Cycle Shorts: The First 100 Miles

A café bar in Fabrica, which according to Lonely Planet is home to one of the world's most beautiful beaches and, in my opinion, is still one of Portugal's best-kept secrets, is a funny place to start a story about cycling between the more, shall I say bracing, Lincolnshire seaside resort towns of Cleethorpes, Mablethorpe, and Skegness. But it was in Fabrica, in the long, hot summer of 2018, that I was inspired to write about cycling in a much cooler place. Clearly, I’m talking about temperatures here.

It was the hottest August on record. As temperatures soared to 46˚C (115˚F) on the coast, the surrounding countryside burst into flames. Wildfires burned around the city of Faro and all the way along the coast to Silves and Portimão. Thousands of tourists and locals were evacuated as more than 23,500 hectares of land were scorched before the flames were quelled.

I wasn’t about to let a national emergency ruin a hard-earned family holiday and so our days at the beach, by the pool, and at the waterpark were spent under the occasional passing plume of smoke. In fact, other than nervously checking the horizon for flames every time the wind changed direction, our 2018 vacation in Portugal was very much like any other. Except for just one thing, it was too hot to cycle anywhere.

This was a pity because there is nowhere on earth I would rather ride my bike than Portugal.

My book Follow the Blue Line: Cycling the Algarve had just been published and I hoped to use the holiday to get back out on my bike and do some social media posts and perhaps film some YouTube videos to promote it.

Normally, I don't mind cycling in the heat. When people ask me about the challenges of cycling in the summer, I tell them that if you ride fast enough you create your own breeze. It's like having your own air conditioning unit on your bike. However, this only works until the mercury climbs above 40˚C. Then, even for a heat-loving lizard like me – the theory begins to melt.

I’d hired a bike for the day from a beachfront concession in Cabanas de Tavira. The fact the bike only cost €5 for the day should have, at the very least, sounded some warning bells. I really should have declined the boneshaker when the hire company couldn't even give me a pump to put some air in the back tyre and suggested I ask a rival hire company if they could help me out.

Even with a little extra air in the tyres, the ride felt like hard work. My initial plan for the day was to cycle out to Vila Real de Santo António on the Spanish border and back, a round trip of some 35km and a ride I’d done many times before. The heat and my bad bike had other ideas. I barely made it the 5km along the coast to Fabrica before I had to stop for a medicinal beer.

I sat on the small sea wall, overlooking the channel between the village and the beautiful, beautiful island beach, and sipped my beer while reconsidering my options. The heat just sapped my energy and the thought of getting back in that awful bike just didn’t appeal to me.

So there I was, sitting in paradise with a cold beer in my hand and I was thoroughly depressed.

How the hell could this have happened to me? Just a few months earlier I had cycled the entire length of the Algarve, without even breaking a sweat. Today, the sweat was pouring out of me quicker than I could replace it with alcohol (never a good idea in the heat).

Maybe I was getting too old for this sort of thing. What was a 47-year-old doing wasting his precious holiday time in the sun riding bikes for anyway? Surely, I should be back with the family at the apartment, embarrassing his kids in my inappropriate swimwear like the other dads around the pool.

I cut my losses and slowly headed back to Cabanas, where I spent the rest of the day on a sun lounger, sipping water and fretting about my lack of cycling stamina.

Little did I know at the time, in the course of that 10km ride there and back, I’d somehow managed to get heatstroke. I won’t go into too much detail about the condition, other than describing the next 48-hours as largely revolving around being sick from both ends while my youngest daughter Dotty ran around singing a self-composed song about “Diarrhoea Dave” and “Sicky Steve” coming to tea. This 48-hour period also included a flight home — an absolutely terrible experience when your body has essentially been turned into a double-ended, high-pressure hose.

While "Dave" and "Steve" disappeared within a couple of days of returning to the UK, the feeling of failure stuck around for many weeks. I would almost certainly have to do something about this. I needed a new challenge.

That challenge needed to be something big, something I could be proud of, something that would restore my masculinity.

I would never profess to be an athlete but distance is not usually a problem for me. Give me the best part of a day and I’ll happily put in a slow 50, 60, 70, or even 80 miles. There was one distance that had always evaded me — 100 miles. If I was ever to regain my confidence in my ability as a cyclist I knew that I would have to push myself past the ton.

Pick-up any glossy cycling magazine and you’ll find pages and pages of advice about riding specific distances. There will be advice on training schedules helping you work up to the big event, advice on the nutrition you’ll need to fuel your ride, and technical advice about preparing your bike. My eyes will typically gloss over within a couple of sentences. None of the cyclists on their £5,000+ bikes featured in these magazines look like me. I decided I didn’t need this elitist advice and set about planning my own route.

