.

The inclusivity bit needs taking with a pinch of salt though.

'We're doing a gravel trip next year. If you want to come, you'll need a gravel bike'.

I didn't have a gravel bike as I normally identify as a road-rider. Mmm. The cost of inclusivity. Do I also need a rainbow helmet?

Damo sorted a flexible solution for the my first real toe-dip and the shiny new Cannondale landed late last year…. and remained unridden until about March this year I think (which is shocking behaviour on my part).

Moley, the man in Pink, upped the route planning comms and had landed on 4 routes which everyone poured over. It's no easy task is route planning… if it goes well, everyone enjoys it. If it goes wrong (in even the slightest way) you get crucified. And so it turned out.

In a change from the usual form, I'm not going to re-live the day-by-day story of the tour, but thought what might be helpful to others would be if I reflected what I learnt from the experience. As always, I've come back older and slightly wiser.

So, without further ado…. The things 'what I learnt on my hols'…..

James gets quite snappy when he's tired

Macca gets quite snappy if he's snapped at

A blood sugar spike happens when glucose builds up in the bloodstream and your blood sugar levels increase. Early digestion of bread as part of a meal can cause this and so is to be avoided like the plague

Italian sheepdogs are rarely kept on a lead

English cyclists smell like sheep

Sheep who move quickly get chased and barked at

I can practice being a slow sheep. JT less so….

Damo delivers feedback in a sensitive and private manner if something irks him

Macca takes 40 mins in the bathroom in the morning as he washes his whole body with a tiny finger flannel. This irks Damo

Just because a taxi ride from the airport is good, doesn't mean a taxi ride to the airport will be the same. It won't

The day 1 Italian service station was the best I have ever been to. Period... (and would be classified a '2' all day long)

It's a long way to drive to Tuscany. A veeery long way

50% of gravel riders have brown wings

To ride gravel means to faff around with Garmins & Wahoos till the cows arrive arrive back at their respective abodes

'Catch me if you can muthafuckers' should only be shouted if you are absolutely sure you are going the right way

If you wait 2 hours for a taxi in a café in an Italian square, don't expect that the first taxi to arrive will actually be the one you ordered. Always check with the driver.

If you have a boyfriend with a 'roid rage' problem, probably best you don’t let him negotiate with a taxi passenger who is in the right

If someone tries to steal your taxi, just sit in the back seat, what's the worst that could happen? (apart from a shanking from the 'roid rage' boyfriend)

When you're getting annoyed and frustrated at people who may be implying a certain lack of 'route planning' skill may be present, don't ride up a completely un-traversable path and then just keep going because pride will not allow you to turn back

People can die on un-traversable paths

Italian food is sensational

Italian coffee is sensational

Italian ice-cream is sensational (I ate it all)

Hotel staff who don't have to be polite, won't be

Dropping the tyre pressure by 10psi on day 1 is a game-changer

Damo deserved Pink

There is no such thing as 'budget yellow', there's just yellow, ok!!

To add further colour to the learning points, some photos….

We all agree that this is the best motorway service station in the world

'Hey...Tony'........ 'What?'.....

Big sky, open landscape

JT is a lot bigger than you think in real life

Damo is absolutely disgusted that Macca has started caning the bread before the starters arrive. Huuuge blood sugar spike on it's way

Everyone is looking at the route.... this must be a gravel ride then...

He's off again.....! Practice what you preach sunshine....

One of the best tour lunches.... and there were many

One of the best tour desserts.... and there were many

The dessert winner

Damo (in-shot) prepares to publicly fluff Moley (out of shot)

'I'd like 1 kilo of steak please' sayeth RTA in that Italian accent of his.

'You'll have 2.5 kilos and that's the end of that' sayeth our waiter

In this bar the waiters fight for their local community

A proper cyclist with the best bike. (That statement will not sit comfortably with some, I know... but I like the colour)

3 wise monkeys......

Not exactly a unanimous yellow and a probably underserved pink, but fuck that, they're on my knee...! Anyway, the crushing responsibility of G24 is starting to sink in. Gerona 24... let the road/gravel lobbying begin

Well done Moley, great planning, execution and delivery.

Tuscany was sensational and you can't say fairer than that.

I don’t believe in God and I don’t believe in gravel bikes.

Oddly enough though, I got talked in to doing an 88-mile gravel bike ride by Macca and Drip…. Good Lord.

As I don’t believe in gravel bikes, I don’t own one. This particular sportive had an answer though. Rent one.

I don’t normally believe in renting either. Good job. They’d run out of rental gravel bikes.

So far, this ride was a screaming success.

‘Why don’t you borrow my hardtail?’ suggested the every-helpful McEvoy.

Good idea.

One problem. Drip has had custody of Macca’s ex whip for a while now, so the thing is likely to be un-washed, un-oiled and in need of some recommissioning.

Not so good an idea.

‘Ask RTA if you can borrow his. He’s not doing this ride so you should be fine’.

Thanks Macca.

I left it late. Very late. I’d not done any riding recently and felt distinctly out of condition.

I thought to myself ‘if I can do 30 miles, then I’ll be able to extend that to 40. And if I can do 40 miles, 50 should be easy enough’.

I carried on this line of logic till I reached 88 miles. ‘fuck it, I’ll send RTA a text. Hopefully he’ll tell me to do one’.

He didn’t.

God (in whom I believe-eth not) must have been smiling on me.

Now, Macca likes his gravel bike. In fact, I think the feelings may run deeper. A lot deeper.

At times in recent months, I had wondered if there was some sort of commission angle I’d missed here. I checked the website for the ‘UK gravel bike appreciation society’. Couldn’t see his name as a patron or sponsor.

I checked the ‘North American brotherhood of gravelers’. Same thing. No trace of our pilot.

Finally, I googled all new religions registered in the last 12 months to see if there had been a reverend McGraveloy positioning his ‘new order of the Gravelatti’. Nout.

I did wonder if it was just me. I did wonder if post ride, I would see the religious light and (tail between legs) go off to C&N to place an order. Afterall, James had done so on the mere whiff of new toys in the Peloton. Perhaps I was just being an old stick in the mud and not moving with the times.

‘It’s like when you were a kid…riding around all over the place just for the pleasure of it. No GPS..no heart rate monitor..it’s a breath of fresh air’ sayeth the Reverend many a time over the previous months.

Un-prompted, Drip asked Macca ‘If you had a fire, which bike would you rescue?’.

This is likely the best question Drip has ever asked. Perfectly judged and a response which would be very revealing indeed. This is in contrast to the worst question Dripping has ever asked which was ‘does anyone have any Tramadol’ just before he took a load of drugs and tried to ride in his near catatonic post-crash injured state.

Anyway…. Answer the question Mark…..

‘It would be the gravel’ said Monsignor McEgravel.

Wow.

Bold statement.

So off we set.

RTA’s bike was a perfect fit. And beautiful too. The ride off grass and onto the first bit of gravel (10 yards of carpark prior to the road) was nothing short of…well… nothing short of riding a road bike on a football pitch. It worked. I immediately and whole heartedly declared gravel bikes the future of cycling, computing, politics and life in general.

That statement lasted for about 15 minutes, at which time stamp we found ourselves on a muddy track which was completely and utterly impassable using this sort of bicycle.

Dripping and I dismounted (involuntarily) and trudged after Macca who was stubbornly trying to stay upright.

This was admittedly a low point and things perked up not long after. Much of the route was beautiful. From the North to the South downs and off toward the coast we went.

Drip had prepared well and had his road cleats fitted. The sort of fuck up most of you normally associate with me. It was pleasing to a) stop fairly often (see ‘lack of fitness’ comments earlier) and b) watch Dripping pay for his mistake by extracting mud using nothing more than sharp stones scraped across the bottom of soft cleats, an activity which is akin to Nelly’s ‘removal-of-pedals-with-a-boat-shoe’ trick. Macca took many photos of this. When confronted by the sight of Nelly with his shoe in a death grip he took none and was not making that mistake ever again.

The absolute highlight of the trip was the road support we received from both Bex and Dawn. Bex arrived at strategic points armed with cake, popcorn, energy stuff and a big smile. Fucking ace. Sweets and a sit down. Exactly what I was hoping for. I ate much of what I saw before me.

Low-lights were however many in number.

Dripping being a lot fitter than me was one. If there’s one thing that I don’t like, it’s being a) overtaken by Dripping, b) being overtaken by Dripping and then Dripping and Macca buggering off up a hill and to cap it all c) waiting for me at the top of the hill chatting. Each time I tried to arrive composed with an air of ‘I don’t give a fuckery’ about me.

That didn’t work.

Dripping was very nice about it all… which meant that inside he was doing fucking cartwheels.

I had a quiet word with the God I don’t believe in and enquired about the possibility of delivering some pestilence or maybe locusts onto Dripping, his bicycle and his new found legs. ‘Bit old Skool don’t you think?’ Said the non-existent almighty. ‘maybe’ I muttered. ‘maybe’.

I had much time to think on this ride. It’s lonely being a shit cyclist, but I could at least analyse the pickle I’d agreed to find myself in.

Throughout the course of the day, I think I’ve puzzled it out. I think I have the answer to the question. The big question. Not the meaning of life, the meaning of gravel bike.

Macca was right. If you can have only one bike, then it makes sense.

If you can have only 2 bikes. It doesn’t. I’d always take a road bike, because they are perfect for the road and a gravel is a slight compromise. If I wanted off-road I’d always take a mountain bike, because a gravel is an even bigger compromise.

If I could have 3 bikes, this is where it makes sense…. And then I’d definitely have a gravel because it would be perfect as a winter/commuter bike and if I ever wanted to do a route with a ‘downs link’ type element, then that’s its habitat.

This 88-mile ride wasn’t perfect for the gravel. But it was probably just about the best compromise out of gravel/road/mountain.

But my rides tend to be on or off road. So if off-road, an mtb is just so much more comfortable, capable and suited to the hills.

And for big road rides, particularly our tour trips with big down hills, then I’d always favour the purity of a road weapon.

I’ll leave with this thought though. Both Macca and RTA’s bikes are lovely. Really nice examples. Expensive, tight, slick. Lovely to ride. And they are growing in popularity judging by the crowd who rocked up for the run to the coast. James has got one too, so when the German lands back he’ll be all over it and Strava will be awash with JT/RTA/Macca gravel rides where there will be much declaring of ‘It’s like when you were a kid…riding around all over the place just for the pleasure of it. No GPS..no heart rate monitor..it’s a breath of fresh air’ and other such snake-oilery.

Ultimately though it’s a bike, it’s outdoors, it’s with your mates.

Really, that’s all that matters. The bikes have always been secondary to that and always will.

Gravel onward my friends, gravel onward.

Hoppo

Here’s a thought. Theoretically speaking, which one of the peloton would be best suited to doing the job I do?

Now I know as the current jobholder, you may well think that I’d be in with a pretty good shout, but just because I happening to be holding the ball, doesn’t mean that other riders may actually be temperamentally better suited to the role of chief administration monkey.

JT for example, with his brutal efficiency, lack of human compassion, swift and confident decision-making might indeed argue that he could do what I do, not only better and quicker, but likely with one hand tied behind his back, blindfold and probably whilst still doing his own job of firing subservient German media underlings without missing a single heartbeat (assuming a heart exists of course).

And he probably could.

In a similar vein I’ve often thought that flying a plane (non-carpenter version) is not all it’s cracked up to be.

We all had a go at landing a jumbo in a simulator and managed to pull that off with only limited constant coaching and interfering from Macca. Clemo and I even had a go at landing the space shuttle whilst holidaying in Florida one year. Again, shelling peas.

And as for chief health and safety guru on the nation’s railways, a job which on the surface Dripping seems least-well suited to with his near constant calamitous brushes with death, his very keen eye for leaves and ability to carry a clipboard and wield a pencil may ironically mean suitability is in the ‘duck to water’ realm of comparison.

I was left pondering much of this on the ride last Sunday. And I had time to ponder. Being flung off the back of the excitable peloton freight-train gives one space to consider one’s navel, as well as time to dwell on the questionable moral fabric of one’s fellow riders.

Still, I did manage to hold a couple of wheels on the 55-mile jaunt into the Surrey hills.

For the first group ride of the season, there was much to prove by many.

My own goal was not to be left too far behind too often. Macca on the other hand was clear in his intent. Even though he was on his gravel bike with balloon tyres, a bike made of metal, his clearly stated goal was not to let anyone overtake him unchallenged…..anywhere….at anytime.

My youngest has a new kitten. He teases the kitten with a toy foxtail. The kitten goes absolutely scatty for this thing. Even when sitting placidly on the bottom step of the stairs, a quickly waggle of the foxtail in her line of sight and she jerks into a barely controlled ‘hunt-it-down’ frenzy.

Similarly, whilst chatting at the back of the pack with Macca (who had felt a level of pity for those at the rear of the bus), I was revealing my inner-soul about my childhood trauma. A moment which I was bravely recounting for the first time without crying (my voice was wobbling like a schoolgirl mind) when Dripping overtook us both, a little too closely for a health and safety expert if you ask me.

All empathy disappeared from Macca’s face and the ancient part of the brain responsible for chasing, hunting and killing foxes, shut down all rational thought and he was off leaving me in a wash of angry competitive spittle, balloon tyre disappearing up the road in front of me.

Dripping knew what he was doing. He may as well have gone past and yelling ‘fuck you Macca’, the result would have been the same.

He didn’t yell that. But I also was equally certain that ‘Fuck you Macca’ is exactly what Macca heard.

Anyway, I pulled my emotional self back together and pedalled on.

The Surrey hills were fabulous on Sunday morning. It was cold but bright and there were Pelotons everywhere. Most of which significantly better dressed than ours.

What had prompted my thoughts on job-suitability was the Arrival of Mark on the scene with his yellow safety bib. I expect he was trying to un-nerve Dripping who was on his new S-Works by subconsciously suggesting that he had the moral high-ground when it came to health and safety. It was an interesting look made all the more appealing by his wearing of double-trousers. Clear thought had been given to the temperature and appropriate clothing selected. Impressive caution.

The overarching theme of the day however remained competitive aggression.

The normal course of a professional peloton is to build speed slowly with all team-mates attached. What you rarely see with Team Ineos is the rear-rider overtaking the rest of his own team and gaining a 50-yard lead. What you also rarely see in a coordinated peloton is one of the more senior members then breaking from his own team so as not to let the rear rider (now at the front) take all the glory.

If the rear-rider (now at the front) pulls onto a roundabout with only just enough space to miss the oncoming Nissan Nivaro, then the chasing competitor should do the sensible thing. He should weigh up the options. He should think ‘should I risk near-certain death and follow his wheel so not to concede the lead’ or alternatively he might think ‘should I just let the car go as we will be stopping at traffic lights in exactly 50 yards time’.

After long consideration, Macca flew onto the roundabout chasing Dripping’s foxtail whilst a man in a car literally sat on the horn, his frightened children praying that Daddy didn’t lose his temper with that ‘you-fucking-wanker!!!’ cyclist their father was waving his middle finger at.

RTA had already peeled off gracefully to Reigate so didn’t have to witness any of this buffoonery and so back to chez Hoppo we returned for bacon and sausage butties.

I had finally reached a conclusion. 

So which of our cyclists did I think was best qualified to fly passengers across the Atlantic safely?

Dripping was out of the question as he would choose the wrong plane… he’d likely insist on a Blackbird SR71 as the logical steed for the job assuming the same bike-buying logic of the ‘S-works for the hill works’.

Macca would also be completely out of the question. Seeing one of the other planes take off first would see him have him pulling the throttles back whilst still connected to the passenger onboarding jetty, spilling people and trolleys asunder as he dragged the stairs down the runway so as not let the EasyJet Malaga shuttle be the first one with its wheels up.

Mark, whilst on the surface may be qualified to fly planes, would need to up his game to be more qualified on the visually superficial level. As a passenger if you saw the man with the safety vest welcoming you aboard you would think that the guy who guides the planes in with the old ‘stick-with-a-light-on’ had got ideas above his station.

I was out of the question on account of emotional fragility. The stinging sense of abandonment on Blanks lane implied that if I so much as got a funny look from a passenger I may well get the hump and sit in the cockpit refusing to come out unless the passenger in 7A apologised in person and promised to be nice to me.

This just leave RTA. He rode the perfect ride. The most capable rider who didn’t get involved in any of the competitive nonsense. He rode at the front and back with equal pleasure and humility. A man who in his spare time is coaxing the Mole back out of his nest and into the hills without leaving him wheezing for dead in the gutter.

So there we have it. Macca shouldn’t fly planes and I should man the fuck up. A reasonable conclusion to the first ride of the year.

Go steadily into the Spring my little fuckerinos.

Sitting in my kitchen about to start the usual factual tour documentation, I look out of my French doors and into the garden.

Literally, as I am about to punch finger to keyboard, a pigeon flies straight into the window.

20 miles to the South (my internal compass still accurate to within a few degrees) and one Captain Mark McEvoy sits cross-legged on his new yoga mat. He is, I suspect, in a deep meditative trance, communicating with the birds…well, one particular bird. He sees through third-sight the motion of digit towards MacBook and he seizes his opportunity.

There is a loud thud as the feathered fox food clumps against the glass.

