The other side of the watch

This morning I rode over to Tempsford to help out at the North Middx & Herts '100' - the organiser having emailed a plea for assistance.  Being a kindly soul (and having been in the position of desperately hunting for marshals and other helpers for an Association event in the past), I immediately accepted, but requested a role late in the event as I was planning to cycle over.  In the end I was asked to help the timekeeper by noting riders' numbers as they passed the finish point.

This was a novel version of the F1/100, apparently necessary because a triathlon was being held on the roads normally used for the event.  Essentially, the course used this morning had the riders doing Tempsford to Buckden three times (this being on the A1), then exiting at the Black Cat roundabout to do two laps of a finishing circuit on the A421.

The morning was very windy (good for me riding over to Tempsford with a tailwind!), and wet towards the end of the event - there were a significant number of non-starters and non-finishers.  As the riders passed the finish line not once, but twice, we had our fair share of tortured faces!  It was rather interesting to see the workings of a time trial from the perspective of the finish timekeeper (not least of which is the difficulty of reading unpinned numbers) and the calculations going on before relaying results to the race HQ by phone.  It certainly helps if riders call out their number as they cross the line, but this seems to be quite infrequent nowadays.

My return ride home was not nearly so pleasant as the outward ride.  On the way out, the roads were really quiet, there were quite a few sunny spells, and all was at peace with the world.  Humans were mostly tucked up in bed (except for mad time triallists), and the skylarks were aloft.  The ride back was a pretty hard slog into the wind, with some pretty hefty showers, and with cars racing past pretty much all the time.