Let’s talk a little bit about my bike. To the untrained eye, it looks pretty swish. However, to anyone who knows anything about bikes, it probably resembles a pile of scaffold poles. This isn’t to say the bike is a pile of junk. Costing a little under £300 from the online store Wiggle, my Brand-X road bike was described by the cycling press as an excellent value, entry-level road bike. Entry-level or not, it's enough for me.

I've long held the opinion that cycling has replaced golf as the pastime of choice for many men (and some women) of a certain age. While many cyclists benefit from and enjoy the latest and most expensive bike tech, I'm afraid to say there is also a lot of snobbery in cycling, resulting in many people believing you have to have a "proper bike" to be accepted into the fraternity. This is a shame because, I believe, it actively puts people off taking up and enjoying the benefits of cycling.

Being slighting overweight and dangerously close to my 50th birthday, I’m not out to break any records. I also believe it would be true to suggest that any marginal gains afforded to me by a higher-level bike would, at best, be incredibly marginal. That’s not to say I wouldn’t like to ride a more expensive bike, it’s just at this stage in my life, I cannot justify the increase in pleasure to price ratio afforded by a carbon frame or high-spec group-set.

Another benefit of riding a cheap bike is when parts wear out, as they inevitably do on any priced ride, you don’t have to worry too much about the price of replacing those worn components. Cycling can be a very expensive hobby but it doesn’t have to be. This is especially true if you learn to maintain your own bike.

The moral of the story is to ride what suits your needs and circumstances and never judge anyone on their choice of ride. As cyclists, we need to stick together. Remember, the more of us who take to the roads on our bikes, the greater the benefit to our collective health, the environment, and our safety.

My usual Saturday morning ride takes me from my home in Cleethorpes to Mablethorpe. Taking in the villages of Holton-le-Clay, Tetney, North Cotes, North Somercotes, and Saltfleet, this would normally cover around 56 miles and with the aid of a battered jumbo sausage and chips, a can of Irn Bru, and occasionally maybe a cheeky pint of shandy along the way, wouldn’t normally present any problems.

On the continent, a shandy is often referred to as a Radler. In German, Radler means cyclist. Therefore, it stands to reason that a shandy is a perfect drink for cyclists. Based on absolutely no scientific evidence, I will tell you that shandy is full of essential performance enhancing ingredients such as sugar and carbs while lacking the alcoholic clout to make you fall off your bike. It’ll also quench your thirst faster than any isotonic energy drink and taste a hell of a lot better.

Occasionally, I would extend this ride out to Mablethorpe by pushing on to the gentile beach resort of Sutton on Sea or the more boisterous fleshpots of Skegness (often referred to as Skeg Vegas by the hordes of day-trippers and caravan-based holidaymakers who flood to the east coast every year). This would take my ride anywhere up to 86 miles and would require a packet of jelly babies and a snickers bar to supplement my fuelling strategy.

I knew I could make up the extra 14 miles needed to hit the ton by taking some detours around the various villages between Cleethorpes and Skegness and set about on Google Maps looking for the longest possible route their and back. Worst case scenario, if my ride fell short of the 100-mile target, I cycle around the block until Strava confirmed I’d reached my objective.

14 extra miles doesn’t seem like too much but my rides out to Skegness hadn’t always been successful. In fact, you just need to ask my kids about my attempts to cover the distance and they’ll happily highlight my many failures.

In my eldest daughter Rose’s mind, the ride that best illustrates my cycling career is one that fell short of Skegness by a couple of miles.

My partner Sarah (an avid Park Runner – don’t even get her started on her latest PB) had entered a 10K race (whoa betide anyone who calls it a fun run) in Skegness and so we thought we’d make a long weekend of it and booked a hotel. Sarah and the kids would drive out there, while I would jump on my bike early in the morning hoping to meet them in time for the 2 pm check-in.

While I would never describe myself as a fair-weather cyclist, I would one day welcome the opportunity to ride my bike without getting wet. The whole coast was clouded in thick fog for the duration of my ride. Not only did this make me incredibly nervous about the oncoming traffic, but it also completely soaked me through to the skin.

Despite this, I made it all the way to Ingoldmells, a rather boisterous resort town just outside of Skegness and home to the famous Butlin’s holiday camp, when my back tyre suddenly deflated. To be honest, it wasn’t just my tyre that was deflated.

Luckily, I'd come prepared with tyre levers, a spare tube, and a pump in my panniers. Pushing my bike off the road, I was just about to set about changing my tube when my smartphone rings. It was Sarah. She wanted to know where I was and if I wanted a lift to the hotel?

Normally, I would have declined such an offer – but listen, I was cold and wet and it’s only 3 miles to the hotel. Surely, after 40+ miles I could be proud of myself?

Not according to Rose.

