ego.istic.org

Another early morning this morning. Again, the spirits conspired to wake me up at 0600, an hour earlier than I intended, but this time laziness won out and I didn't get up 'til 0700. I bought a Camelbak (I won't link to their website, as it is Flash-only) hydration thingummy last week, but with last weekend's bad weather, some long work days, and my bike being serviced this week, I hadn't had a chance to try it out, so I was keen to get out and about today.

When I picked up my bike after its service, the chap behind the counter mentioned that Fowlmere is quite nice to visit by bike, and it's not far off the route I usually take (which goes through Harston), so this morning I checked my OS map (Explorer No. 209) and decided on a route. Ah yes, plans. I got to Harston and forgot the name of the village I was going through to get to Fowlmere (it was Newton, FTR), so I missed the turn-off. Still hoping to get to that area, I followed the A10 instead of turning right for Haslingfield as I usually do, thinking to follow it wherever it took me.

Where it took me was a very fast route to Foxton. I had to wait at the level crossing there anyway, so I took the opportunity to get my map out and decide where to go next. The best route seemed to be to turn right for Shepreth and go on to Barrington. In fact, though the roads that way were quiet, they were also very uneven, so I didn't make good time. The other shortcoming is that there is a hill between Barrington and Haslingfield.

Now, I grew up in the North, so I know that hills exist. I spent a relatively large fraction of my school holidays walking up and down them, so I'm familiar enough with the concept. I'm even aware that my bike has a whole front chainring just designed for climbing the things, but I have never used it other than by accident. So when I got to a hill that climbs 40m in just over a kilometre (the road sign calls it 1 in 20) I was quite excited. It's not huge by the standards of, say, the Pennines, but as the highest point in Cambridgeshire is only 74m above sea level it's quite a big deal for me. Besides, for historical reasons, my anaerobic performance is truly awful. I count riding on flat ground at 18mph as aerobic, and I can keep that up 'til the cows come home without breaking a sweat, but ask me to do that little bit extra (like climb a hill) and I'll be exhausted in no time.

Tejvan Pettinger has blogged recently about making sure you eat enough on the road to avoid hitting the bonk point, which can really ruin your day. As I only tend to do short, fast rides of 20–30mi, this has never been that much of an issue to me. I tend to do morning rides before breakfast to give me a hearty appetite, and today it certainly did. I ate lightly last night, as for some reason I wasn't really hungry when I got home from work, so this morning by the time I reached Kingston I figuratively hit the wall. From Kingston back to Cambridge there are not really any short-cuts you can take, so I rode the 10mi back to town at a crawl. (Well, a crawl for me. I still wasn't overtaken by any other cyclists, whereas I overtook four or five and one tractor, but my feet and arms were not very happy about that.)

Getting back into Cambridge I was dreaming of breakfast, a cool shower, and getting my shoes off (in no particular order) when I passed a sign for ice-cream. It was the Toni's Ices hut on the corner of Parker's Piece. “Mana from heaven,” I thought, and pulled over. By then it was only 0930-ish, and the ice-cream man had not yet turned on his machine. I asked for a double ‘99’, the biggest one on the board. He told me it'd be some seconds before the ice-cream was cold. “That's fine,” I answered meekly. “Umm… while I wait, could I have a Mars bar?” The Mars bar was fresh from the fridge, which IMO is too cold to store them as it makes the fudgy bit go hard, but that didn't bother me today. No sooner had I finished it than the ice-cream was ready. He had obviously rushed it, as it was only just cold enough to keep its shape: you couldn't have given it to a child without first laminating all their clothes and putting down a large tarpaulin. But I didn't give it enough time to discover how runny it was. I could happily have had one of everything he had in stock, but he told me he was worried about his stock levels anyway because there was a rugby tournament on Parker's Piece that he didn't know about in advance, so I satisfied myself with that. It was enough to get me home on all cylinders, dodging buses at my usual speed.

So that was my trip. Far from perking me up (“bright-tailed and bushy, umm, wait, that's not right…” as my colleague put it the other day) for an active day, it has left me sitting here with no desire to do anything involving any physical exertion whatsoever. Even the ironing, which was my planned activity for this afternoon (exciting, I know, but I have to do it sooner or later), seems like too much effort now. I might just stay in and read a book, but turning all those pages is such hard work.