Undeterred, I press on though. This is an important story to tell.

Munich really is a beautiful city. It has an unhurried feeling about it. Not too much hustle and bustle, but just enough. Clean and tidy everywhere and a sort of low-rise architecture with church spires scattered about the place, London this is not.

Sitting in the city-centre roof garden sipping beers with Macca, overlooking the city was a lovely start to this mini cycling trip.

We chatted about this and that. Furious disagreement on Coronavirus not even in the air, let alone the conversation at this point. (I believe that we need to be careful and manage the infection as the human price is significantly larger than the financial one. Macca believes that we should inject everyone in the eye with the virus and that the strong will survive and the weak will be thinned out nicely).

The drama of the evening was the arrival of Tommy Trusler with an arm in a sling (his own arm I should add). An outrageous rugby manoeuvre had seen him hit the deck and pain arrive with a jolt. Within 2 minutes of the news landing Macca had completely diagnosed both the problem and the rehabilitation period, had put the Truslers’ collective minds at ease and then laid out a spread of complementary peanuts to settle everyone down.

Next morning, the drive to our first port of call was largely uneventful. Deep into Italy and with a further 2 hours still to go to get to the eventual destination of lake Garda, we stopped for the day 1 ride.

The Sella Ronda. 42 miles and nearly 7,000 foot of elevation. This was going to be tough.  JT lead the pack out and immediately into the first tunnel. Somehow, I had found myself in second position. With this group, this is not a position which I belong in.

I didn’t know James had an uneasy phobia of tunnels. Why would I? Within 100 yards of setting off we entered an uphill sloping tunnel. There was a faint parping sound from the rear of James bicycle and he was off. For the first 15 seconds I thought it was just me getting used to the normal pace. I started panting. By 30 seconds my legs had started to squeal at the pace of the relentlessly pedalling Trusler. By the time we exited the tunnel my lungs were burning. They took 30 mins to lose that feeling. Seriously. 30 fucking minutes. We were less than 10 minutes into the toughest ride of the trip and we’d effectively started our marathon with a flat-out 400 metre race. I don’t remember Mo Farah ever adopting this tactic in the Flora 26….

Most tours I’m middle-to-lower Peloton. This mini-tour and I knew I was going to be at the back.

JT and Macca were known quantities. I’d also ridden with Neal and knew he was up there in the Macca-sphere somewhere. Andrew was an unknown quantity. JT had described him as ‘liking to get out front early before settling in to a rhythm. Strong rider’.

Over the course of the 3 rides I would describe Andrew a strong rider who likes to get out front early before settling into a rhythm.

What is particularly unusual is that in this instance James displayed some genuine human assessment to his rider categorisation. Normally his brain places people into 3 buckets.

‘Bucket 1, riders who are the same as, or better than I am. Bucket 2. Shit riders. Bucket 3. Riders ability unknown as mentally feeble.’

I know he sees me as firmly having two feet in bucket 3 with aspirations to climb into bucket 2. Macca has me pegged at the pre-bucket stage.

The ride finished with over 40 miles under the belt and nigh on 7,000 foot of climbing. That’s punchy in my book.

Friday’s ride was not much easier either. In fact, with the mileage in the legs from day 1, it felt the toughest of the days by a good measure. The climb after lunch was fairly relentless with a big high-teens ramp toward the end.

Whilst on the climb I came across a stationary JT. A few weeks earlier he had allegedly been severely injured in a freak accident at Center Parcs involving a waterslide and the wrangling of a small child. I didn’t like to probe. This injury however, whilst not apparent at the time (nor visible…. Nor complained about….or even talked about it seems) suddenly re-appeared on the ascent. A grudging acknowledgment of the severity of day 1 along with the unrelenting nature of the back-to-back-ness of day 2 was murmured.

Thrilled to have company at the back, I chatted light-heartedly until we arrived at Andrew, stationary on the steepest part of the climb so far, looking pretty fed up.

The sight of him stopped gave my brain all the excuses it needed to deploy the old executive decision to down-tools and break out the food.

I sat down under a tree.

I quite like sitting down.

The other two then buggered off.

I remained sat down.

The crest was only about 200 yards away as it turned out. When I got there, I felt done. Not since the last time, the fountain at Malaga I think, I had a little lie down. Again, not what you expect your average cyclist to be doing whilst out on a ride. I breathed deeply whilst listening the chitter chatter of the fellas discussing James’ alleged knee injury.

After the ‘CenterParcs vs small child’ explanation, Macca dwelt.

He narrowed his eyes.

There was complete silence.

His semi-sentient neural connection to the world wide web had latched on to a local wi-fi hot-spot and he had deployed a legion of web-spiders all armed with binary details of all of James’ symptoms onto the net.

His eyes lost all focus momentarily.

After a few seconds I think the first of the spiders returned as Macca suddenly arrived back in the present, eyes squeezed into a defined narrow gaze.

‘I think you have a damaged meniscus and in all probability a cyst on the inside of your knee’.

James pondered this for a moment. ‘You’re probably right’.

Behind Macca’s eyes, the fire raged. Fury and bile broiled in the pit of his stomach as adrenalin coursed through his arteries and soaked his brain.

Deep in his mind his basal ganglia fired messages to all parts of his thinking system and from the cold dark recesses of a structure billions of development years in the making, a dark, deep, cold voice uttered a single word……’Probably?’

Macca wanted to grab James by the throat and lift him off the floor and squeeze… his mind’s favoured Darth Vader manoeuvre. He wanted to lean in to him. Nose nearly touching nose. And quietly, in spittle filled words say ‘Probably?’

What he actually did was imperceptibly shrug his shoulders and gentle raise his eyebrows a couple of millimetres and softly said ‘seems likely’. The web spiders had started fighting amongst themselves. Macca calmed them down.

The rest of the ride was smattered with stops for food and some post-lunch ridiculousness in the form of immediate 20% climbs out of the town.

By the time the day had ended, we’d caught 2 cross-lake ferries, ridden a brutal 50 miles on top of the previous days efforts and were back at our lovely apartment for after-ride chitter chatter.

Saturday was nearly with us and general consensus was a rest day was required. All agreed.

The conversation slid to another climb which both Neil and James had done in the local area. Both riders had not managed to conquer this particular beast.

Massive gradient, brutal in a way that Mortirolo was…. but worse.

Brilliant. This was my chance. I’d been dying to put the needle into someone at some point. I was fed up of being the shit rider, now was my chance to lash out at the talent.

‘Wow….. I bet Macca could do it’.

That little bomb-shell deployed, I thought I’d settle back and watch it all unfold.

Whilst there was plenty of chatter about it, the white glove was not picked up off the floor. This was terrible. If Dripping had been here, the moment it was suggested he would have had a foot in a pink Rapha shoe, gels quickly thrust into jersey pocket, car keys in mouth, ready to go.

He would have failed of course, but Jesus H Christ he would have given it everything….!

Macca wouldn’t have failed. He is in phenomenal shape at the moment. Low on weight, big on power and with a ‘I will not be fucking beaten’ mindset, he would have crawled through broken glass to come out on top.

Still, I couldn’t convince him to give it a go. If he would have, I would have gone too. I would have given it a go. I would have failed. My mind, on seeing the ridiculous uncomfortableness of it all would have replayed the fact that Neil and James had failed, therefore there’s no shame in stopping, sitting down and having a bite to eat.

‘You know what today is don’t you?’ I parried in one last attempt to make the great seem mortal.

‘Chicken Saturday’.

It was a cheap shot. It was a final shot.

It didn’t work.

A great rest day followed where we swam in the lake, ate amazing food, sipped Negronis and generally relaxed in the loveliness of it all. Even went on a tour of a vineyard where unbeknownst to us, a small rodent-like creature ate half of James’ under-bonnet Jaguar.

The final day of riding was an early start and a just beautiful ride up and around the lake. Amazing scenery and some really lovely climbs.

What I came to realise during the course of the trip is that the Peloton needs its fair spread of performers. Being slower than the rest meant I rode pretty much every climb alone. Whilst Macca, Neil, Andrew and JT managed to broadly cycle tighter (I am assuming…didn’t actually witness much of this with my own eyes), I was at the back. Pushing against no-one. The other fellas had some competition. One trying to drop the other etc. This meant they all pushed hard, very hard at some point. At the back, a push resulted in the same thing as just grinding it out. Progress up an empty climb. It was not an easy 3 days of cycling by any means. 40 miles and 7,000 feet of climbing never would be. But did I ever empty the tank? No. Did I track someone down, hold their back wheel and then fuck the hell off when I sensed weakness? No.

For that sort of cycling in general, I need to rest of the lower-order Peloton and in particular, Dripping. I fucking hate being beaten by him. He has more capability and more sheer determination to suffer pain than I do. I beat him because the one thing I do focus on with a bit of bloody-mindedness is training. The day he does the longer training efforts, sharpens the weight, then I’m fucked. In the meantime, I keep plugging away and am just about keeping my nose in front…..just.

Cycling is different things to everyone. This trip also underlined the sheer beauty of the world we live in. Whilst cycling up the climbs I contemplated what was around me. I even took the odd photo. Competition and personal performance have their place. But…. and it’s a big but, for us mere mortals who don’t do this for a living, more eyes on the scenery and less on the heart-rate is probably a good thing. Perhaps in time as our performance inevitably wains the balance will shift a little and we won’t mourn the loss too much as we’ll appreciate the gain.

The white Jaguar piloted its way back toward Munich and made its way closer to my absolute tour highlight… ‘Pork Knuckle Sunday’. What a way to follow the disappointment of ‘Chicken Saturday’. Along with gravy, chips and a massive fucking pint of lager (technically not a pint, I know, but you get my drift).

James, not a driver for any of the world’s slow lanes, gave the cat a fair thump away from the service station following the pit stop. Pulling out (at velocity) onto the motorway, he snagged a yellow ‘engine warning’ light and the car went in to limp mode.

Macca’s eyes hazed over.

‘Please tell me the symptoms’ said Macca (whose voice tonality had suddenly gone all Alexa).

After James’ incoherent babble I casually thought for a moment ‘probably an emission thing after you hoofed it’ said I, not really caring as we still seemed to be moving and pork knuckle appeared to be at no particular risk.

There was a very quiet snort from the back-seat. Almost as if Holmes had just heard Watson’s completely amateur explanation of the what had happened to the murder victim in the hours preceding his grisly death.

‘I suspect’ started Sherlock McEvoy, ‘That an air and/or vacuum hose of some variety has become dethatched leading to the engine switching quickly into a self-preservation limp mode.  Likely cause? The Bavarian crested marmot. They like to digest rubber in the confines of a warm bonneted car’.

As dusk approached, the web-spiders where shepherded back to their pens and a calm quiet settled into the car.

In what has been an incredibly unstable year, I feel lucky that a flight to Munich booked pre-pandemic for some cycling in Germany ended up in Italy and played out exactly as it had. 2021 seems an awfully long way away. Success would be a full Peloton tour and narrow squinted eyes towards Dripping’s rear wheel.

Get out and ride my little schweinshaxe.

A much more reasonable start to this year’s tour. No crazy-early alarm clocks, just a nice trip to the airport with only hand-luggage and a gently grumbling Macca.

Our favourite plane man had unbeknownst to me fired a very early warning shot regarding our mode of transfer on arrival in France.

At 5.50am, whilst shooting the breeze on my couch, McEvoy had enquired as to whom I’d booked the hire car with. The one which would take us to resort.

‘I dunno….it’s on the App’ sayeth I.

I had a quick look. Whoever the third party was, they had a stunning 6.5 out of 10 rating. Not quite M&S levels of service, granted, but still it’s on a trusted App, we are only using it to transfer, I’ve got insurance, it’s France for fucks sake. It’ll be quiet and I’m a capable and experienced driver…. Well, we’ll come back to that last bit shortly.

We get to Gatwick with ColMac and Drip in tow and await the arrival of HRH.

The first of many 2019 tour errors soon became massively apparent.

We’ve got two gingers on the trip. Fuck. How on earth did that get through the vetting process? I sent my beloved co-chair a text

‘JT, I’m at LGW. We’ve got problems…..’

Before too long Drip and HRH are bonded in conversation which carried over onto the flight. By the time we were at 30,000 feet they were each answering the others questions before they had even been asked. It was like listening to 2 people taking it in turn to read out just the answers on a bunch of Trivial pursuit cards.

Macca whispered to me whilst transfixed by this sight. ‘What’s happening over there?’

‘They are becoming one Macca, they are becoming one’.

By the time we had landed things had progressed further. They were now communicating with eyes closed with just index fingers lightly touching. Silence. Occasionally dripping would meow.

When we got to Toulouse we started the hunt for the hire car counter. The twin gingers (Twinge?) followed gently behind in a glowing orange aura.

Whilst all this was going on, I’d failed to notice that Macca had entered a worrying (and just about controlled) mental meltdown.

‘Where’s the hire car counter…? It’s off-site isn’t it… remote.. we’ll need to get a bus… not even in the terminal…what were they called again?’ he blurted out in staccato perfection.

‘er…. Gold cars’… sounded good to me. What could go wrong when you’ve got Gold in your company name?

Within minutes we were at the Gold counter waiting to be served.

Macca had moved to DefCon level ‘Blind-Frenzy’.

He’d got straight onto his iPhone and had a full list of every negative customer review for Gold cars. I’m in the queue and he’s jabbing the phone at me and saying ‘look’ in a high-pitched squeal, ‘Maureen from Romford….. she’s 97… and this is how they treat our British citizens..!!’

‘They’re going to sell us extra insurance and then steal all our money’.

At this point I was starting to lose my legendary zen-like calm.

Macca connected with his iPhone again and dialled up a quote for a Hertz rental car equivalent.

‘Look, we could have had this one’… and with that, he was gone. Off to the Hertz counter.

I queued quietly on my own. Drip had temporarily disconnected from the Twinge umbilical cord and was trying to locate Macca to gently nudge him toward the exit.

Right, I thought… time to get this car booked and get the hell out of dodge.

My turn came and I presented myself at the counter with my usual finesse. My mouth opened to speak and just as I was about to wish the nice lady a very good morning Macca arrived on my shoulder, phone gripped in fist and launches a barked question at the unsuspecting clerk.

‘WHY DOES YOUR COMPANY HAVE SO MANY BAD REVIEWS?’

‘WHAT DID YOU DO TO MAREEN!?’

Macca was metaphorically wrestled to the ground by airport security and tied to the nearest pillar using clingfilm and then gently tasered… (this was how my mind was dealing with the situation at any rate).

The rest of the mini-peloton looked onward in apathetic bemusement. None of them gave a flying fuck about the arrangements on the basis that if it all went wrong, I’d be the one getting all the shit and would subsequently have to get us out of the hole I’d dug.

3 pairs of peloton eyes would say ‘your name on the form, your fucking problem sunshine’.

Anyhoo… after the drama of the hire car counter (which went perfectly smoothly), we picked up the car (which went perfectly smoothly), and got ourselves in and ready to go (smooth… perfectly).

I then started to drive. Dear fucking god where the hell has my driving ability gone?

I tried to change gear twice with the door handle and got completely befuddled with the clutch before a near impalement with a coach at the very first roundabout.

There was a flurry of uncensored ginger telepathic communication in the back seat which I am sure ended with Drip saying to HRH ‘if he kills us now, I want you to know I love you’.

At one point early on in the journey, I drifted the car toward the right (something I’d done subconsciously, I suspect in an attempt to place my body in the middle of the road).

I had started to edge us toward an 18-wheeler in the next lane. I could see HRH in the rear-view mirror edging in to the middle of the car whilst breathlessly mouthing ‘watch out’.

White-knuckled hands gripped the wheel as I steadied myself. Drip, after further telepathic liaison with HRH suggested we listen to some music. No sooner thought than done, HRH racked up some impressive tune-age on the multi-media and we settled in to our journey to the Pyrenees.

Now this particular hire car was blessed with a behemoth-like engine of 1.0 litres of petrol frugality. Barely enough power to progress much past a standstill. With 70 stone of Peloton meat and gravy aboard, the thing struggled. The useless fucking clutch had zero feel and as the engine generated the mechanical momentum of a spinning 5p piece, so stalling was a regular occurrence.

4 of the 5 car inhabitants saw stalling not as a consequence of a shit car and 5 fat blokes, but more as an aching lack of talent on my part.

Worst was yet to come.

We entered resort and got to within 25 yards of destination when a tricky hill-start was required. Handbrake on, gentle rise of revs, I’ve got this. I’ve got this…..I didn’t have this.

I was about as far from having this as you can get whilst remaining in the same country.

The engine squealed, the clutch slipped, massively. NWA was turned down on Spotify and all we were left with was the stench of burning clutch.

I had a sinking feeling that I’d properly fucked the hire car.

Anyway, announcing your arrival in a plume of melted friction plates is how we rolled in team Gold car.

Greetings aside, quick sit down and then to the job of bicycling.

And so we return to the annual highlights list. A snap-shot of the rides and the riding from this year’s Grande Tour. But before we get to that, some stats.