This was the one failure that outweighed every successful ride I’ve ever completed. The coast to coast ride across the UK, the numerous rides across the Algarve in Portugal, the ride around Lake Balaton in Hungary, and my more recent adventure cycling across Belgium, are all not worth mentioning when compared to the time I “begged mum” to pick me up when I failed to cycle to Skegness.

This is a shame because if she really wanted to highlight a catastrophic failure on a ride she’d get much more mileage out of my next ride between Cleethorpes and Skegness.

This was the ride I was really going to crush 100 miles on. My levels of preparation were unsurpassed. I had restricted my intake of red wine the night before the ride to two (quite generous) glasses, I'd made some sandwiches and packed them up with some energy-boosting chocolate brownies and a flask of black coffee in my panniers. I even took particular care to check the weather forecast before setting off. It looked like my ride was going to be overcast but dry. There was some heavy rain and even some thunder and lightning forecast for just south of Skegness – but I wasn't going south of Skegness, so that wouldn't be a problem.

The ride down to Skegness was pretty uneventful. Not too hot, not too cold, and a breeze so light it was hard to discern which direction it was blowing in. The numerous wind farms dotted along the Lincolnshire coast idled in the stillness. On windy days, these wind turbines taunt me by mercilessly pointing in the wrong direction, like huge weathervanes letting me know the wind will never be on my back.

As I cycled into Skegness and hit the beachfront, I become aware that the sky to the south of the resort was darkening. However, the stillness of the day lulled me into a false sense of security. The bad weather was some miles away. I assumed, with no wind behind it, I could easily outrun any storm should the weather move in my direction. I found a bench, leaned my bike against the seawall, and unpacked my picnic lunch and flask of coffee from my panniers.

I’d barely touched my first sandwich before a massive drop of rain hit my cheek. At first, I thought I had been targeted by a passing seagull, but then I felt another hit and another. I couldn't be sure but it seemed to be getting much darker. Then I heard the first rumble of thunder in the distance. Perhaps the storm was a lot closer than it had been forecast. I stuffed the rest of my sandwich in my mouth, washed it down with a mouth of coffee, and jumped back on my bike. It was time to get the hell out of Skeg Vegas.

Those first few miles heading out of Skegness felt good. I was working really hard and picking up pace. I felt strong and fit but this burst of speed had nothing to do with my athleticism. The wind had picked-up and those wind turbines were certainly spinning now. The wind was on my back. Normally this would be a good thing but this meant the storm was also moving at pace in the same direction. This wasn’t a race I was going to win. It was just a case of how far I could get before I needed to find shelter.

The lightning streaked across the sky to my left. It looked like it was a few miles away but then it suddenly cracked like a shotgun directly above my head. The rain was now tipping down in torrents while the lightning strobed the sky above me. The rain was falling so fast the road had begun to resemble a fast-flowing river. I had no idea how safe I was on a metal bike with so much electricity in the sky and only 25mm between me and an incredibly waterlogged earth and I’ll be honest — I was beginning to panic.

I have a rather irrational fear of being struck by lightning. This is probably based on a Discovery Channel documentary I once watched which interviewed lightning strike survivors. This somehow convinced me I was a potential victim. One of the survivors spoke about how the hair on his arms stood on end moments before being struck. It’s probably my overactive imagination, but the moment I hear a clap of thunder – I feel every hair on my body reaching for the sky.

I’d never been more relieved in my life to see a petrol station complete with a little convenience store attached come into view.

I pulled into the petrol station and bought a coffee from the machine and as the assistant if she would mind if I hung out in the shop until the storm had passed. I think she was glad of the company. Three hours and several cups of coffee later she told me the petrol station was closing and I’d have to leave.

The rain and the thunder and lightning didn’t look like it was going to stop anytime soon and the light was failing. Reluctantly, I phoned Sarah, giving her the postcode of the petrol station in the middle of nowhere, so she could find it on her Sat-Nav and come out and rescue me. Typically for the weekend, she was busy ferrying the kids between dance and violin lessons and wouldn’t be free for another couple of hours – so would probably be another three hours before she could come and get me.

I sheltered under the petrol station canopy for the next couple of hours – nervously watching the lightning flashing across the sky. All of a sudden there was a massive crack in the sky directly above me – it sounded like a shotgun. Then another and another. This was far too close to comfort.

I decided to take action and rushed across the road to a small row of houses. I knocked on the first door – nobody was in. I tried the next door. A young girl wearing a onesie answered the door – I asked to speak with her parents. A rather nervous looking woman appeared behind her also dressed in a onesie – "Can I help you?"

“Er, I’ve gone on a bike ride by mistake – my partner cannot come and get me for at least another hour. I’m cold and wet and a little scared, any chance I can come in for a while.”

