The Kirks

When their family is away for the day most men have a little “me time”.  This normally involves slobbing around in your underwear  drinking whisky and watching Die Hard movies.  For some reason, when the family was away at Burleigh, I decided to see how far I could cycle in a day. I had already done a 160km ride round Cambridge but I thought I could maybe do 200.  As a friend calls it, “a marathon”.

It was a beautiful day in the morning and so the first 50km went pretty easily from Cambridge down to Saffron Walden.  No clouds and just a little bit of wind.  I stopped for my regular chocolate tiffin and a quadruple shot giant americano. The next bit was surprisingly easy going NE to Newmarket and the reason it was surprisingly easy was that the wind had got up from the SW.  I stopped for lunch in Newmarket and had sausage and chips listening to a really good busker.  Then it all got a bit horrible…

Although the landscape south of Cambridge is really nice.  Rolling farmland, woods, trees, pretty little villages, once you get north of Newmarket, it turns into…the Fens.  A flat blasted wasteland of huge fields with no hedges and no trees and dotted with crappy little towns like Soham and Earith.   It looks the way that I would think the Russian steppes to look like but minus the stark beauty, the high cheekboned women and the pristine snow.  It’s more fat arsed women and mud really.

Of course the route was going west right into the wind.  A 30km/h wind in your face is no bloody fun.  I’d done the first 100km at a 27km pace which I was feeling pretty good about but on the way west from Newmarket I was struggling to keep the speed above 20km.  Around 130km the distance really started to drag.  I noticed that the Earith Wind Farm was shut down due to the high wind which gave me a good 30 minutes of righteous fuming about the impracticality of renewable energy resources.  Oh, btw, everybody should read Sustainable Energy Without The Hot Air.  It’s a great book.  Then I got stuck at a railway crossing with broken lights and the police wouldn’t let me over for about 15 minutes during which I got really cold. 

The whole of the fens smells of leeks and onions since it’s harvest time.  They all fall off the lorries going to the storage depots and with the abundant road kill at this time of the year I could have made a pretty decent Rabbit Stew. Finally I turned left at Earith and headed back towards Cambridge and although the wind wasn’t behind me, at least it wasn’t in my face.   By the time the distance got to about 175km, I got a bit of  a second wind.  Back through Dry Drayton and Hardwick (which looks crappy enough to have been transplanted from the fens really).  Stopped for a chocolate bar and then battered on home.  I had to go round the block at home once just to get the distance up to 200.32km.

So, the stats:  200km in just under 8 hours.  Average speed of 25.2km/h.  Max speed 66.6km/h (the speed of the beast). 809m of climbing.  The route is on bikely as 200km Round Cambridge.

Lots and lots of music.  Prince was good at the beginning.  Listened to a lot of Busted and McFly on the way to Newmarket.  During the pain it was Thin Lizzy and ZZ Top.  And for the last hour, Tom Waits groaning poetry/songs were perfect.

So, I can do 200km.  I won’t do it again.  It was long, hard and lonely.  The bike was great and my LAACP meant there was no…err…unpleasantness but it’s a long long way.  Oh, and by the way, “Lance Armstrong’s Anti Cancer Pants” is a googlewhack.  Well, it’s more than 2 words but there’s no other site with that combination of words.