The Rides

• Day 1. Lac d’estainge. Shortest ride at 32k but 3rd for overall ride gradient. • Day 2. Col des Tentes. A punchy 96k but a bit bleak on arrival at top • Day 3. Tourmalet. 101k. Great ending with really steep gradient for the last few hundred meters. You can see why it’s used on the tour so often. Fairly bleak riding through the town halfway up. Unrelenting 2 hours of climbing at over 8%. Brutal. Sensational ride home though through some beautiful countryside though • Day 4. Col d’Aubisque via Col du Soulor. Probably the ride of the tour in terms of utterly breath-taking scenery. Beautifully ribboned and freshly tarmacked road on the ascent, which I spent all my time on just thinking about the future descent. And then a jaw-dropping ride along a precipitous drop all the way to the top of Aubisque. A hard slog. Particularly on Soulor when a mid-teens ramp halfway up punches you right in the kidneys and jabs you in the eye for good measure. 2nd for overall ride gradient with 2.62% average for the total ride. Ouch • Day 5. Hautacam. Short out and back. 38k. God, that was one punchy climb. Kilometers click past and are either 8,9 or 10%. Felt unending. Overall ride average gradient of 3.1% made this the most climbiest rider per K we did.

The experience and the stories

• Good accommodation at the Pyrenees cycling lodge. Although Mark, our host, was somewhat perturbed to find Twinge v1.0 curled up and asleep at the foot of the front door on day 1. Twinge v2.0 preferred the comfort of the nest • Formal police notices issued for a range of offences including; the leaving of new tour top on the back of the chair overnight….shocking. The public dissing of one of the team whilst he was out on the hill. Police notice issued following a ‘whistleblower’ incident. • Yellow cap went to HRH on his maiden tour, but he was run very close by the impeccably dressed ColMac who, in my view, nailed the best single day performance with his well-judged blue accents matching the tour top perfectly. There was no suggestion of Twinge vote irregularities. Well, none were verbalised at any rate • JT won orange on the fact that he pulled his thumb out of his arse a couple of weeks before tour and did 2 or 3 turbo sessions. Everyone agreed that this sullied the good name of the Orange cap and that perhaps we should remember last year’s benchmark winner when awarding in the future. General shock and disappointment all round. At least one person cried. • The group as a whole consumed 18 complimentary fun-sized Mars each and every day. • I accounted for 17 of the above • Perfect weather • I’m not saying that sharing a room with Macca is like drawing the sleep equivalent of the short straw…….. this year’s tour saw ear-plugs land. At last we can now embrace our favourite  flyer like a long-lost brother..snore onward little one, snore onward • Biggest tour disappointment was the e-bike not running out of juice. At least 8 people prayed daily for this to come to pass • I only fell asleep twice this year at the various lunch stops… once in a deck chair next to ColMac whilst holding a pint (which I subsequently spilled on myself)…oddly enough, this incident went completely unobserved. Second time was at the top of Aubisque and lasted a nano-second. Not only was this observed but it was also filmed. Cat-like reflexes of the Pittock

….and so much more besides.

G19, a Grande Tour and huge success. My thanks go to JT for wrangling the accommodation with usual Teutonic efficiency and a huge shout out to Damo for driving all the bikes over there, complaining decidedly little and pandering to many a disorganised cyclist.

However in drawing to a close this year, I’d like to highlight 2 particular tour performances.

Firstly Dripping. The lad has had most of the bones in his body removed and replaced with man-made replicas. He has the back of a 90-year old and the combination of the 2 have meant that any sort of reasonable training regime was nigh-on impossible. He wasn’t ready to perform. At times he could barely walk straight let alone ride. To top it all off he’d had an epidural to release the muscles in his lower back, an injection which effectively puts your muscles to sleep, a consequence of which must undoubtedly seep into the legs one way or another.

Early on Tourmalet, and I mean really early, first 15 mins I reckon, I passed Dripping who was panting and out of the saddle, wrestling his bike reluctantly up an unrelenting climb.

It took me 2 hours. Drip spent an hour on top of that defeating his foe. 3 hours of climbing at over 8% in that condition. I don’t think there was anyone present on this tour who would have had the mental strength to achieve what Dripping achieved. I would have thrown my bike off a cliff having doused it in petrol and set fire to it long before the summit. Amesy wouldn’t have even boarded the plane. Clemo wouldn’t have left the bower.

As pink cap performances go, Dripping knocked it out of the park with gritted determination and practically zero complaining (apart from when our host effectively called him a vagrant for dossing in the hall).

The biggest problem Dripping now faces is going to be awarding the cap next year. He has shocking form in this particular decision-making department. Last time he did the honours he overlooked Damo’s stellar tour and gave it to James, who had pulled his thumb out of his arse and had done 2 or 3 turbo sessions. I swear to god I think I’ve seen JT do the old Obi Wan Kanobi Jedi mind tricks on awards night more than once…’there’s nothing to see here… move along’

In a bold future prediction, the G20 pink cap odds are currently, Damo 3/1 (patience and service of Drip’s woefully cleaned bike), JT 2/1 (Jedi), HRH evens (blood is blood).

Before we finish, time to look at things through a slightly different lens.

A coupla months back, I accompanied JT and his chum Neil (inventor of the petrol engine) on a wee trip to Austria. This was prior to JT putting in his incredible 2-3 turbo sessions I might add.  

As the wee-man and and I snuffled and puffed our way up Großglockner we both discussed the possibility of e-bikes on future tours. We saw families of all ages out on bike, often with the older generation right in the mix on their leccy MTB’s.

We loved being out on the bike but could feel the pain of the combination of hurt from lack of preparation, weight and age.

In a universe which sees entropy rule, moving order and structure slowly but inevitably into chaos, time is our enemy. We can fight and push but this ride is one-way only. It’s a big step to make decisions to tackle a harder path just to be able to enjoy the journey, but by chosing to go on tour with an e-bike this year, this is the path Moley chose. And he bloody loved every second of G20. Always smiling. Riding every mile. The e-bike enabled him to continue and properly enjoy the love of cycling in the big country with the boys.

He took a lot of shit for that decision. And indeed, can rightly expect to continue to do so. In fact, we are all still praying the fucker will run out of juice one day! But taking the piss is one thing, I actually think more than one of us looked negatively on the decision to do these rides on an e-bike. Almost as if it were cheating.

Now Moley may have had some assistance enjoying the trip, but he still had to put a shift in. And what else was he to do..? Not go, because he didn’t want to suffer and at some point, or even worse, fail over the 5 days?

Moley is the first person to take an e-bike on tour.

He will not be the last.

I want to ride as long as possible on a normal bike, but fuck me I’ll be e-biking it all the way if it’s a choice between doing or not doing.

Dripping aced pink on G19 with grit and utter determination.

Internally he said ‘fuck this, I’m going no matter what’.

Moley knew he would get a lot of stick for the e-bike choice.

Internally he said ‘fuck this, I’m going no matter what’.

That’s the spirit fellas.

G20, the summit, beckons. Majorca. The weekend of 25th April is looking likely. Gentlemen, clear your diaries. Gaudeix press release and invite to follow shortly.

Do 2 or 3 turbo sessions and a cap is more or less guaranteed.

Ride safely my lil fuckerinos….

Deep breath. 

OK, here goes.

I am prejudice. At times, horrifically so.

There. I’ve said it.

I feel better. Marginally.

Society today is becoming increasingly intolerant of any individual who dares transgress the firming social lines of the protection of the individual. And if the individual is in any kind of minority group, then watch out buster, say nothing or have your very being besmirched for being an out-of-date and contemptible individual. Cast out of the society you circled in and forever damned as being a sinner amongst saints.

Last week a cable TV show announced the annual winner of the ‘Funniest joke at the fringe’ award.

Every year I read through the top 10 and smirk at the inevitable, but usual amusing and witty contenders. 

This year was no different. 

An example of the type of top gaggery comes from the 2017 winner. Topical, as it came at the time of a new release from the Royal mint:

I'm not a fan of the new pound coin, but then again, I hate all change

Nice. A gag that has both a slight play on meaning and it topical. 

This year’s winner was equally gentle in its bending of phrasing.

I keep randomly shouting out 'Broccoli' and 'Cauliflower' - I think I might have florets.

Now I read this at work one morning, and seconds later moved on with other things. A few days later and a casual glance at the BBC website and there was a follow-on story. This time Auntie Beeb has published an article about the annoyance that the Tourettes Society have felt at with this joke.

A prominent lady within the society voiced distinct disapproval;

“Humour is a great way of educating people - but not only is it not funny to poke fun at people with Tourette's, it's not even that funny a joke, is it?”

In the irony of all ironies, the Tourettes society were one week away from launching a campaign aimed at stopping the condition being a punchline in jokes. How d’ya like them fucking apples.

Now I personally think you’re treading a fine line by dictating what you can and can’t make jokes about. Clearly the old days of Chubby Brown and Jim Davidson are well and truly behind us. Humour used to belittle particular groups and minorities. It always left a nasty taste in the mouth. But not being funny because someone is in a minority group? Not such a clean-cut affair.

I find it almost unbearably funny taking the piss out of people who are different. People who don’t conform. Social groups are almost always driven by some sort of common conformity after all. Look at the Peloton. All centred around cycling and conforming to what that social circle deems acceptable.

Let’s look at a few examples of what happens when someone wanders off group alignment.

• JT rode a Cube FFS. And it was a triple! In the fullness of time he was nearly bullied into tears over that little faux pas

• RTA made the best repair he could to a pair of shoes that had given him particularly good value. Merciless haranguing followed

• Has Damo worn the famour winter ‘lobster glove’ since that particularly cold ride on January?

• Macca and the white ‘show the world your penis’ bib shorts. 

Now none of the above makes any difference to the enjoyment of cycling. But they all made a helluva difference to the enjoyment of cycling on that particular day (for 7 out of the 8 riders at any rate).

But this is the thing. Comedic highlighting of group norm differences within the group, gentle isolation, then regular revisiting of past errors affirms group identity. And, it actually re-shapes individual behaviour and brings it back to group behaviour.

An interesting point to ponder is this. Should the individual who made the brave move away from group compliance, continue to do so without giving a merry fuck, would the group then gently steer towards him as a standard? Would his own confidence and ‘don’t-give-a-flying-fuckery’ actually position him as a standard setter…one to follow…? 

It’s difficult to believe that the Peloton could, in some parallel universe all be riding about the place in white penis-flaunting bib-shortery… but you never know.

Thank fuck Macca is a social conformist is all I can think.

This behaviour however is inbred. It’s part of humanity. When it’s one of your own, it’s good natured and mistakes are to be pounced on with glee. They’re funny. And there is nothing quite as satisfying as being the first one to publicy spot a fellow rider’s error.

Outside the social group, the prejudices are all still there, but all sense of warmth evaporates. This is where my inner demons roam. This is where my critical and saintly eye turns on humanity from the comfort of my own stately glass house.

I have a broad expansive set of prejudices and as part of recognising who I am, I feel the need to unburden myself. Think of it as detoxing. Perhaps tomorrow I’ll be a better person. More accepting. Happier, dare I say it.

So, in no particular order, here is a summarised list of some of the things that really hack me off about people whom I don’t know who have the temerity to be different to me.

• People who ride bicycles with the seat too low. Every time of see one of these hapless fuckers I think exactly the same thing. ‘Not very efficient on the quads that…. And you could do with dropping a gear or two. That slow cadence is making is harder that it should be.’ My gaze lingers for a few seconds whilst I mentally shake my head. Now what difference does it make to me that ‘random station commuter’ is going to spend exactly 8 mins not being as absolutely efficient as he could be? Answer? No difference whatsoever. So why do I feel slightly annoyed by it? How is this man’s seat height affecting my life in anyway whatsoever?

• People who ride by pushing the pedals with the middle of their feet as opposed to with the ball of their foot. When I see this, I want to see justice delivered instantly, preferably by the police using a taser gun to stop the offender in their tracks before then shouting at the quivering and prone floor-bound body to ‘pedal that fucking bike properly’ and then going about lesser police priorities. An overreaction? I think not. If I’m with the kids and I see this social travesty I point it out them. Seriously. It absolutely boils my piss.

• Now this one is perhaps my all time, most heinous of heinous crimes against civilised society. I mean, when exactly did some people revert to living with the apes in that great troop on the savanna? Have we forgotten millennia of tool-making and using skills? One of the very few things I might add, that genuinely separates us from nearly all living creatures on earth. When sitting in a restaurant or pub for that matter, and I see a mature homo sapien, who can seeming talk. Seemingly dress themselves in a manner compliant with social norms. Who can order food. Who can pay for food. Who can interact with waiting staff with courtesy and conviviality. But, who can’t hold a fucking fork like you are supposed to…! I mean for the love of sweet baby Jesus… you’re holding the thing with thumb and three fingers (pinky redundant)…jabbing it down like a fucking chop stick…. What the fuck do you think you’re doing? Why aren’t your parents at this very second, beating you to within an inch of your worthless life at your inability to grasp and use the most basic of tools in not just the right way, but the ONLY fucking way to use a fork!!! When I see this, I just want to shout ‘WANKER’ across the table and over my salmon and quinoa salad. 

I had my annual BUPA health-check last week and no ulcer was detected, but I’m telling ya, it’s fucking coming.

This weekend I’ve been mountain biking with my eldest. I bloody love it. He bloody loves it. He’s new to it and the activity is nothing short of joyous. 

Yesterday we went over to Holmbury St Mary and into some of the well-established MTB trails. Second time round I had a proper go at ‘Barry knows best’, a long swopping bermy 3 or so minutes which is just fabulous for the 2 beginners alike. This time though, whilst absolutely caning it and trying to set a time which my son wouldn’t beat (he did), I properly stacked it. Half way down. Came down hard and narrowly missed a tree. Very lucky really to only have a hurty shoulder today. After the event we went to the local pub and had chips and a pint. (Well, I did. Jnr had chips and a couple of glasses of coke. It’s like the Tenants super for the young generation.)

Outside there were scores of pretty serious looking bikes and bikers. They all looked different, but oddly the same. They all conformed to this particular group norm. I could tell my eldest was a little wary of being seen as a beginner. Neither of us where particularly dressed to ‘shred the gnar’ or whatever the fuck it is Macca says when he’s talking MTB mumbo jumbo. 

I sat there and munched a chip. ‘Don’t worry about it son… I don’t care about them, we’re doing this and enjoying it. I don’t care what we look like. We have as much right to be here doing this as they do’.

Off we went, back to the car. I felt bruised. Jnr felt good following the Strava analysis. He’d come out on top. As we walked past a table of fellow diners I noticed the husband holding his fork the wrong way. Our eyes crossed. As I walked past I felt a sense of calm solidarity. He had every right to be there. Just as much as me. And if he insists on eating like a wanker, that’s his call. 

Celebrate the commonalities, not the differences. 

Hold that thought as the rag-tag peloton makes its way to France this year. Perhaps we will see more tolerance? (I bloody hope not).

Finally, for the first time in 5 years I rode with Clemo today. The Peloton’s favourite chippy and the most upright tax-paying citizen this country has seen has rediscovered his cycling mojo and is out on his bike.

Clemo and Amesy in Majorca fo G20?  For the fist time in this edition, I’m not taking the piss.

Ride safely mon fuckerettes.

Last weekend I rode with 2 English riders who speak German. It’s not their natural language, but since they are both taking coin out of Merkel’s economy, I guess it made sense to put some effort in and learn.

JT has been firing employees in Germany for a couple of years now and is getting more and more comfortable despatching the walking dead with a Bavarian lilt. Neil, who has a proper job it turns out, has been there a similar amount of time.

Unlike the usual peloton career, Neil’s job is making real things. On deeper discussion, turns out he’s made the engine for one of the early hot hatches, the good old Ford focus ST170. He’s actually designed and made the thing. With his team of people. This is indeed useful and pretty impressive. James just yells at people. Dripping wanders the country with his health and safety clipboard and pencil round his neck, Macca drives a bus (albeit in the sky), RTA is in Insurance marketing so no doubt spends his days imagineering. The rest of us, well, it’s non-too impressive is it fellas..? I mean, me being able to navigate post-it notes and a flip chart stacks up pretty poorly against a man who makes engines for Henry’s firm.

Anyway, Neil was very modest about the whole thing, so I just sat there quietly hoping he was going to be shit at cycling so it would make me feel better.

He wasn’t. Bollocks.

Anyway, more of that shortly.

In numerous cafés and restaurants my 2 faux-Germans baffled me with what looked like pretty good conversational German deployed to numerous waiting staff. The waiting staff responded in kind and clearly communication was occurring which everyone understood.

Everyone that is, except me.

I sat there feeling like somebody’s Granny. Listening to the waiter, then turning to James and half shouting ‘what did he say?’

I don’t understand James at the best of times. I understand him even less when he is barking his shouty orders to menials in verse I don’t follow.

Still, German and indeed Germany suits JT. There is a ruthless efficiency to the country that perfectly apes our diminutive chums’ approach to life and work.

On the last night after 2 days of amazing/horrific bicycling, JT took me to the local German pub. We marched into the gaff… through the gaff… and out the other side into the Garden. There must have been half a thousand people in the Garden, all sat at benches drinking massive glasses of lager and eating food.

‘See the blue table clothes?’ squeaks JT ‘That’s where you can buy beer from here but bring your own food’.

A-huh.

