LEPRA report – Part 1
Jun.26, 2006, filed under Miscellany
The more observant amongst you will have noticed that there is a new box on the right of the screen. Thirty second haiku reviews. We’ll see how it goes. There will be a maximum of three up at any one time, owing largely to space restriction, and until I can figure out how to get it to work properly there will be no comment option. They will be archived, however.
The LEPRA (click on the link if you want a Gmaps route) was quite good fun. Frood and I ended up doing a nice round 80 miles, which is not the century we had planned. It was still the longest ride he had ever done and it was certainly the longest and most challenging ride I had ever done on a 70″ fixed. I think I was the only fixie rider out of the 800 fair souls participating. This supposition was certainly supported by the habit of the whippet-thin roadies of riding past with the normal sideways scan of the bike, only to get about 3 lengths ahead, do a double take and drop back to say: “You’re on a fixed gear? You’re a nutter!”
We took the 06:36 train from Cupar to Inverkeithing in the end. This meant getting up stupidly early, and I only had about three hours sleep the night before. There were already a couple of people on the train who had embarked at Leuchars and we had a nice chat with the guard. He told us how last year there had been a lot of people trying to get on the train and he had been about to try squeezing one guy on when the chap had said: “Don’t you give me any of that crap about not being able to fit the bike on!”
At which point the guard, quite rightly, decided he could stuff it. Always start off being polite. The guards are generally quite nice. They’re not all jobsworths.
We rode straight along the A90 dual carriageway on the way into Embra, meeting up with a few folk from South Queensferry after Cramond Brig. The closer we got to the start the more cyclists we gathered until there was quite a pack. After a brief stop at Waverley station to use the loo, during which time I had a fight with the rotary gate thing that left me with a black bruise the size of a hen’s egg on my thigh, we made it to the start where we met Mr and Mrs Pingu (Duncan and Clare) and Noggin. Chewa was there but we didn’t see him (he did see us though!)
The start was pretty chaotic. There was no police escort so there were 800 cyclists all trying to get out of Embra along the main central through route all at the same time. The organisers had impressed upon us that traffic lights applied to us too, but frankly it would have been less hassle to the rest of the traffic if we’d just massed it and got out of the way as quickly as possible. But we didn’t, so we had a slow exit from the city.
The directions through Rosyth were pretty shoddy, but I’d had the presence aforethought to sit down and go through the directions the night before and write out an audax-style route sheet, which spent the day folded neatly and slotted down inside my bra next to my sweaty bosom. Very handy, but do make sure you use waterproof ink if you’re going to try this.
It was all fairly easy until Crossgates, although I did start to regret sleeping on the train rather than stuffing my face with flapjacks. Then the topography woke up and started making itself known. I asked Pingu nicely not to talk to me for half an hour, assuming that half an hour would see me over the top of Cleish Hill, which I had been fretting about. Immediately after this some bloke on a road bike came up and hovered on my off side (guaranteed to irritate, as I’m blind on that side).
“That’s a fixed.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You’re really brave doing it on fixed.”
“Right.”
“It gets worse from here.”
“That’s nice.”
“I’ll be really interested to see how you get up the hill on that.”
“I did just ask to be left alone for half an hour.”
Pingu, by this point, had made a swift exit rather than getting between me and someone making me cross.
As it turned out I was soothed by a cheery conversation with a chap on a recumbent from Laid Back Bikes (on the left of that photo), just in time to get a Stinger down my neck before the serious climbing started.
I made it. I muscled that 70″ up to the top of Cleish Hill for ice cream and a quick gasper, although I did have to stop for a minute to let the lactic acid die down before hitting that last steepest section.
Oooh. Lunch time and it’s Monday and that means swimming. I’ll tell you all about the midges later.
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Singularity
~something that is singular as (a) a separate unit, or (b) unusual or distinctive manner or behavior; PECULIARITY;
~the quality or state of being singular;
~a point at which the derivative of a given function of a complex variable does not exist but every neighborhood of which contains points for which the derivative exists;
~a point or region of infinite mass density at which space and time are infinitely distorted by gravitational forces and which is held to be the final state of matter falling into a black hole. Sight
