Flies and Bikes Blog
Verulam CC '25', or how I seem to be spending a lot of time riding on the A1...
Another Sunday, another time trial, another spell of riding between Temsford, Sandy and Buckden on the A1. After last weekend's '100', it would have been nice to race somewhere else for a change, but once again early Sunday morning found me ploughing my way up and down the same on road. On a dull morning (only occasional sunny spells), there was a nagging breeze that should've made things easy northbound and a bit tougher heading back south but actually seemed to me to make it tough all the way round.Nothing much untoward during this race - I plugged southward to the Sandy roundabout where I got held up briefly by traffic, then headed north through the Black Cat roundabout to turn at the Buckden Roundabout. A fairly dull event, enlivened by catching a few riders en route, and hearing what sounded suspiciously like a puncture (but wasn't - good job I didn't stop to investigate). To be honest, my chest was still feeling the effects of Wednesday's club '10', and by the time I finished, I was coughing quite badly.
My period of irritating mechanical problems have continued - after the event, Geoff pointed out I was missing a chainring bolt (and since these are a particularly unusual type using a torx key and from Campagnolo a replacement is stupidly expensive) - presumably it's out there on the A1 somewhere. On the other hand, during the week, I identified the horrid banging noise that I thought was emanating from the head tube area was really the seat pack with tube, levers, patches and CO2 cylinder banging the seat post.
I finished in 58:30, which was a little disappointing.