‘See those table over there’ Sayeth James with a pointy finger that has dispatched many a quivering underling from his office on the 20th floor of Sky towers. ‘Table service’.

Er…ok.

‘and this section is self-service. Follow me’.

The next 90 seconds were a bit of a blur. But here goes an accurate (for once) account of what happened next.

James orders me a plate of Pork knuckle from a large German man who looks like he’s lived on nothing else. Within seconds it’s on my plate with a dumpling and gravy.

‘Veg James?’…… The place went quiet….James’ eyes narrowed and also spoke (a first for eyes).  ‘Oh do fuck off’ they said.

No veg then.

5 seconds later we were at another counter. Behind this one another large German stood with his back to us. He was drawing lager from a cask which could have easily accommodated a cow. It looked like this was wasn’t just his job, it wasn’t his vocation, it wasn’t even his dream. It was his utter and complete meaning. Without even turning he placed a pulled litre of lager firmly onto the counter. James took it and put it on my tray. 5 seconds later he’d done it again, another lager on the counter. No looking. No talking. No contact. Just lager. James nabbed the next one up and the hurried me off the counter number 3.

Payment.

James paid for both within seconds (a first) and noted down in his little leather-bound accounting ledger the transaction and proposed apportionment (muscle memory).

We sat down.

90 seconds. Seriously. Breath-taking efficiency which has been giving JT wet dreams since the moment he landed in Munich central.

The food and beer were sensational. I had been dreaming of both during the 2 cycling days. Meat on a big bone accompanied by lager. Don’t over complicate perfection with greenery and other such fripperies.  

We both sat there and reflected on the preceding coupla days.

‘Well, I’m getting an electric bike. That’s all there is to it’.

JT in one of the peloton’s strongest riders. Surely a couple of German/Austrian hills can’t do this to a man? I know he’s not done much training, but how hard can riding a bicycle up a hill be for pities sake?

Pretty hard is the answer to that one.

Near the town of Zell am See, nestled in the Austrian alps, lies a mountain. Großglockner. This is the highest peak in the Austrian alps and has been a pass for human traffic for over 3,500 years. The road probably wasn’t tarmacked back then and they definitely didn’t charge 35 Euros to haul your car up and down the mountain like they do now. Still, with around 2,000 meters of climbing for nearly 20k, 8% as an average was always going to be tough.

Interesting fact number 1. James has done next to no training. Interesting fact number 2. I have done quite a bit of training. Fact 3. I have also been consistent with shovelling Haribo and Dolly mixture down my greedy gullet of recent. This could all be very interesting indeed.

Obligatory photos are taken at the foot of the hill before we set off.

Now I am in no hurry to bust a gut on this one. We have the Pyrenees beckoning and for JT and I, this is very much ‘getting your eye in’ type of stuff.

Still, it doesn’t stop me putting an initial sprint in after 15 seconds on the hill. I’m in the lead. I’m already regretting having done that. Normal order resumes as Neil and JT gently pedal past, James shaking his head slowly.

We all settle in to a rhythm. Neil has a fast-paced cadence which is I suspect measurably accurate and consistent to within 0.05 rpm. He looks professional with his 95 revolutions every minute. I have a cadence of similar accuracy, the only difference being I occasionally mash the pedals, more often than not vary the speed of rotation between about 5-15 rpm, sometimes I kick over the top, sometimes I drag back and lift, sometimes I go for the fluid movement (but for never more than 8 pedal strokes in a row). Other than that, in comparing form we could literally be cycling brothers…

The hill is hard. The 8% climb is unrelenting. And the weather is starting to degrade. Gentle drizzle spits in and out of existence and whilst warm, clothes are starting to cloy to skin.

Unusually for a ride with JT, he doesn’t fuck right off into the future to leave me to my own mental demons. He’s up the road from me, but not that far. Probably about 100 meters or so.

We climb. The scenery is stunning, despite cloud significantly obscuring the best views.

Within half an hour we are high high up. 8% of climbing has seen us well into the sky. Trouble is, inside my head I can hear the voices complaining loudly about the effort…the drudge… the slog. It is hard going. You forget what proper hill work is like. We remember all too easily the tea and slice of cake at the crest of previous efforts, followed by the flowing downhill of ribboned tarmac folded across alpine pastures. Today is stark and real. This stuff is tough. I project forward to the Pyrenees. I know James is ahead of me doing exactly the same thing.

Training wise neither of us are in the ‘too little, too late’ category and the Pyrenees may be steadier in gradient. Still, a resolve is being independently crafted by both of us to put some real effort into quality training in the remaining weeks.

Of course, I’m now in Turkey caning the ‘all you can eat’ buffet and drinking the resort out of pina coladas and Baileys. Other than that, quality training is my mantra. (There is no Haribo at this hotel. I have written to governor of the local province to ask him what the flaming heck is going on under his watch. I’ve had to resort to eating iced buns for goodness sake. I’m battling through the obvious discomfort this whole situation is causing me).

It’s an hour into the climb. JT and I are now cycling together. For a period of time I’ve actually been ahead. This is a most unusual experience. It’s like a different universe where I am the one with cycling talent. JT is the one who is frustrated and annoyed. I think if provoked, there may even be a little wheelie in the locker too…. But I’m too tired to irk him with this sort of behaviour. Instead, we both push on.

Neil is ahead and is looking comfortable (well, as comfortable as you can be on an increasingly cold and wet mountain).

We pass a sign showing the 1,900 meter mark. As a group we commit to go to 2,000 meters. It’s a good mental stimulus. Something to focus on. The signs come and go and the metric altitude counter seems to only inch up (I thought about that sentence for too long!).

We round a corner, JT in front, expecting to see the 2,000 meter sign. It’s not there! I can literally see the man deflate in front of me. He stops. Arms folded across bars. Head hanging. He’s in a tough spot. We’ve all been there. Ready to hurl your bike off the side of a mountain and just sit your arse down. It’s brutal. It’s miserable. It’s cycling.

We cross the road into a lay-by and call Neil back. As we discuss options, a cloud literally comes down the road toward us. A cloud. Actually, on the road. This is all JT and I need. I reach into JT’s imaginary rucksack and haul out the white towel and hurl it up the road. That’s it. We are done. Wheels about and off we coast.

The next 15 minutes are technically quite challenging. Slick roads, winds and drizzle combined with increasing cold. I’ve got the brakes applied for nearly the whole duration of the decent. My new wheels are great, but I’ve not ridden these tyres before. My old Conti 4,000’s gave ultra-confidence and I’m just getting my eye in with these Bontragers.

I over-cook one or two turns, but other than that, we were down a lot quicker than we were up.

We now have a flat 15 or so K before we get back to the hotel.

There is a tiredness in the team. Weariness. Like post-lunch toddlers, nap time is upon us. We have no choice. We look at the stats and the numbers don’t quite tell the story of the ride. That consistent gradient was the real killer. Combine that with JT’s lack of prep (my ok prep, ok-ish weight and less than ok age these days) and reality bites. We talk about comparative difficulty. This is probably up there with a Stelvio/Croix de Fer… that sort of thing.

That evening at drinks, a funny thing became apparent. Zell am See is a small town in the Austrian state of Slatzberg. Nothing funny there you would have thought. We were munching down on a burger post-pint and I slowly became aware of the general population mix and ethnicity. There seemed to be a fair few Gulf state rich folk and their families milling about the place. When I say a fair few, I would estimate that the general tourist population was 75% Gulf state. I’d definitely not noticed this proportional representation anywhere else whilst in Austria/Germany. So what gives?

JT is hardwired to the Internet and quickly found an answer.

Apparently back in the day, some smart bod on the town council thought that their picturesque town, crystal clear lakes and mountainous back-drop was an absolute shoo-in for the description of paradise laid out in the Quran. And so off started a spectacularly successful marketing campaign directed Emirates way. And so, every summer, thousands upon thousands of well-shod Arabs head toward this little town to get out of the desert heat and spend some of their hard earned on Austrian trinkets and general tourist junk. They even had a shop there selling hookah pipes. Although I’m not sure which foolish gulf resident is going to rock-up back in Qatar with his genuine Austrian Hookar pipe  and show it off to his mates…. Wouldn’t that be akin to going to the Galapagos to pick up some Kendal mint cake?

Next day saw some more gentle weather. The cycling with picturesque and generally less battering than 24 hour earlier.

There was however one notable exception.

One section stood out. 20% of solid climbing for what turned out to be perhaps a third of a mile.

I don’t think I’ve ever bicycled slower. Out of the saddle and still I reckon I’m doing 3mph.

James is behind me (repeat, James is behind me). It’s funny how such a simple statement can give me such warm comfort.

Anyway, I’m struggling… unbeknownst to me James has been doing my old Alpine skiing trick of traversing. Cheeky fucker. Still, when I threw in my own towel (might be a first that… beaten by a hill) I looked back down the road and was pleased to see that JT had also had enough.

When I re-tell this particular story, James was 700 yards back. When he retells it, he was literally nibbling my rear wheel. Either way, we were both shamed into walking up a steep hill, bike being led up like some tethered goat.

At the top we again pondered the upcoming Pyrenees trip.

There is a little less than 4-weeks before 9 riders of varying levels of fitness attack a Grande Tour and this year there is a definite hint of nervousness.

Some have trained really hard. Some of have trained fairly hard. Some of just trained and some have just thought about training.  

Whichever camp you sit in (and you all know exactly which one that will be), remember that riding in scenery like this is a privilege and we are all lucky to be able to be there, whatever level of training. Memories for life are booked in for 11th September.

Will we have another ‘Moley walking through the saloon doors with tears in his eyes’ moment?

Will we see Macca snatching defeat from the jaws of victory as Damo hunts him, down to the line?

Will ColMac shout ‘Buongiorno’ directly in the face of any local who has the foolishness to catch his gaze?

Who knows. For the first time in years thought the form book is well and truly wide open.

Whilst HRH and RTA will no doubt be dancing near the top of the pack, will Damo’s recent hard-yards see him flirting with the podium?

After those three, the remaining 6 look like a complete and utter shambles of a team. I think I’m going to take a photo of the ‘calamity six’ and make one of those motivational posters out of it.

There is one I’ve seen which shows a silhouette of a guy on a race bike at sunset. The slogan is ‘Effort and determination are the key to going the extra mile’.

The calamity six poster will be ‘Effort. This lot should have fucking put some in’.

So here we go again. Tour upcoming. Nerves a janglin’. Damo’s tuck shop is being stocked as we speak.

Let’s all keep everything crossed for Dripping, his new hip and his knackered back to make it there. If he can do it, the rest of you can pipe down and suffer in silence…!

G19….. this is most definitely going to be a tour to remember.

Well, it’s 5 months to the Grande Tour that is G19, the Pyrenees. Training has slowly rumbled into life with many a peloton rider poking their beak from the comfort of their winter lair.

Surfacing over the last few weeks have been Damo, a few commutes and even the odd MTB ride. I’ve managed to get off the turbo and have swapped the virtual for reality. We even had the first group ride of the year with RTA & Dripping. An historic event as Dripping tested the new carbon fibre hip in the April sunshine.

A mere 9 weeks ago Macca and I visited Dripping in his private room at the private Gatwick Park hospital. When we arrived, he was in the middle of making a massive fuss about the fact that one of the wall power points wasn’t working and that he couldn’t plug his smart phone (well…. Samsung) in within convenient reach. The nurses, clearly tired from a punishing schedule of looking after the weak and infirm had to drop everything to wheel the half-robot across the corridor to a new room with a better selection of power facilities, Drip grumbling quietly en-route.

Macca and I looked at each other nervously as we felt a chill descend upon the room. It transpires that Drip’s irksome mood was somewhat provoked by a polite refusal from the nursing staff to his 8th request of the day for a bed-bath. 

‘But nurse, ever since my new hip has gone in, my winky feels dirty’, protested a nearly tearful Drip.

Macca, ever the empathetic and caring friend, pulled on the surgical gloves and reached for a damp cloth when Dripping’s tone changed and he suddenly got all shirty about power sockets and room adequacy.

Anyhow, 9 weeks later and the stooping drugged-up post-Op Dripster is sprightly, twinkly-eyed and ready for a 50-mile jaunt in the sunshine. Astonishing all things considered.

The ride out was sensational. We took in Denbigh’s followed by the box hill Olympic route before cutting back up past Dorking and onto the coffee stop.

RTA had shouted a campsite/fishing ground as the place to go for snacks and warm drinks. We had a coffee. We had cake. Then, as it was a particularly sunny bank holiday Friday, we had a pint. RTA and I also learned a little bit about fishing during our 30-minute break. 

Dripping, a keen angler, gave us a good 20-minute running commentary on all the mistakes being made by the small cast of fishermen who were assembled within eye-line. Not only was he highlighting their errors, he was also giving RTA and I coaching on what do should we find ourselves Rod in hand and hunting for sprats.

I tried to pay attention to the pearls of wisdom Drip was releasing. It’s a subject I don’t fully understand, but here goes my attempt at remembering the salient points. RTA, please feel free to fill in the gaps;

• Catching fish is like giving children quality street…. One at a time, to keep their interest.

• Don’t spook the fish

• Don’t show them the line

• Don’t touch the fish which are covered in jelly

• Sit still

• Read a book

• Don’t cross swords with another angler (I am praying he was referring to fishing rods)

Whilst Drip was observing the carnage unfolding, he’d occasionally berate all the JR Hartley’s by muttering ‘rookie’ under his breath.

To conclude, I’m not sure why Drip is trying to keep children’s interest with the bait of quality street or how fish get to purchase and wear jelly. I’ve made an executive decision to stick to cycling. I understand it. It understands me. My sword won’t get crossed. The children are safe. All in all, everyone’s happy.

The ride eventually concluded with a bit of a faster-paced sprint back to the bower for Drip and I. 50 miles in the bag and I could see exactly what Dripping was thinking. 

‘Moley… I’m a coming for ya’…. He didn’t say it…. He didn’t need to. And so, we move seamlessly into a few words on tour preparation.

Now, this year, I ain’t gonna do what I did last year which is turn up ill-prepared, fat and in need of regular snoozes just to keep me functioning. So, I’ve hit training early. Drip is on a mission. He will not only want to be there, he will want to take somebody down. I am grimly determined that it ain’t gonna be me.

Damo, currently wrestling a knackered back, has been off the booze for ages and is in reach of his usual cyclists’ condition. 

JT doesn’t look to have turned a wheel…not that it matters with the amount of winter sports he’s done, but I am determined to see him pushed by this year’s tour virgin, HRH.

Macca and Col Mac have been quiet and finally Moley, well, Moley needs to use the equipment he’s blessed with. Turbo? Check. Hills nearby? Check. Is he his own boss and can therefore engineer his time? Check. Time to get those massive engines which drive your ankles up and at ‘em Moley. You know who’s looking at you with grim determination and a plastic hip don’t you.

 Now here’s a question for you. What has the Peloton got in common with lobsters? An unusual comparison you may be thinking. 

Now lobsters have been rocking round the seas for several hundred million years. In this time their brains have, like many, developed to recognise and react to status. In short, the higher up the pecking order (clawing order?) they are, the more balanced and happy they feel. They show this by their body language. Apparently, the controlling mechanism for all of this is the proportionate balance of 2 hormones produced by the lobsters grey matter… bit more of one (serotonin) and the lobster is a confident little fucker and as such, rises in the social standing of the group…. Bit less and the crusty fella gets a bit withdrawn, hunches his shoulders a little and doesn’t get the pick of the little chickadee lobsters. Now the female lobster is attuned to status. They see a confident sprightly lobster as a good proposition, all things considered, so he who hath his claws held high and bit of a swagger about his gait can expect to be a hit with the ladies and a roughie toughie with gents.

However, all is not quite that simple. Should our alpha male lose status, in a fight with another male for example, then he moves down the chain. This has a dramatic impact. The hormones rebalance to such an extent that the brain has to physically re-grow to cope with the change in circumstance. The old brain just can’t cope with the impact that loss of status has on the tiny aquatic creature.

Worryingly, one of the wider peloton is going through just such a transformation.

Back in the day Amesy used to live on the Bower in creepy Crawley along with the rest of the herberts (me included, natch). Then he moved up in the world. He moved out to the leafy suburbs of Ashington village and into a nice extended 5-bed with a double garage. He could be seen prancing around the place, coaching the privileged kids football and generally being an upstanding pillar of the community. 

Over the period of time I suspect voting changed from labour left to mild conservative right.

 Social status grew steadily and then he hit the big time. He moved to Royal Tunbridge Wells. 

Saturday mornings and he could be seen cruising round the charity shops with his yellow lambs-wool jumper draped causally over his shoulders, whilst he browsed the nick-nackery on offer. 

He even joined the local theatre and became something of a minor celebrity for his portrayal of Widow Twanky in the AmDram Christmas production that year. 

A few months ago he was sitting in the garden in one of his very many comfortable outdoor chairs, sipping a glass of chilled Riesling. He turned to Lou, tireless loving bride of our social high-flyer, and said ‘you know what love, life aint half good’.

Ominously, unbeknownst to Amesy, dark clouds had started to gather. His beloved second home, the luvvies theatre, has now been served an eviction notice and a brand-spanking new facility has been approved by the council. £90 million quids worth of theatre and a smattering of town centre parking is heading his way. And the new lot have made it quite clear that there is no space for his level of Widow Twanky. 