She turned her head and screamed, “Put the kettle on love. There’s an idiot outside who’s got himself soaked to the skin. I was quickly pulled into the living room where I was introduced to her husband and son (both also wearing the obligatory onesies). They furnished me with a never-ending supply of coffee and cake and asked me all manner of questions – “What the hell did I think I was doing? Didn’t you check the weather forecast? 100 miles – are you an idiot?” Actually, all of this mockery seemed to come from a good place and I think they were generally happy for me to intrude on their household. I was certainly very happy to meet them.

To my absolute shame, I never asked for my host family’s names or took down the details of their address. A card or a bunch of flowers would be the most appropriate way of saying thank you for their hospitality. Instead, I’ll just have to show my appreciation in this blog post on the off-chance they will one day read it. Thank you.

An hour or so flew by and Sarah called me from the petrol station, confused to see my bike chained to the railings outside but with no sight of me. I thanked my saviours and ran back across the road to meet my rather bemused girlfriend where the questioning started again.

“What the hell did I think I was doing? Didn’t you check the weather forecast? 100 miles – are you an idiot?”

I’m not sure these questions came from such a good place.

The drive home was difficult. Water was flowing down the roads like a fast running river and the flashes of lightning seemed far too close to comfort. Sarah clearly wasn’t very happy with me and we sat in silence for the majority of the journey.

Needless to say, whenever I set out on a bike ride or any distance now, my daughter Rose always shouts after me as I cycle down the drive and away from the house, “Don’t call mum to come and rescue you!” She’s a funny kid.

Perhaps 100 miles was beyond my capabilities. There's probably a very good reason why the cycling press seems so keen to sell 100 miles as something that separates the men from the boys. It’s too difficult for the likes of me. I decided to let the idea slip for a little while and concentrate on more achievable rides.

It's funny when I finally did successfully tackle a 100-mile ride, it actually seemed quite easy.

OK, that’s maybe a bit of an exaggeration. The first 80 miles were quite easy. The last 20 miles were hell. Poor planning (who, me?), meant that when I finally did hit 100 miles (approximately 161 km in new money), I was still four miles from home. The final leg of my ride home was slow and painful. My backside felt like someone had attacked me with an abrasive wheel and my left leg was cramping. I could have easily pulled over and laid down on the grass verge beside the road. Instead, I focused on the ice-cold four-pack of Brew Dog beer I knew waited at home for me in the fridge.

So what was my strategy? You’ve got to have a strategy if you want to ride 100 miles — right?

First things first, I checked a long-term weather forecast and picked the most promising day for the ride. Saturday looked good. It was going to be overcast but there was absolutely no mention of thunderstorms.

I then set about getting some supplies for the ride. My 100-mile ride would be fuelled by an eight-pack of pain au chocolat, a large pack of jelly babies, and an assortment of energy bars. These were all packed into a camel pack with one and a half litres of water, a multi-tool, two spare tubes, and a spare foldable tyre.

I set off early the morning and just concentrated on turning my wheels. There really was no drama. I stopped at Mablethorpe – about 26 miles into the ride for a coffee and a Snickers bar. I pushed onto Skegness and treated myself to a giant fish supper and a pint of shandy at the beach and then slowly made my way back. I stopped again for a chocolate bar and a bottle of Lucozade (I remember when this was sold almost exclusively at pharmacies and only drank when you were poorly) in Salt Fleet. Looking at the distance I'd covered upon reaching Skegness, I knew I'd have to add a few extra miles to the ride at the end and so rather than cycling around the block around my house multiple times – I took a detour to North Cote's airfield – where I had a little lie down in a field and enjoyed another energy bar before pushing on to the Crown and Anchor at Tetney Lock for a pint of larger (not shandy this time). While I enjoyed my pint, I phoned Sarah and she asked me if she’d like me to come out and pick me up – with only 8 miles to go the answer was a resounding “No”.

It was the longest 8 miles I have ever ridden in my life.

As I pulled into my drive – I checked my phone app to see I had covered just over 100 miles, literally seconds before the device's battery went dead. In a blind panic, I stuck it on charge and was able to recover and save the ride – I'd have had to do it again if I didn’t save it. Without social proof these days, can you really say it happened?

So there you go - 100 miles. No PBs, tons of calories burned and consumed and a really great feeling to go with the ache in my backside and thighs. I’ve never done 100 miles again, I think the maximum I’ve ever done since is 85 on a ride from Zeebrugge to Brussels – but that’s a different story.

No matter - after my disaster in Portugal – I proved to myself I was still capable of doing something that I know very few people have ever done. It wasn’t the fastest 100 miles – it was probably one of the slowest – but it's my 100 miles and you cannot take that away from me. I think that’s the reason why I ride long distances – just to prove to myself I can do something I consider extraordinary.

So what are you going to do to challenge yourself?

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