Saturday mornings generally mean only one thing (unless I'm not at home after a boozy Friday evening) and that's ride time.
It's 6am and I'm awoken by an unmistakable song intro and I gather my thoughts through the next few tracks. By 7am, I've had two coffees; toast; Weetabix with Acacia honey and milk; and I'm kitted up. Just need to prep the bike and then make a move. I've given the bike a once over the previous evening - to save time - but I check the tyres; brakes; gear indexing; and fill the water bottles.
I roll out at ~7:30am and I'm the only person up and about in my street as far as I can tell. The sun rises over my destination and birds provide the opening ceremony for a new day. There's a chill in the air and a slight dew, but by the time I've covered 10 miles and am well into the open countryside, the sun is up and the dampness has burned off.
Some people will think roadies are mad getting out of bed at 6am on a Saturday morning after a week at work. They're entitled to that opinion, but will sadly never appreciate the magic of rolling silently along country lanes at 25mph - separated from the world by only a few lbs of carbon fibre, aluminium and rubber - as nature awakes.
The first mile or so is a little stop start as I negotiate a couple of priority junctions and have to trackstand at an unforgivable red light - no traffic around and there are few things worse than a red light jumping cyclist - but then it's pretty much free rolling for the next 10 miles or so. Beginning to warm up now and the early morning tightness is ebbing away. I exchange 'hellos' with one or two oncoming fellow roadies, get ignored by the mountain biker (long story) and am careful not to startle another roadie as I overtake him just the other side of Womersley. I don't know if he tried to stick to my wheel, but when I look back 5 minutes later I can just make him out in the distance.
As I head straight over the cross roads on the A19 and make my way towards Pollington, I'm overtaken by a tractor pulling a large trailer. Opportunity. I let the farmer pull a 20ft gap, before shifting up a gear and accelerating to within 10ft of the trailer and into the slipstream. Thanks to the draft, I've hit ~35mph and need to come back off the pedals so as to remain at a constant distance from the trailer... time to sit up and have a drink and slight breather! I could sit here until the farmer pulls off into the fields, but a typically ignorant driver with the preconception that "cyclist = slower than me" seems desperate to overtake me and then our friendly provider of potatoes. I drop back and let the cockwomble do his thing and the tractor has gone - I would need to work hard to get back in the draft, but I still have miles to cover so leave it. Oh well.
To either side, flat expanses of pastoral and arable land extend towards the horizon. The southerly cross wind is as fierce as usual. Soon though I pass a solitary house and a school on the right and then cross over the Aire and Calder Navigation into Pollington where I find temporary shelter from from the gusts. Leaving Pollington to head north for half a mile over the M62 motorway, that southerly wind becomes my friend... grab the drops, get tucked and crank it up to 30mph without any draft assistance. Awesome like a hot dog.
I turn to head back in the direction of home, making progress through Gowdall, Hensall, Kellington, Knottingley and finally Pontefract. The wind funnells through the cooling towers at Eggborough power station and makes bike handling tricky for a few hundred metres so I ease off the pedals and concentrate on not taking a spill. Cycling through Knottingley can be interesting thanks to the traffic lights at the sports centre and at Hill Top and this time it's no different... crawling along at 10mph bumper to skinny tyre to bumper and yet the bloke behind insists on driving alongside me. So I let him come by and then assert a positive road position in front of the old dear in the Daewoo Matiz - she's happy to follow patiently as she struggles to ignite a Camel with a yellow "five for a quid" lighter.
We eventually pass through the traffic lights at Hill Top (well the chain smoking lady stalls it and misses the window of opportunity) and it's full speed ahead to Pontefract town centre and the Town End junction for which the Highways department of Wakefield Council have received nothing but complaints. I can't think why. Anyway... I cut through past the scrap metal yard and hospital before flying up Mayor's Walk to cut the corner and Town End junction out of the route. Another half mile in shopping traffic and then I'm home.
35 miles@ave18mph and I'm set for the day before a lot of people have crawled out of bed!
I'm pleased with my current stable of bikes, but the accepted mathematical proof for the number of bikes a roadie requires is:
Number of bikes required = n+1 (where n is the number of bikes currently owned)
So I'm always on the look out for the next bike. Among all the 'obvious' choices, the Colnago Master 55 and Pinarello Prince of Spain have really caught my attention! Time to start saving.
Thanks for reading.
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