Bang… no more Widow Twanky… no more luvvies… no more kudos and gentle ripples of applause from the blue rinse mob. 

He’s a shattered man.

I spoke with him earlier this evening and it dawned on me just how bad this situation has got. The following words are about as accurate as Peloton news has ever been…

Amesy has been out, placard in hand, and has joined the Tunbridge Wells Alliance in protest against the new theatre. He is literally incandescent with rage. How very dare they!

Who do they think they are? These faceless councillors who just rock up, let money talk, and spoil the whole damned shooting match with this new high-brow monstrosity.

I didn’t ask if he protested in his Widow Twanky garb, but what he did tell me was that he joined in with the chanting.

‘WHAT DO WE WANT?’

‘Not this level of wasteful investment right in our lovely town centre and in particular not the new toilet block pencilled in for Calverley grounds’

‘WHEN DO WE WANT IT?’

‘Now please’.

Not particularly catchy and a far cry from Derick Hatton and the 80’s militant movement, but still, he’s fucking furious.

Anyway, I’ve bought him a box of quality street and Drip is lending him his fishing rod. He needs a calm space to heal, be himself and to regrow his status-shattered brain.

First step fishing…. Who knows, we may see him on a bicycle yet.

Right my lil fuckerinos, get yourselves outdoors and get the wheels moving. 5 months will spin by. The last thing you want to see is Dripping and his spectacularly clean winky making off ahead of you and into the sunset.

On second thoughts, perhaps having dripping behind you and hunting you down with his spectacularly clean winky may be even more frightening.

Ah well, roll the metaphorical dice and let’s see what happens!

Lobsters away..!

The sleepy town of Grindelwald lies at the foot of the Eiger. A Swiss peak with a frankly terrifying North face which is concave and year-round bathed in shadow. As a climbing challenge it’s ferocious.  

Climbing the Eiger the normal route, whilst not for the likes of you and I, is it seems relatively straightforward.

Climbing the North face however is a completely different barrel of monkeys.

So many climbers have died trying that the Germans have a  nickname for it. ‘Murderous wall’. 

Before being successfully climbed in 1938 by Anderl Heckmair, who along with 3 chums made it to the top with many a tale of derring do, many climbers lost their lives trying. 

In 1935 for example, 2 German climbers had to bivouac 5 times over a period of a few days whilst attempting the summit. Fog came down and watched from Grindelwald below the people saw them disappear. 2 days later they were found frozen to death at 3,300 meters in a place now called ‘death bivouac’.

Like many a great Strava segment, the Heckmair route has iconic ‘segments’ named after various heroics in the history pre-summit.

The White spider, the Traverse of the Gods, flat iron and difficult crack (we’ve all been there). 

Probably the most infamous drama to play out on the mountain was in 1936 when 2 Bavarian climbers, Andreas Hinterstoisser and Toni Kurtz and a couple of Asutrians had a crack at the North face.

Stuck on the wall and cut off by bad weather, they made fatal mistakes. They traversed across an area of flat purchase-less mountain face  but instead of leaving the rope behind so they could get back, they took it with them. Now stuck, 3 of the group where swept off by an avalanche with Kurtz left hanging in mid-air on a rope. 3 guides went up the hill to try and rescue him. They used the railway inside the mountain which has a couple of places where you can come out directly on to the North face. They got within shouting distance of Kurtz who relayed the fate of the others.

The guides managed to get a rope to him so he could traverse down, but hands ravaged by frost bite, he spent hours trying to get the rope into his carabiner. In the end he just gave up and died exhausted on the side of the mountain.

Nobody wants that, least of all me….. still… twas nearly my fate this weekend.

A small subset of The Gaudeix Peleton this year visited Kitzbühel in Austria to mark my 50th year on the planet. Of the 5 riders, 2 are good skiers, 2 are good snow-boarders and 1 is 50 and never worn a ski boot outside of Hemel Hempstead. This was going to be interesting.

I had taken this task seriously. I’d had 11 hours-worth of lessons and the boys had bought me two 3 hour sessions of one-on-one tuition from an 8-year old Danish boy called ‘Viktor’. 

He and I had a lot in common. 

1. We are both male

2. We were both spending 6 hours together.

The rapport flowed and we found ourselves chatting away perhaps once or twice. It wasn’t frosty… we just shared little common ground. He asked me what I did. I told him I worked in Insurance…. and that was the end of that little line of enquiry. I then dropped one of my sticks off the ski lift into what looked like a ravine. ‘Couldn’t nip and get that for me could you Viktor?’

Still, in fairness to Viktor, he did treat me gently and didn’t at any point leave me for dead on a steep mountain. Not at any point. Thanks Viktor.

My confidence grew gently. I crashed a couple of times…. Once spectacularly on a very flat and unassuming piece of ground. I felt like I was going maybe 10-15 mph…. just standing up… not doing anything. Exerting no effort. It was like my brain had a sudden moment of ‘hang the fuckety on, what’s going on here. You’re standing still but still moving. Stop this bus immediately’. At this point I did a massive cartwheel on the flat ground and ended up in a heap with a hurty rib and a concerned looking Viktor whose voice said ‘are you ok?’ but whose eyes said ‘how the fuck did you just crash here… it’s flat you complete fucking moron’.

After that ‘lil event though, things kinda progressed well. I did more skiing. Viktor took me on some blue runs. I didn’t die in any meaningful way. All was well.

The big day of the week though was Saturday. Hip flasks packed. Time called fairly early. Everyone drinking hot chocolate with beers and added hip flaskery. We hit the town early. We hit the town hard. Some harder than others.

It’s not fair on those involved to go into too many raw details, so I’m going to deploy the famous ‘summary bullets’ to the evenings events and let others add the names/fill in the blanks. Here goes;

• Snowboarder X…. too drunk to stand un-aided, staggers down road… then runs at a complete stranger shouting… and hugs him. Literally the funniest video I’ve ever seen…. And I have played it to no-one today at work. Noone at all…

• Skier Y…… upstanding pillar of the community. Responsible job in the transport industry…. Never kicked a football in his life. Taped to the bar with electrical tape and broke a hotel wardrobe door.

• Snowboarder Z….Generous purchaser of birthday Champaign… roommate to gentle old man…. Literally left me for dead on a mountain to be eaten by wolves…. Revoluted me for the cost of the wolves whilst I was being eaten.

• Skier Z…. self-employed….. can start his car with an App…. Tired legs…. Also taped to a bar with electrical tape. Broke no doors.

Clearly names have been changed to protect the innocent. 

I can’t however leave this edition of Peloton news without re-living the disaster that was day 3.

I hadn’t seen Viktor that morning. 

I had felt that I held kept my head above the snow. 

Off we all went to the other side of the mountain. 

The fist little sign of trouble was when Moley suggested that we take a quieter, less well travelled route. The trouble with skiing that I have found, is that once you are committed to a route by going down some part of it…. You are committed… there is literally no going back. This particular route was not long…. But very narrow and icy. I instantly panicked and then fell over.

At this point an 80-year old German woman enters the scene. She stands on her skis by the side of my broken body and starts asking if I’m ok…. Moley, ever the gentleman, assures her that there is nothing to see here and that he is ‘taking care of it’.

She literally refuses to move. 

‘He shouldn’t be on this slope’ says Frauline. 

I’m preoccupied looking for my other ski and I think I’ve also lost a stick.

At this point I’m sitting down and looking over the edge of the slope I’m sitting on.

‘He shouldn’t be on this slope’ continues the old bint.

‘He’s fine’ continues Moley. ‘I’ve got him… we’ll be out of your way soon’.

I continue to sit.

Eventually I get cracking again and manage to slide my arse off that particular hill and move on to the next drama. 

I didn’t like that slope. Too narrow and very icy.

My arse hurts.

My rib hurts.

My pride hurts.

Eventually, snowboarder X & Y arrive at the top of a blue (black?) run and fuck the hell off without so much as a backward glance. 

They leave the Hemel Hempstead flyer with Moley and Macca to pursue their own agenda. I’m left wondering what they talk about…. When they do their thing together. I have no idea because I’ve been skiing for 11 hours in total. I don’t know what goes on chat-wise at the front of the Ski-pack. I just know what happens at the back. 

Anyhoo, within minutes, I find myself on the North Face of the Eigar looking down. Fuck me this is a looooong slope. I mean really, really long. And it’s about 40 degrees in angle.

I go down and within seconds I’m travelling at a pace I really don’t like at all. Not one Iota. So I do what I do best. I fall off dramatically and take a German lady with me for good measure.

She said ‘are you ok?’….. her eyes said ‘for the love of fuckery what on earth are you doing here you complete amateur’

I was now sitting in the middle of a mountain on my arse. One ski moving downhill being chased by Macca with Moley up the slope looking for my stick.

I was frightened, confused and angry.

How the fuck was I going to get off this slope. I literally had no idea. I’m on the side of a mountain. I can’t go down 2k’s on my arse for fucksake..!

Both Moley and Macca are trying to gently talk me down. I’m having none of it.

‘What the fuck am I doing here’, I whine.

For those of you present several years ago on Barhatch, when an unnamed cyclist so pissed on my fire that I popped a little wheelie in anger and then spoke to no-one for 30 mins…. you’d recognise this particular version of me. 

I’m getting irrational and angry at how average I am at pretty much every sport I try. Cycling. Average in the pack. Squash… average. Boxing… average…. Football….. yep, pretty shit at that. 

I feel fear. 

Macca is trying to talk to me ‘put the weight on your downhill ski Hoppo and try and press your arse into the mountain. It’ll give you better purchase on the edge and will be a lot easier for you to sustain… come on Hoppo…then you can rest… and we can go down gently’.

All I hear is ‘blah blah blah blah.. Hoppo….blah blah blah… Hoppo….blah blah blah…. Die’

Moley gently slides into view.

‘No worries Hoppo… just traverse…. Just traverse over there Hoppo… you can do it’.

All I hear is ‘Traverse… blah blah blah…. Traverse…. Blah blah blah’.

I am genuinely fearful. I’m sweating and my legs are burning. The slope is 45 degrees and covered in ice.

Literally hundreds of people and gently sweeping down it without a care in the world. I am the only person on the slope going fucking sideways….. slowly. From one side…. to the other…. And then down a few inches.

This takes what feels like hours.

I reach the bottom a sweating gibbering mess.

I look back up the slope. Fuck me it’s massive. For far too long I felt like Toni Kurtz… desperately trying to get down… but too cold… too frightened… so close… I thought I was going to be stuck on the mountain for ever.

In my wild subconscious I thought I heard two snowboarders overhead chuckling as they were lifted to safety whilst watching the madness below. Couldn’t have been our two.

I was nervous on day 1 as had absolutely no idea what to expect.

I came back alive and un-injured.

Being 50 isn’t about being brilliant at everything you do. It’s about just saying yes to doing brilliant things. 

One day I will ski the murderous wall and overcome the demons.

March 2020? Not sure I’ll be quite ready then… but one day. 

See you there next year. 

In the meantime I shall be retreating to the safety of my bicycle.

Slide away mother fuckers, slide away.

2018 was a year of pretty significant change for me.

I’ve left the comfort of the stationary cupboard and placed a foot in the direction of contracting. Good in many ways, variety of work, change of scene etc.. but non-the-less a little unnerving with its potential short-term nature. Still, one renewal down and all seems well.

Moley too has joined the same club. After years in comfortable bliss in the same old pair of shoes (so to speak), our chirpy pink cap potential has also embraced the new ‘gig economy’. We even share the same accountant and both now sound as wise as Clemo in the ‘tax efficient’ expense logging game.

We both now join the herd on the morning schlepp to London Bridge. The downside of this particular arrangements (for both Moley and I) is that time is increasingly pressed. I leave the house around 6am and am not back normally to gone 7. I think Moley may operate similar parameters.

I don’t think I’ve ever had a year where so many of my waking minutes have been occupied with doing stuff of one form or another. What I could often do with more than anything else is a bloody good sit down.

So, what of 2019. Well, my big goal is to smash last year’s woeful tour performance.

In Malaga I was fat (I’m guessing somewhere north of 92-93kg).. I had done little road riding (I think I may have troubled a road ride once before 2018’s unusually early tour).  And whilst a trainer road regime meant I could complete the test without bonking, I did struggle.

Even though I was a bit shit, I still put a shift in. The day Drip beat me to the water fountain (a mid-point on that particular ride) was the day I put myself well and truly in to the red. It’s a dark place to be when emptying the tank to the extent of then needing to actually lie down to recover, only gets you last place…..

Another indication of potential lack of form is the habit of nodding off in the sun after lunch. Luckily there were no sharp-eyed Peloton riders around to take a video, convert to GIF and then circulate on Whatsapp to highlight the poor nodding fat bloke in ‘lycra stretched over greed’.

It was still a great tour, but I have to confess that I missed Moley… he had called it a day whilst he was dealing with the maelstrom of a changing work landscape. He wanted to focus on getting work before focussing on getting pink.

I knew that if he had not done the training either, then I may have had some company at the back of the pack. As it was, I had to do with the humiliation of the ‘Peloton rota of shame’ as the main pack took it in turns to schedule some time with the wounded cub at the back. All very gracious about it they were too… except for Col Mac who came back and gave me a big push up the hill. The one thing you don’t need when sulking with your moobs and off the pace is for any of the team to come and say (in the form of a flat hand on your back) ‘for fucks sake could you ride any slower’….!

The sentiment was appreciated Mac, but by that point I was in the dark space of self-loathing!

So, this year JT and I have booked the tour a little later. 2019 also heralds the return of a ‘Grande Tour’. A big 5-day-er. Huge scenery, hard cycling. Relentless back-to-back days.

Make no bones about it, the Grande Tours are tough. Day 3 nearly always sees aching quads which are painful to touch.

In Malaga and probably Majorca too, you can get away with not training much and taking some lard into the hills. Try that little stunt on a the big one and it will be very hard yards indeed.

So, for 2019 I have a predication. I think this year will see the most preparation and the best level of general fitness across the group.

Clearly the average has been upped by the introduction of HRH. A man drafted in to cause much restlessness amongst the chickens at the front of the field. Hopefully the podium boys will be forced to actually put a shift in this year as opposed to casually dragging the rest of us along in their breeze.

And so, to my predictions. I’m going early this year, but hey, let’s get it out there to be shot down.

JT

When your mass is somewhere in the 70’s in the currency of the kilogram, you’re going to be doing just fine. Fresh from a year of skiing and snowboarding our pocket-rocket from the land of beer and meat will put in a bit of training and will be his usual excitable self in the top quartile.

I’d like to see someone push him into the hurt locker and keep him there for a while. Last time I saw that was in 2012 when a broken JT sat opposite me in a tapas bar in Palma.

It was very pleasant viewing from where I was sat. Very pleasant. ’d pay to see that again.

Drip

Excruciating back trouble at the end of 18 will hopefully right itself as Drip treads gently back into a training rota. As always, his rides will be short but frequent. He’ll do what he can. Will it be enough? His mental determination will bridge many a gap. Likely to perform well. Probably most excited in the group at the prospect of a Grande tour. All we need to do is add poker and it will be literally heaven for our recovering friend.

Damo

No booze. Cyclocross. Commuting. Cyclists mentality. It’s only going to be as hard as he makes it. He’s another one I’d like to see breathing out of his arse.

As usual the big question with Damo will be what sort of cycling exotica will be wheeling about on?

I live in hope to see him on a Di2 Evo Supersix HiMod.

Macca

A verbal pessimist pre-tour, expect the same this year. Still has robotic tendencies and whilst Trainer Road has almost eradicated that slow, powerful cadence, it occasionally creeps in to remind you that he is almost certainly non-human and better than you!

Always there or thereabouts.

Col Mac

Will married life impact the unusually consistent performance? Whilst he does his riding on flat-as-a-pancake courses, he seems to be able to translate this into decent mid-table performances on the big hills.

Took a massive brave pill by announcing his attendance on tour (which coincides with his 1-year wedding anniversary). He’ll be there and probably still married, but you can bet your arse he’s going to have to pay a price to his new bride for getting away with this little stunt! (Prada Shoes? Gucci handbags? Mac getting pegged from behind by the Mrs wearing a 12-inch black strap-on? All we can do is cross our fingers and pray for the latter….’go on love… make him squeal…!’).

RTA

At last, his ‘top of podium’ position is in potential doubt for 19. RTA will be what RTA always is… well trained… in good condition… and eye candy for any passing lovelies.  Huge pressure on his shoulders this year as he has to take on the responsibility of awarding the 2019 Pink Cap. Fuck, you don’t want to get that little decision wrong…. Remember the year Drip lashed it up and gave it to JT… ? That was the year where I had three refund requests from disgruntled Peletonistas.

(In fairness, the 3 requests where all from me… anyway… it was still a shocking decision).

There is still a twinkle of hope that he will take the baton and arrange a curry night. Be a real pity to revoke the 18 cap because of a ‘failure of office’.

Moley

1st of Jan sees the heralded return of Moley to his beloved Turbo (clothes horse/cat scratching post/paperweight).  Like Harry Potter emerging from the under stairs cupboard, the Turbo is about to see the light of day and the power of the Moleman’s quads as he embraces the 19 campaign.

Much chattering about getting ‘ski-fit’ first (I have no idea what that means), but if Moley decides to make a go of it, me and Drip are proper fucked.

HRH

Tour virgin and in my book, straight in as favourite. Big expectations hover over our blue-blooded London commuter.

We need him to properly tear it up at the front of the pack. I want to see a hard pace set with JT, RTA, Macca and Damo blowing to keep up…. And then I want to see them individually dropped.

I’m half-considering getting an electric bike and a go-pro so I can capture the magic as it happens.

As it is, myself and chums at the back of the pack will just have to revel and enjoy the delicious tension when we arrive at a coffee break to a table of riders not talking to each other and HRH desperately trying to make small talk. I literally cannot wait.

Hoppo

I’ve set myself big targets this year. 5-7kg lighter than current weight. 20+% uplift in FTP.

If I do this, I won’t be last.

If I don’t, I will.

In my silver jubilee year, it really is as simple as that.

So, there we have it. A Grande tour awaits. And this year we have the added entertainment of fights breaking out every meal time as Moley and I wrestle over grabbing the lunch receipts as for the first time in tour history, the midday snack and pint will be logged on the system by 2 riders as ‘Business Entertainment’.

I’ve never had to claim the VAT back on shame…. No time like the present.

Happy new year all.

This week, RTA and Moley went off to enjoy the cycling somewhere. We were all invited (eventually) and what an evening it was. JT, like a foreign benefactor blessing his adoring public with little leather pouches containing silver coins, sent £7 to our hapless duo for them to buy some fizzy lager. It’s not all champagne and strawberries in his Munich Penthouse you know. The fact that he can risk his children’s breakfast by dipping into the pension pot to pull out 7 whole pounds just to buy Bert and Ernie a beer speaks volumes.

JT has changed. I remember years back on a drunken night out, James threw 10p at my head after I had suggested his Golf (2.3V5) was not quite in the same league as my BMW 635 Csi (shark-nose). The shot caused a small dimple on my temple. Later that night in my taxi ride home, I spotted him shining a torch in the gutter in a lame attempt to locate the said coin.

He never did find it…. But the story doth not endeth there… many many years later, last year in fact, when JT paid for coffee one morning on our Malaga trip and shared the bill with the Peleton, the eagle eyed amongst you will have noticed that everyone got charged £3.20….. everyone except me… my bill was £3.30….. I looked at my screen… I looked up at JT… I looked at my screen again…… I didn’t move my head this time, instead slowly raised my eyes to his. There was much hub-ub at the time with the rest of the group teasing RTA about careless bicycle leaning (bike on wall.. bike off wall… bike on floor…. Damo summoned to fix)…..but JT met my eyes with his icy stare. We said nothing….. JT tapped his temple….. and we both knew…. That 10p was lost no more. The Trusler balance sheet was restored.

Half an hour later I glanced over JT’s shoulder as he was texting the lovely Mrs JT…. All I could read of JT’s message was;

‘Close the 2004 accounts. Balance now received. Nobody makes a monkey outta……’ and that was all I glimpsed….(although I later saw Karen’s reply ping through…’Well done love, nobody out-cunts the cuntmaster general…ps. Bring home some schnitzel x’…)

So in summary my advice to RTA and Moley is…. Send the money back…. You might as well…. And probably before the 2018 accounting period is over.

Sunday came this week and for a change some of the Peleton managed to ride together.

There has been much press speculation of late concerning G19. The big fight in town being DripHop….. a little less Wiggins v Froome.. a little more Fury v Wilder.

This was the first press conference Drip and I have done since James ‘Frank Warren’ Trusler had the contracts drawn up. It could have been a frosty affair, but luckily, we had Macca ringside to keep things on the straight and narrow.

Macca, not one for riding off ahead and leaving every other fucker in his wake, rode off ahead and left every other fucker in his wake.

Drip and I made a sufficient meal of riding in mud and also managed to embarrass ourselves with many a stranger before the day had concluded.

It didn’t start well.

We rocked up in Cricketers close in my second-hand bargain Range Rover (blacked out windows, natch).

I wound down the passenger window when we saw a cyclist and immediately struck up a conversation with the fellow rider as he was Macca’s mate and was due to join us on our ride. Being Macca’s mate, he was dressed in hugely expensive gear, had an expensive (but sensible) car and spoke with an accent that has probably had money thrown at it at some point. (He really was grammatically flawless). Drip and I were dressed in trackies and trainers and looked like a couple of pikies who had lucked-out and found a brace of bikes outside the local newsagents.

Anyhoo…. After much jolly banter, our riding partner disappears and Macca arrives on the scene.

‘Who was that?’ asks Cricketers favourite pilot (there are 14 of them on the close).

Turns out the fella had fuck all to do with Macca and us….. ffs…. Sometimes I do feel a complete pillock.

Anyway, it comes time to trundle off and Dawn waves from the upstairs window… well, it was either a wave or a furious ‘get the hell out of the street with all ya noise and bafoonary, people are trying to sleep’…. I think it was just a wave.

The ride itself was tough. It’s been a while since either of the two Crawley boys have troubled mud on a bicycle and the long, slow climbs took their toll.

Overall though I was quite pleased with the days riding. Macca was like a wheeled London city guide…every hill, climb or manoeuvre was teed-up with an introduction.

‘Slow climb coming up… steepens after the turn….. then steady to the top’

‘Tough climb… looks easy… is surprisingly hard and into the wind’

My favourite of the lot was when we were about to conduct a tricky gnarly and rooty left/right bend.

‘I’ve only every completed this a couple of times without having to walk the bike round’ says Macca… clearly expecting Drip and I to be walking bikes around.

I follow Macca. Macca clears the tricky section without stopping. It’s the first time he’s done it in years. Now it would take a complete twat to show-boat and go around like a hot knife through butter making easy what had been positioned as hard. It would have been like a giant ‘fuckyoumotherfucker’ whilst giving the finger behind poor Macca’s back.

Clearly Drip and I are two proper gentlemen who don’t just rock up at this sort of event looking like Vince and Jules at the end of Pulp Fiction only to embarrass our host by deploying rarely seen cycling talent to cast shadow over his own.

Who do you think we are…? We’re not monsters you know.

Anyway, I went round that corner like a knife though hot fucking butter….. but boy did I pay the price later….

The promised post-ride breakfast was a dish of revenge…. Served piping hot.

Drip, who had the courtesy to put his foot down and pretend that it was too hard, got Avacado with his bacon, two cups of coffee… TWO!!!... double toast…. DOUBLE TOAST…all served up within minutes of his arse touching a McEvoy perching stool.

I had to wait….. a loooong time……. And then……. I got a piece of toast (un-buttered).

‘Er…. ‘ I said.

‘What?’ squawked Macca

‘Butter?’ says I.

Macca pushes it my way…. And adds a ‘would you like a fucking hot knife with that?’

Now I may be seeing shadows, but I think Macca might have had the hump. It was either my wizadary on two-wheels that hacked him off…. or it might have been the fact that on entering the McEvoy kitchen I immediately commented on the picture of Mark and the budgie (now ex-budgie) on the fridge.

On mention of the cheeky chappy Dawn cried for a solid 20 minutes…. How was I to know?

All-in-all though, a successful ride out. Fury vs Wilder looks set to be a thriller. Training has started in both camps and ahead of us lies many a press conference.

So finally, I’d like to end on an unusually positive note. Our 2018 pink cap, RTA, has been shamed by Damo into action and will shortly be sending out invites (printed on heavy-weight fine china-white stationary) to his inaugural 2018 pink cap social.

It will be lovely to see you all. We can expect a contribution from our Munich benefactor no-doubt, in line with the precedence he set last weekend.

This year’s tour was a little fractured to start with.

JT, my honorable (although diminutive) co-chair has been living in Munich for some time, so has reluctantly lobbed all administrative tasks my way. He still of course has a pointy figure hovering over the keyboard most hours of the day to fire off a bullet-like reminder should any delegated task fall in to the overdue category.

My approach this year had been to further convolute the whole process by sub-delegating further down the value chain. This year RTA picked up route-planning duties, shouldering the full burden once Moley had thrown the metaphoric towel into the Gaudeix corner.

JT arrived the night before to settle into Hotel Mariposa and to busy himself ready for our arrival next morning, where, his welcoming party preparation of sundry nibbles, iced towels, freshly pressed mango juice and 6 flutes of chilled Champaign could be seen exactly nowhere.

Quietly bikes were built and readied.

I don’t with to appear overly-critical at this early stage, however I feel it is important to highlight areas where improvement could be made.

My first area of improvement relates to a mathematical ratio.

13.2 is an acceptable ratio.

60 is a completely unacceptable ratio.

Back in the day when I rode motorcycles for my thrill-seeking pleasure, the most expensive item of an accessory nature was the helmet. An oft quoted saying was ‘If you’ve got a £10 head, get a £10 helmet’.

I valued my head at considerable more than £10 and hence why I could be seen peacocking about the place in the latest stealth MotoGP inspired bonce-protecting loveliness from Arai, makers of the very best.

And the same is true of bikes and their bags.

If you’ve got a ratty old Trek which you equally be happy to see as landfill as opposed to nestled between your legs, then by all means bag it with a carrier from Tesco.

If on the other hand you have a carbonfibre creation, with composite wheels, electronic shifting and less weight than a fat sparrow, then for fucks sake, buy a proper bag.

Is there a correlation between 2 visits to a bike shop for fixing 2 bikes hurled into fifty quid bags?

Answers on a postcard…

Next year we are going to be introducing the video referee to dish out ‘after the event’ fines and tickets to offences against cycling such as this little atrocity.

Anyway, peleton delayers aside, we had quite a good tour from a reliability perspective.

No flats at all in 3 days of riding.

Not bad going considering the excess baggage about 50% of the peloton where wheeling about the place.

It can be a harsh life travelling with a pack of cyclists. As a group, we are generally slow to acknowledge quality but lightening-fast to highlight weakness.

This year’s theme was most definitely fatness.

It all started when Dripping decided to relax on day one and let his guard down.

The relief a fat Victorian lady must feel when at the end of a day grazing on mutton, savory puddings and broiled swan, she releases the strings on her corset, was probably how Dripping felt as he gently supped an ale whilst not ‘tensed’ or ‘sucking it in for dear life’ sitting quietly in the sun.

It was harsh and cruel for Mac to take a picture of Dripping at rest in such an unguarded state. The resulting snap caused almost immediate physiological damage, which was then added to by verbal slappery of the worst kind from almost all.

Macca’s boobs got a much lower level of attention than would otherwise have been.

But the real crime in the whole torrid ‘fatgate’ affair, was a quietly outed photo from Colchester Mac which showed what looked like a Michelin Man ballooned around a struggling Cannondale, legs bouncing hard off an impressive midriff as the owner snuffled and puffed his sorry arse up a hill.

That night James in a moment of shocking and completely unexpected kindness said to me ‘You’ve put on a bit of timber this year’…..

It’s about as nice as he’s ever been to me in the 15 years of friendship we have shared.

Ever.

Meanwhile, back in the Peloton, Whatsapp was on fire as fat Michelin man took a breather from cycling, sat down, drank a beer, guzzled food and then promptly took a micro-nap to allow his body to digest this latest onslaught of calories.

The peloton…. They can be mighty cruel to those built for comfort.

Anyway…let’s move on. Let’s talk compliments….

‘Love the tattoos’

‘You’re girlfriend is very pretty. The plastic she has had inserted in the chest area is both proportionally perfect and pleasing to the eye’

‘Nice denim’

‘Wow.. impressive steed’.

All of the above are probably good ways to make a hells angel feel special.

Alternatively, you could surprise the life out of him by slapping him on the arse as you cycle past at 15 mph…. showing shock and dismay on your face and general surprise that he hadn’t apparently heard your tinckly bike-bell.

I arrived at a stationary Peloton to find Macca being verbally abused by a very angry biker who was busy calling us all arseholes……. I mean he was right…. Must have been a lucky guess.

This was another visible demonstration of Macca’s intolerance to a good swathe of human kind.

On the flight out, Moley’s seat on the plane had been taken by a Turkish lady of more senior years and built like I will be if I don’t stop eating constantly.

She was resting up from the exertion of having had to climb the stairs at the rear of the bus and drag her cabin bag the 6 yards to her seat. The bag was then occupying Macca’s seat whilst she appeared to be cuddling it.

This was clearly a cue for some helpful soul to then lift it into one of the overhead lockers and help her out.

Macca, ignoring this cue like the plague, barked at her. He informed the startled greek lady that he owned the seat, not her bag, and would she kindly get a shift on and move it.

The plane went awkwardly quiet.

Trembling, the lady dressed in black wobbled to her feet and with oscilating bingo wings hoisted the bag upward. There was a moment or 2 when none of us could be sure the bag was going to make it. Like an Olympic weightlifter going  for a PB, there was a pause, a grunt and then a final push… the bag was in.

Macca looked on in bland indifference.

She sat down, glazed with a sheen of garlic and thyme perspiration.

I think secretly Macca was hoping for an engine issue, a wayward turbofan blade and the exiting of the Greek weightlifter from the above-wing window seat.

He fumed quietly for most of the flight.

I suppose I should at some point talk about the cycling.

As with all these tours there is a lot to cover. But, as with most years, I generally can’t be arsed doing so and instead revert to the well-established highlights list.

So, here goes for G18, Malaga;

• Dripping confessing to having voted tactically in previous tours when it came to the yellow cap. Berlusconi-esque in its political nefariousness • C&N orange camo base layer • Mrs RTA’s contribution to the tour…. Can’t name it for legal reasons, but it went down exceptionally well • RTA’s ghost-like completion on date realisation • General higher standard of dress quality (although I still feel the shame and hurt from the explicit savaging I got from Dripping on the yellow cap voting paper… he went into enough detail to require and appendix FFS…) • Damo’s use of the back pen on photos • Whilst he did fuck all in his season of pink, Damo did at least sort out everyone elses mechanical catastrafucks whilst on tour • RTA’s route planning. Magestic. Simply nailed it to the floor. The pink was going one way only after 3 days of beautiful scenery • I hate losing. I especially hate losing to Dripping. I especially especially hate losing to Dripping twice. First time I made an error of timing. After having nearly lost a lung hunting down my prey I should have tailed his sorry ass for half a K before nailing the finish. I didn’t and paid heavily. Day 3’s mechanical was akin to running out of petrol 50 yards short of the finish line. I was running in the red and Drip snuck in and nicked my lunch. Absolute bastard. • Col Mac’s ‘Spam’ top • Macca’s deep-seated suspicion of foreign restaurants… he had me convinced that the preparers of our final meal where going to triple the bill, hack our phones, empty our accounts, spit in our food and quite possibly steal our children. What they actually ended up doing was serving us food which was simply sensational and probably the best meal I’ve eaten in the last 12 months, and then go on to charge us very modestly for it too. • Strange fact number 1. Everything edible in Malaga is cooked in beef fat. • Strange fact number 2. There is nothing wrong with 7 over 40 year olds drinking pink gin with berries in the glass. Completely hetrosexual and in keeping with the modern men we are. (On reflection, I think Colchester Mac way have swerved the gin actually) • If I have to hear one more bloody time about how good wahoo is…… you didn’t invent the fucking thing for the love of sweet baby Jesus… • Shit Garmins • The descent on day 3…on day one going up it I nearly died…. On day 3 coming down I could have cried…. Probably the best descent this peloton has tasted. • This year’s tour caps…. Top quality. • A vintage year that saw our first triple-cap…. ! Yes, my (well deserved) orange nailed a hat trick of caps (although only 2 physical caps probably maketh the point moot). • Desire takes many forms. But few have the strength and longing that have been displayed with the force of a Dripping wanting yellow. He may have ‘bought’ the cap, but god it was worth it to see his little face!! • Murdering 9 oranges to make 1 drink

And finally, whilst we have our highlights list, we also have a lowlights list. This one is my own personal list…. Only 2 entries… and neither of them spotted or witnessed by the Peloton;

1. On unpacking my bike and reassembling, somehow my fat fucking fingers and squinty eyesight have managed to crush the Di2 cable that runs the front mech…. FFS… bike now on turbo in just the little ring…. Horrible humble and apologetic call to Damo/Amy coming shortly. I can actually feel Damo’s eyebrows raise as he reads this…. (and can actually here him say ‘well you’re a fucking idiot aren’t you’…..) 2. Do you know what Raybans hitting tarmac at 20 mph sound like? No? It took me a while to figure it out too…. Well, 10 miles worth of fast riding to be precise…. And then I sulked quietly for 20 mins when I realised that day 2 would be the last time I went our armed with more than one pair of sunnies…… I kepy it quiet because Trusler would have definitely shit himself laughing at that one…..

So there we have it. Drip and Mac need new bike bags if they are to show their cycling faces ever again, Macca needs to take a tolerance pill twice daily, Damo needs to tut in my general direction, JT needs to not mention sunnies to me ever again, Moley needs to get his shit together in readiness for G19 and RTA needs to take a well deserved bow to a round of applause from the Peloton.

Malaga, G18…. Magic.

Christmas eve and all is quiet.

All except for my grumbling legs.

In the latter half of 2017 my training commitment has been nothing short of shocking.  As you know, a couple of house moves and much a foot at ‘Post-it’ Guildford HQ is enough to keep a boy busy and broadly out of mischief.

Peloton news has been less than prolific too. In fact, there have only been 3 this year, this being the 4th.

At the beginning of the year I went massively off-piste and rambled much about my dabblings in the world of Crypto currency and Bitcoin.

Much has happened in this space. It’s been a wild 2017 with massive peaks and massive troughs in values.

On the plus side for me, the small amount I put in I’ve now taken out. So at the end of the year I can now say that my flirtation with Bitcoin will not have lost me anything…. Any bits left are now all Brucie-bonuses.

On the plus side, with a little bit of float I’ve withdrawn I’ve finally done the unthinkable (some would say ‘the inevitable’) and followed JT/Macca/Drip and bought a Turbo Trainer. Not only that, but I’ve only gone and downloaded Trainer Road. I fucking hate it when this shit happens…. You lot do something… I moan and groan… but eventually, begrudgingly, follow suit…. Like a small child with his Parka coat attached to his head by the hood alone, looking down and kicking a pebble along the road… hanging back and generally sulking.

I didn’t know I was going to buy a Turbo, but when I rocked up at C&N yesterday Damo had already put one aside for me.  I think it’s been there waiting for 18 months.

Both Damo and Amy muttered technical jibber jabber for 5 mins before sending me on my way with little in terms of instructions and much in terms of a heavy box.

Which brings me to my first piece of real news.

Damo has had a vagina sown into the top of his leg. He’s kept it quiet, but deep down I could sense his excitement.

Apparently a minor procedure to remove something or other from the top of his right pin has left a ‘wound’ which I think Damo is considering using as man-bait. How he has reached this conclusion is unclear. I think he may well have tried it out himself….. Clemo will be absolutely itching for a go on it.

When we’ve all uttered those magic words ‘Damo, go fuck yourself’ I’ll bet none of us actually thought he’d have surgery and follow through with it.

Just goes to show… cyclist mentality. Committed.

Although deeply disturbed by many elements of the conversation at Damo’s gaff, I put it all aside and set the Turbo up last night and downloaded trainer road. I went to bed knowing that the morning would bring my first FTP test.

Holy shit… did I not like that.

An hour on a bike in my kitchen… it doesn’t seem right.

Still, I’ve got my first 6-week plan and I’m going to stick with it.

I need to get in shape otherwise I will find myself at the blunt end of the Peloton for the 2018 trip. ….next year Gaudeix are off to Spain with some beautiful cycling around and about Malaga and Andalusia.

Damo is on Pink cap duties and as such has already taken it upon himself to sort out the tour caps. The power has gone to his head… watch this space for shocking revelations as Damo rips up the conventional rule book and re-invents the whole damn charade.

At some point soon he/she will also no doubt arrange a curry night…..(Come on Pittock., pull your finger out (might need to remove your cock form it first though))….

And so to the 2018 predictions. It’s been a quiet year for our riders, so this could all be speculation and supposition. …. But let’s face it, that’s never stopped me before.

Damo

Pink cap and still looking like a racing snake in lycra…. came top in the ‘non-gender specific entrant’ of the 2017 LGBT cyclocross challenge. Expect a solid top-quartile performance. Definite podium material and if any one is ever likely to award themselves the pink cap, then it’s this fucker.

Drip

For 2018 he’s dripping in confidence. He’s been battering the Turbo and he’s looking sharp. He’s done more mileage than everyone else (probably) and he’s determined to do really well. You wouldn’t bet against him blowing up though, but for next year, I wouldn’t bet against him nailing it either.

If he doesn’t win yellow I don’t think he’ll ever come again.

JT

Our diminutive co-chair. I don’t give a fuck how much muttering he does about his condition or lack of miles. He may be tiny but he is a strong cyclist. As always, he’ll be there making me feel good by riding with me. I’ll appreciate it but deep down I’ll know he could disappear into the distance with little effort. A solid performance expected.

C-Mac.

My challenge to ColMac this year is to descend and leave more than a cigarette paper’s width between his front wheel and my back wheel. Plus, a new local greeting is now required for Spain…. No more Bonjourno!

I think he and Drip are still doing their local loosener in prep for the tour. Let’s reserve form judgment on both until their annual ride is completed.

Macca

Very quiet year from our favourite Airplan-man.  Will his form have gone? Will he have grown breasts to match Damo’s new lady bits? Will he fire a withering look at anyone who has the temerity to make a common grammatical error? (Woe betide anyone who misplaces or dangles a modifier, is vague with a pronoun reference or (heaven forbid) misuses an apostrophe).

He too will moan about condition, but you can’t take the robot out of Macca.

Moley

For fucks sake Moley, will you just please do enough to win the Pink cap this year so we can all just move on…

RTA

He’ll look the same… he’ll ride the same… but please, for the love of fuckery, not those shoes again….!

Hoppo

Repeat….’Don’t let Dripping beat you… don’t let Dripping beat you… don’t let Dripping beat you.’

And so to 2018. Look forward with enthusiasm, curiosity and hunger for a new year. I know I am. Get amongst it.

Merry Christmas and a happy and healthy new-year mon fuckerettes.

Love

At least once a year for the last 6 years, we have been away on a cycling tour.

It all started with JT and I and a trip to Majorca.

Here’s a fact for you, long brushed under the carpet of time. I actually arranged most of the riding and routes on the first trip. Yep.. I did.

I Google-Earthed each route to make sure it was an actual road and not some farmer’s track. I mapped them, Garmin’d them and then sent them to JT.

All was well.

Some of the iconic long-time favourites were first born here. Col De Sa Batalla, the decent into Soller.

There were also a couple of howlers in there too. The strip in Magaluf… not my finest cartographical moment. JT trying his best to hide his ‘WTF-face’ as we glided down the main strip on a casual Saturday afternoon. Since this point, his patience his shortened considerably and his control-freakery at all things planning has well and truly taken a Japanese knott-weed grip on the roster.

I didn’t mind handing the planning gauntlet back in all honesty. It’s easy enough to do, but the absolute merciless hammering you get from the baying Peloton should you as much as put a wheel wrong takes what little shine there is off the whole process. That and the constant squeaky-wheel that is our diminutive friend, always asking for a progress update. He would see it as delegation…. But that would assume that some level of responsibility had passed to allow minor decision making…

‘Big assumption’ the little man would no doubt counter.

At times I’ve felt very much the beaten-wife…” I just do it to keep him happy… you know… for a quiet life and all that”

I say all that though… but I know that deep down… every member of the Peleton loves his ruthless efficiency at planning and organising. For most of the team, all that is required of you is to follow a list of instruction on what to pack (I mean, it’s like a professionally guided tour, it really is) and then turn up at an airport on the time written in the e-mail (plus numerous reminders).

Turn up, go where told, cycle, arrive home. Bosh. That’s it But, as long as Gaudeix are going on tour, JT will plan it and sanction the decisions, I’ll sort the caps and the shirts (for the Grande Tours) and then completely exaggerate everything via the printed word and everyone else will turn up and contribute to making these trips what they are… a great experience. Each and every one.

This edition of Peloton news will take a slight departure from the usual recounting of tour heroics.

Yes, I will be covering some of the big moments as we work through the following process…. however I feel a slight shift in format is required to keep things a little fresh.

‘Feedback… it’s the breakfast of champions’…well, so sayeth an old Peloton laggard…. a man who hasn’t edged his cycling beak out of the comfort of his nest (meringue?) for some time.

I couldn’t agree more.

In my stationary cupboard team (I’m proud of each and every one of them), we have deep and intensive feedback sessions…. Not so much your classical 360 degree feedback (i.e. the ‘to me, to you’ type session so favoured by many a progression management guru). No, I like to call mine the 180 sessions… I tell ‘em what I think… if they know what’s good for ‘em, they listen. Easy.

And so my little Peletonistas…. The price of a tour ticket is a seat at the 180 degree listening post. Pin ‘em back please, I feel wisdom a coming…

Dripping

Pros

·      Excellent preparation this year.

·      Did the most miles

·      Talked up his ‘yellow cap’ chances (more to follow on that subject)

·      Didn’t bonk

·      Looked like a giant in some photos

·      Has invented a new shade of pink (Dripink)

·      Didn’t crash

·      Shouted extra rides

Cons

·      ‘Yellow cap’ effort…. A little like that old Morecombe and Wise sketch… all the right clothes… just in the wrong order…

·      Still surging (although much enhanced ability means he now troubles those ahead as opposed to those behind)

·      Still saying a ‘hail Mary’ on every landing. “I always say it and we always land safely”… difficult to argue with… I’ll let Macca stew over the best way to explain correlation

·      Animal cruelty or butchering a pair of beautiful white leather Rapha shoes…. Which is the most morally disturbing?.. … answers stapled to a cat to the usual address please

JT

Pros

·      Got yellow (just).

·      Solid riding

·      Down-hill ability in marginally sketchy conditions was excellent. I watched whilst tailing him. Unusual.. but in mixed conditions, he’s too fast for me.

·      Booked the flights… did all the initial ride prep a couple of years back when he was in one of his awkward ‘between jobs’ situations…. You know the ones…. where he gets rumbled for extracting cash from a large corporate, then somehow manages to get even more cash from said corporate and then lands a promotion with another corporate… who export him to solve a problem (but still give him cash)… realise he ain’t letting go… and then…(it’s a strange noise if you’ve ever heard it)… the corporate just sighs… JT rubs one dry hand against t’other…. And the family moves on. (As an aside, I’m running a book on JT retiring at 50, golden handshake, golf handicap down to single figures, member of an exclusive club…. 3/1. I’m hedging that with an outside bet with the local bookies that sees him busted for snorting coke of the arse of a transsexual rent-person…8/1). Still… he asked for and took no credit for any of the planning this year…. but he deserved it. Well done sunshine.

Cons

·      He still likes to gently wake me at 3am by drinking 2 pints of water in a way you would imagine a parched elephant with a heavy cold might attack a half empty bath…. Seriously… I thought internal organs were going to felch from his nose…

·      People-tolerance levels still only marginally warmer than sub-zero

Damo

Pros

·      Every year we see a little bit more of the true cyclist. Crushingly consistent at the top of the pack

·      Nearly aced yellow as well as pink

·      Aced pink (not just a wrong righted from the year of JT’s catastrophic ‘we’re leaving the Euro’-type pronouncement either… )

·      Shoes

·      Bike

·      Bike

·      Bike

·      Cannondale

·      Bike

·      For Damo.. was surprisingly un-grumpy…and… rode back more than once for a straggler.

·      Bought me breakfast a few days later

·      Relentless replaying of the ‘red nose’ gag on Moley. It was a narrow bandwidth of attack, but it was superbly executed.

·      Cyclist mentality

Cons

·      Has a habit of being dismissive of exceptionally difficult rides. I remember Paris Roubaix… My Comment: “Fuck that was tough eh Damo… I ain’t doin that again…ever”……reply: “was alright.. I’d like to do the full route. It’s only as hard as you make it”.

·      A quiet Mr Sock this year

Macca

Pros

·      Well kitted out… as per…

·      New shit on his bike (it’s like a ‘where’s Wally’ game with Macca… we all know he’s got new shit going on…. But who can spot it?).

·      Consistent riding from the Robot

·      Bought me lunch and talked soothingly to me at the airport. Thank you Macca.

·      How the fuck can a man have that much time off work, not cycle and lose weight… I mean what the fuck…. If I had had a quarter of the ‘leisure time’ that our flying man has had… I would be the size of a house… even our old chum Amesy… he has to work 14 hour days just to keep his biscuit habit the right side of obsessive.

 I genuinely think Mark is half-man, half-machine. I’m going to have a chat with his roomy, Damo. I have a theory that when he goes to bed, he secretly plugs himself in to charge. You can bet your he’s got an Apple lightening connector…. Perish the thought that he would have something as vulgar as a kindle re-charging point.

A little like his over-sized iPhone charging case, Macca has additional spare batter capacity. We saw it a few years ago when he dressed all in white and revealed his penis to the world. (I say penis, on reflection I think we’ve found his charging point.)

Cons

·      Less tolerance than Trump (or should that be fewer, Mark?)

·      Has perfected the withering look (closely followed by the sarcastic smile). This little beauty is normally reserved for Dripping and I when we have the temerity to propose some sort of cycling knowledge… I mean… the very thought….

·      One of 2 people who constantly correct my grammatical meanderings. (In my view apostrophe’s should be used gushingly and with abandon)

Colchester Mac

Pros

·      Enthusiasm

·      Enthusiasm

·      Enthusiasm

·      Dug deep and rode consistently

·      Nearly witnessed our joint demise atop Stelvio… who’d have thunk it… both nearly killed by a motorcycle falling from the sky

Cons

·      Shouting 2 words and 2 words only at Italians (‘Bon journo’… I can still hear it at night when I listen to the wind on cold evenings)

·      Descending as if riding a tandem. Why have the safety of distance when you can have the knife-edge of proximity!

RTA

Pros

·      Very very nearly got Pink.

·      Very strong riding

·      Modest

·      Sacrificed the most difficult climb… one he would have aced.. to support Drip… top effort RTA and it didn’t go unnoticed.

Cons

·      Only one thing here to see folks…. The fake home-made Rapha shoe.

Moley

Pros

·      Took the stick from Damo with broad shoulders

·      Always smiling…

·      The seminal tour moment for me goes to Moley.  Day 3 had me looking deep into my soul… I’ve never crested a more difficult combination than Mortirollo followed immediately by Gavia. I genuinely think it took me near to my cycling edge of pain. But Moley… he laughed in the face of my anguish and he went deeper…. I’ve never seen a man so wracked by the utter effort and ensuing exhaustion… the day Moley crashed through the saloon doors atop Gavia, cowboy-style, slumped down in his seat…. Tears in his eyes, will live with me a long time….a truly heroic effort. No one worked harder that day.

·      Best bike bag by some margin

Cons

·      Starts talking about his chances of winning pink a good 6 months in advance

·      He has publically confused the sun with the moon. Tricky heavenly bodies to differentiate, admittedly. One a sphere of hot plasma, about 300,000 times the mass of the earth, accounting for 99.86% of the total mass of the solar system…. The other a debris strewn dead lifeless satellite with a reflectance marginally greater than asphalt…. I mean it’s a tough spot even with a sharp eye….

 And finally….. me

Pros

·      Didn’t fuck up the planning

Cons

·      Nowhere near enough mileage

·      Didn’t make nearly enough of the Moley ‘moon/sun-confusion’ moment

·      Nearly killed a man in a wheel chair along with the pensioner pushing him

  …and there we have it. Another one is under the belt and locked into the memories

My final reflection takes me back to Damo’s comment in the Alps a couple of years back….

‘Wherever you are, be there’..

When I ride in the mountains and I look up…I am always, always there. Always. The high mountains…..my favourite riding.

Tour selection for G18 will start shortly.

Ride safely my little fuckerettes….

Last Saturday our resident rabbit’s foot, RTA, celebrated his 40th birthday. Mrs RTA had organised a surprise bash to startle our little friend and had gone to the trouble of arranging an awful lot of real ale to be delivered to the local church.

I trundled in to the celebrations after the initial brouhaha had died down and managed to have a proper catch-up with Moley.

From the get-go he was pensive. I’d even go so far as to say nervous. The very act of transacting a normal rational conversation saw him shiftily looking over my shoulder every 2 minutes.

After a while he stood a little closer and whispered ‘You’re not going to write down everything I say are you…. You know… make stuff up… this conversation isn’t going to be re-written for the history books and then circulated along with a load of made up nonsense in the next Peloton news is it?’.

Moley…… how could you say such a thing…. I mean really…..

I feel, as usual, honour bound to recount at least some of the conversation. All I could promise Moley was that I would do so with humility and balance…..

Anyway, Moley and I happened to be engaged in a rather interesting conversation with RTA’s sister, who it turns out, is not only a track-bike champion, she’s a world track-bike champion. Not only is she a world track-bike champion, but she’s a world-record holding track-bike champion.

Young Moley and I were in illustrious company.

Now, RTA’s sister is a lovely and modest lady. Along with Rich, her boyfriend (and also a talented cyclist) they make quite the performance couple.

After much genuine interest from me on the subject of great sporting achievement, sister of RTA was just wrapping up when Moley…at this point completely unable to contain himself any further, blurted out (at almost shouting volume) “We’ll that’s great, but I’m the 9th best lifesaver in the world…. And I have a world ranking for bog-snorkling”

Silence fell upon the church hall venue.

Nobody said anything.

Then in the far corner a young child started to cry.

Moley had us all cornered. The only way out of this awkwardness was to gently encourage him to tell his tale of derring do.

In short, at some point in the early eighties I think, a young Molester was at some sort of life saving competition. As far as I can gather, this involved a swimming pool, some dead bodies, some drowning people who were panicking, some drowning people who were not panicking (they were just bobbing) and some sort of record keeping official.

The job at hand for out errant life-saving Mole-man was to prioritise those whose attention he pay heed to.

Moley surveyed the carnage ahead of him. Tricky.

Those who were squealing for help were probably ok he figured.

Those of were dead, were probably not ok…. But perhaps may be classed as beyond reasonable repair.

Those who were quietly bobbing may, just may, be worth saving (from a ‘success rate percentage’ perspective).

Moley felt he had selected well and that his choices would impress the watching judge.

In he goes and attacks the silent bob-ers with gusto.

Now, I’m not quite sure how the ranking for this event unfolded.

I’m not even sure how many entrants there were. If he’s 9th best in the world, I’m guessing the maximum number of entrants would be 7.5 billion.

To be 9/7,500,000,000 is a fair achievement in anybody’s book. I’m not sure the field was quite that wide though. I certainly don’t remember being involved.  It also would seem odd that this has never arisen in conversation before…. Or that we haven’t seen his name as ‘consultant’ on the end credits of Baywatch.

This level of achievement was all to much for the enthralled crowd to bear and whilst I was genuinely interested in his Bog-snorkelling placement (I think Moley muttered something about persevering through the Welsh weather and an attack by a tiger) I couldn’t quite rid get out of my mind the process that they went though in dumping dead bodies in a swimming pool for Moley and co to rescue….

Was it a private school thing? Maybe JT did something similar when he was a boarder. Macca almost certainly has. Either way…. Odd.

Sunday morning came and Moley had agreed to go out for a spin. He took me on the backroads to Boxhill…. Crushed me on every climb, then took me to a vineyard.

This was a nice touch I thought. Turned out it was just another route up onto Ranmore common. Bloody gorgeous though and a side of the Surrey Hills I’d not seen before.

We eventually landed on a very busy Boxhill and did 2 or 3 repeats. Following a heavy Saturday night and no food of any particular quantity, Moley finally succumbed to the dreaded bonk. No energy. His timing was perfect. He’s just shouted at me to ‘Hurry the fuck up Hoppo’ on the final ascent and not a minute later it was clear he had over-committed.

I smiled a wry smile and went past him….. when a man is down… there is only one thing to do… put the fucking hammer down and kick him in the nads.

This I duly did by scarpering away up the hill.

I knew that Moley was furious inside… I could sense it… but I simply asked myself the question…’What would JT have done?’….. yep…. He’d have muttered a quiet ‘fuckety bye now’ and got the hell away from the bonking Mole.

Cycling. It’s a lonely sport at times.

Which brings us neatly on to this year’s trip.

I’m nervous.

…but I’m not alone. I’ve done the routes…they are horrific…. I’ve consulted with our favourite mini dictator…. He has made no amends…. We’re pretty much locked in. We will have a choice in terms of the actual schedule, but the routes…. they is the routes..!

How’s this for size…. 60 miles and 11,000 foot of climbing…. Or how about 28k at an average of 11%.... aint none of you smiling now!

There will be no stabbed rat up any of these (Drip….. steady now…. Steaaady…..)

G17 is the survival tour.

I’ll be sending the official note out shortly with timings, final costs and other minor points of administration shortly. In the meantime though…. Do have the odd restless night won’t you.

When the horror subsides though, just remember, we will be cycling some of the toughest climbs in Europe. Our wheels will be following the tracks of Champions and we will be able to watch the Giro in future with appreciation, admiration and respect for those who attack at pace. Italy will be sensational. Memories for life ladies…. And no doubt the usual pink cap debacle.

We’re nearly there…..

G17…..

And finally, should aquatic disaster beset out days in the sun, remember…..bob silently in the water and look slightly forlorn…. Moley’s a coming….!

Game on my little fuckerettes….. game on!

 2016 saw a distinct drop-off in biking activity… well, communal activity at any rate.

Kids weekend sporting activities now in full flow has meant that for me, snatched rides and some summer commuting was about my lot.

Dripping probably gets the prize for peaking his nose out of the door more than most, whilst I would think Moley tips the mileage record.

Macca has generally been cowering in the corner of the garage and looking at his bike through fingers pressed to face. Biking mojo having leaked down the drain at some point in the summer months.

JT has been busy clinging on to his job with Homer Simpson…. In a crazy maneuver to avoid the axe again, he has decided to hide in Germany… a bit extreme maybe, but in all fairness, if anyone can wrangle cash out of a company and an expense bill that would shame Trump, then it’s our boy on his tiny bicycle.

2016 was a bit of a distracted year for me. Work in the world of post-it notes and flip charts was a little on the wild side and out of the office I had taken an interest in the murky world of crypto-currencies.

I read a book on the Dark Net at the end of 2015 and was taken by the notion of the underworld trading sites such as Silk Road… think of it like an Amazon, but specialising in drugs and other illicit stuff. These websites, far from being a place where dark-surfing Joe Public gets ripped off, actually thrive on doing the whole ‘customer service’ thing as well as they can. They have customer satisfaction reviews and ultimately the better experience they give to their dope-eyed buyers, the more traffic they get. This actually improves both the quality and the price of the product.

Buy shit gear in a dodgy back-alley with a pusher…. Or order on-line and have quality stuff delivered to your door in plain packaging with little risk to you as a user.

So how do you get around the issue of payment?

Putting this sort of transaction through PayPal or your debit card seems a trifle risky… and your Tesco clubcard is probably a no-no too.

This is where the crypto-currency comes in.

Back in 2009 one of the first digital currencies came into existence. Bitcoin.

There are however are a number of problems that digital cash needs to overcome;

·      How do you create the money in the first place… you can’t just print it can you?

·      How do you make sure you can’t spend the money twice?

·      Who controls it…. interest rates and all that sort of stuff?

·      How do you keep it securely?

·      How do you know when it’s been sent and received?

..and many many more….

Bitcoin solves these little conundrums in a tidy little way.

Firstly Bitcoin is mined…. That’s how new Bitcoin are ‘minted’. Anyone who runs the Bitcoin ‘software’ or to put it more accurately, becomes a node in a peer-to-peer network, can apply computing power to the network. This power is rewarded by giving the user Bitcoin (not strictly an accurate description, but gives you the broad idea).

In the early days, the computing power required to mine was relatively modest, so getting coin was easy. Now it requires massive power to earn essentially free money. But in short, this is how the supply of new Bitcoin is created.

Everyone who uses Bitcoin has a copy of the Bitcoin ‘blockchain’ on their computer. The blockchain is essentially a large register of all transactions. When you send BTC (the Bitcoin unit of currency) to someone else, a note of it is made on the register, and every other user…. Everyone… has his or her blockchains updated with a note of the transaction.

This transaction essentially gets verified by every other user… and so…. You can’t spend the money twice… or claim it didn’t arrive.. because everyone can see on their blockchain exactly what has happened.

This means that Bitcoin, unlike normal currency, is essentially ‘trustless’. You don’t need a bank to clear the cash or confirm it’s there… it’s all done by validating with the blockchain.

The implications of this are far reaching. For a start, it takes banks right out of the equation. It means you can send currency all over the planet at literally zero cost… no fees.. no clearing… from me .. to you…. Simple.. no friction. BTC is decentralised and largely autonomous. No one sets interest rates. Except for the market.

Banks aint to happy about this… this means that essentially BTC could well be rocking up and nicking their lunch… not good.  Which is why much fuss has been made of BTC as a currency. They don’t like it up ‘em.

 In the last 3 years the biggest climb in value of any currency (including gold) has been BTC. It has been in short, phenomenal.

In May 2010, Laszlo Hanyecz decided to go on one of the geek forums and offer 10,000 BTC for anyone who could get him 2 Papa John pizza’s delivered to his door. One of his crypto chums soon answered and a deal was struck. This is probably one of the very first ever public trades with BTC. At the time, 10,000 BTC was worth about £15.

As I type this, those BTC (which will still be in existence somewhere) are worth £7.4m

An expensive Pizza.

BTC even started to pop out of niche. Amazon started taking it as a currency. There is even a chain of computer shops, with one near Admin HQ in Guildford that take BTC.

There are cashpoints in London where you can deposit £’s and get BTC sent to your digital wallet.

So, will it ever go really big and mainstream? Well, yes and no. Current market Cap of BTC is £14bn…..(i.e the total value of all the BTC in existence). But the tech that is likely to prove revolutionary is the blockchain.

A potential use could be to replace the land registry. All property deals and deeds noted on an immutable blockchain. That would take a hell of a lot of cost out of that little process. And there are plenty more applications too…. Watch and wait… it’s coming.

So where did I go with all this?

Well, I decided that whilst interested, actually going on the dark web was risky. Once you’ve seen something, you can’t unsee it. Whilst I would like to have a look round the market sites, I don’t want to stumble over something horrific that’ll get burned on my mind, so I’ve decided to stay on the sunny side of the web.

I have however since about January 2016….(just over a year!!)… started buying BTC (buying with £ as opposed to mining).

At first I got a chum to get me some by using a BTC ATM, but since then I’ve got a proper account and have now branched out into other digital currencies.

Ether being the next one…  and the most recent, Monero.

With the digital exchange I use you can start to trade one against the other for very little cost. Shunty would be proud of me.

Digital currency fluctuates wildly. When I first bought BTC it was about £350 for 1. It now trades at £750 and has been as high as £950. With such volatilities, and the fact that BTC and Ether aren’t; necessarily pegged together, comes the opportunity to trade one against the other.

I do nothing more than play with it though, and the amount of cash I’ve put into it is an amount I’m prepared to just disappear altogether if it all collapses.. but.. it has been an absolute education.

When the internet landed, I kind of missed it… didn’t really realise what was happening until it had already started to happen.

This time I feel like I’m in there whilst change is a foot… right now. I’m not sure where it will all go, but it will change things… in big ways.

Will Bitcoin, Ether,Monero or one of the several hundred now out there be the ones? Who knows.. maybe… maybe not…but… the blockchain is here to stay.

As are the dark markets.

Consumer want and technology intrinsically wrapped together.

I think there is a quote from ‘Sexy Beast’ where Teddy Bass says something along the lines of ‘Where there is a will… and there is always a will…. There is a way… and there is always a faaahcking way….’

Interesting times and whilst I have reveled for a year in the world of the digital, I still look forward to the utterly binary sensory pleasure fast wheels on hot tarmac brings.

2017. Who knows what the future holds. A massive mixture of curiosity, pleasure and experience you would hope …. Surely it’s what we’ve all got to be aiming for?

That and a flash of pink.

And so, my little fuckerinoes, after many an episode, Peloton news now must draw to a final conclusion. Time to move on to something else and put this particular baby to bed.

What next? Who knows.

See you in Italy my little digital friends.

Shock is an interesting thing to see on a man’s face.

A while ago I recounted the tale of Eric and his missing snake. You’ll remember the family pet had gone walkabouts (well… as much as a snake walks anywhere) and was lost for a couple of days. The sound of a heavy serpent landing on carpet triggered no doubt a look on Eric’s face that could have been described as shocked… if not, at least mildly started. The snake had hidden out on top of the wardrobe and then made a leap for freedom. What prompted this sudden burst of frenetic airborne activity is still unclear to me.

Not long after, Clemo recounted to me a story from his youth (of which there are many).

This one involved him out for a run in Tillgate park, one of West Sussex’s areas of natural beauty. A youthful Clemo was jogging down a track when he felt a sharp bit on his leg. Low and behold he has been bitten… by a snake..in West Sussex..!

He’s very sketchy about the details. I pressed him with a line of questioning that could be described as ‘cynical’. I perhaps proposed that the oft heard about, ner seen large toothed worm of West Sussex may be the culprit.

‘It was a fucking snake.. I’m telling ya’….

You can usually tell when Clemo’s lying..(normally when in conversation with the tax man), and he appeared to me to be telling the story fairly straight.

I still reckon it was a small grass snake and not the anaconda-like serpent that nearly ate him whole as our erstwhile Chippy would have you believe.

Still, when fangs sunk into flesh, I’ll bet his face was a picture.

Over the last couple of weeks, I have been spooked into shock. As you know, I’m a robust individual with few deficiencies and certainly a person you would describe as well able to deal with life’s little curved balls, so these events must have been significant (you’ll be thinking).

In the following text, I’ll highlight the arrival of each ‘shock face’ with a handy ‘shock face’ text (in inverted comma’s). ‘Shock face’…. Just like that bit.

Macca arrived at mine a few weeks ago for a little bash at the old ‘East run’. 34 hilly miles into East Sussex countryside.

As a man of aviation, you know he’s going to arrive on time. I have an unproven theory that he circles the area until exactly the right time and then, just as the committed ETA nears, he takes his final approach into Hoppo close. No ‘Shock Face’ required when he rocked up on the nose of good time.

We set of at what I consider to be a pace the wrong side of comfortable. He leads out…. All the way pretty much…

When we get to the EGCC hill climb, I find myself in front (JT has just made his ‘Shock Face’).

We climb at a reasonable pace… not hanging around…. Then from behind I hear the tinkle of a child’s bicycle bell.

‘Shock Face’.

‘If I get over taken by a child up this fucking hill, I’m going to jack this whole cycling lark in’ thought I.

It was no child though. For some reason, Macca has fitted a tiny bell to his Carbon fibre racing cycle. A bell…. I mean, why!?

Macca looked as pleased as he usually does when he manages to pull one over on me (i.e. pretty fucking pleased).

…. And so the ride continued.

We crested the never-easy Kidds hill at the half way point, and all was still good.

I’d decided (well… been firmly prompted) that I should lead for a while… Priory road is a mile and a half of incline, starting by a pretty church and then leading through the forest.

I pressed on…. As we entered the forested area, I heard a little tinkly bell about 150 yards back….

I looked behind… and there was Macca in the middle distance… dropped….(‘Shock face’).

There are few things more pleasurable in life than seeing the McEvoy cycling robot have an off-day. I mean they don’t come very often, but when they do, they should be savored and talked about loudly.

A previous day mountain biking, a touch flu, explosive diarrhea, they were all cited as reasons. Macca pulled up short of blaming a snake bite…. But I reckon he considered it.

Last week I was in Turkey on annual vacation. On arrival at the airport I didn’t see any ‘Wanted’ posters with a picture of my ears large and centre. Not one.

It was a little uncomfortable being in a county that borders Syria, has got the right hump with the Kurdish rebels and plays hosts to many a frequent bombing event

Not ingredients for your normal holiday, granted, but our little ‘all inclusive’ place was more than a grenade throw from the madness, so all was well.

At about the half-way point, I decided that a haircut was in order. They had a man on site for very such an eventuality, so off I went and purchased myself a trim.

I’m a man who is not unused to a haircut. I’ve been having them for years now. I know the score. He asks what I want…. I go with boring predictability… he says ‘of course sir’.. I say ‘can you cut the grey out’… we both chuckle and then settle into the matter at hand.. relaxed as old pros in each others company. Experienced barber…. Experienced customer. It works a treat.

Haircut finished with, I await the usual tour with the hand mirror…. I’ve got my line prepped and ready (‘great.. perfect…that’ll do for another coupla weeks’).

Instead of the tour though, the barber tries to set fire to my ears with what looks like a tiny petrol-soaked rag on a stick. (‘Shock face’).

The next minute is spent in terror as he goes about my (some say) interesting features with fire.

Not content with the flame assault, he also goes after my nose with his scissors and has a go at my eyebrows for good measure.

Who gave him the order to attack my ears?

Is this some new government crackdown of which I am blissfully unaware?

Were my ears marked men?

Who knows.

All I know is… they are now particularly tidy.

A reliable source informs me that once cut, ear-hair grows back at a frightening pace… longer…thicker…

I don’t know about that, but I have been having to do the old comb-over trick on the stuff since my return.

Today’s ride saw JT, Moley and I attack the Surrey Hills.

I’d been drinking quite heavily with Clements yesterday so it was painful. Very painful.

Lovely ride though. Moley dressed all in black (think ‘Burt Kwouk’ from the Pink Panther films and you’d be about right). JT back from his ‘claimed holiday’ in Greece, sporting skin whiter than a sheltered albino.

News on the street for JT is a potential imminent spell in Germany for his paymasters at Sky TV.

He tells me ‘it’s all a bit shit over there… I go over… I discover that shit aint done proper… I go again the next week… new shit emerges… I go again.. more shit… different shit to last time…. I need to go and sort it’.

Now, if you’re a German senior HR-type bod, the last thing you need on your tail is JT sniffin about your patch…. But he’s a coming…

During the course of the ride I got JT to confirm his list of top 5 sayings at work… Here we go, in reverse order;

5- ‘Shit’s gone down here.. I aint happy’

4- ‘This shit aint right…Klaus… what the fuck?’

3- ‘I’ve lifted the pebble…look.. there’s shit under there….Klaus.. are you looking?… at the pebble?… look… the shit’

2- ‘Klaus… you can’t see the shit for the shit… I mean it’s fucking everywhere’

1-    ‘I’d like a schnitzel and a pack of those peanuts you do….’

Whilst Moley was busy being Burt Kwouk, his feet were busy being Jospeh and the Technicolour raincoat. Socks of outrageous hue, worn for shock value I am convinced. Have a look at his ride on Strava… he was good enough to post 2 pics on me looking a) knackered and b) fat… so he followed it up with a final snap of Joseph feet.

It’s late. I’m tired. I’ve got work tomorrow. What was the biggest shock?

Ears attacked by fire?

Clements bitten by a snake?

JT cross at somebody for something?

I think you know the answer.

‘ding ding… wait for meeee’

Happy riding my little fuckerettes.