Bienvenue a France!

Sat in the dining room of our hotel, looking around at the team eating their breakfasts … there are a few sunburned faces, talk of rain (par for the course now really), and speculation about how many of our refreshment stops will provide loo facilities versus the hunt for a suitable spot for a jungle wee.  (Yesterday the catering crew simply designated a spot in the village square car park for wees, and set up the soup kitchen the other side of the car park.  The locals thought them most intriguing.

Clearly the team has bonded and the shared sense of endurance has loosened inhibitions for discussions of piles, boils and raw bits abound.

Despite the unexpected and horrendously long, steep hill out of Folkstone, yesterday was a thoroughly enjoyable cycle through the Northern French countryside, in sunshine until late afternoon when the rain set in and soaked the jelly babies in my jersey pocket!  There were a few hills, just to remind us how much we enjoy them, but mostly smooth rolling.  A fair bit of fannying about at various points with ferry terminals, to regroup with lost crew and lost cyclists, to fix punctures and administer roadside massages, meant it was a long day.

I don’t think too many people woke up this morning thinking ‘I really fancy an 85 mile cycle ride today’.  But cycle we must, and it’s time to lycra up and head off, so more of this later …

I’ve never been so pleased to be tucked up in a decrepit British seaside hotel; the overcooked sprouts at the dinner buffet, the smell of burning when you switch the electric heater on to fend off the chill, the unidentifiable stains on the ceilings, walls and carpets.

I have also never been so proud of a team effort.  30 wonderful, wet, cold, bedraggled, muddy, tired, aching cyclists finally made it to the hotel at 7.30pm, mostly with humours in tact, after a twelve hour day tackling the streets of London, hill upon hill upon steep fecking hill, lashing rain and a howling gale.

There has been an amazing team spirit today.  We rode together all day, everybody looking out for each other, those at the front stopping to wait for those bringing up the rear; the fitter among us (not me, I hasten to add) going back to help those requiring support getting up hills, massaging cramps and changing tyres; keeping up spirits when the going got tough.

98 arduous, ridiculously hilly (undulating, my arse, Mr Hammond!), cold, wet, windy (and for the last hour, dark) miles … that’s day 2 done!


So in celebration, a song or two I think …

• Keeping your head out of the loo (yes, this is a song, google it) … how my day started, after a sleepless night spent throwing up.
•  London calling … yes, they want their streets back, they appear to be riddled with cyclists riding three abreast, no less.
• It’s raining men … in tights!  I have never seen so many men in tights.  One doesn’t know where to look.
• The hills are alive with the sound of … 30 knackered cyclists, creaking, groaning and pedalling like fury up so many hills.
• Windy Miller, Windy Miller can you grind the corn … no, but I can summon a ferocious wind to bitch slap you about a bit on your bikes … and I’m talking a real hoolie, like 30mph gusts blowing in all directions.
• It’s a long way to Tipperary … it may be, but not as bloody long as it is from West London to Folkestone via a few navigational cock ups.
• I’m singing in the rain, just singing in the rain … we were, at one point (Oh I do like to be beside the seaside) in a spontaneous outbreak of morale.
• This bed is on fire … no, it’s not, but my arse is.
• I want to ride my bicycle, I want to ride my bike … actually, no I don’t, not really!  Don’t even want to look at it.
• We are sailing, we are sailing … at least we will be in the morning, providing the storm abates and the ferries are running, that’s a puke fest waiting to happen if the sea was anything to go by tonight.
• I love Paris in the springtime … ‘cept it’s Autumn.  And cold and wet.
  

I signed up for this ride because I wanted to challenge myself; take on something I’d not tried before and push my limits.  Done that.  So over that.  Can I go home now?  No, I can’t.  Because I also signed up to this ride to raise money for Bliss.  To help them provide vital support and care to premature and poorly babies and their families.  So please, if you can spare a few pennies, or a few pounds, please donate at www.justgiving.com/rebecca-pointer and help spur us on.

What an amazing first day – Cirencester to West Drayton (75 miles ish)!  Felt very emotional this morning as it all came together, and the bikers, crew and hoards of supporters gathered in the Market Place to begin our journey.  Forgot to check the bus times, so slight delay as we waited for the number 10 to pull out, but then we were on our way to cheers from the crowd.

There were spills, there were far too many hills, there were punctures, there were cramps, there were stragglers, there were wrong turns but we all made it safe to the end of day 1.  The crew have been incredible; feeding us, fixing us, fixing our bikes.  Ellie is sat next to me right now making an appointment book for massages, she’s in high demand already.

So on behalf of all my fellow Bliss Baby Bikers, a little poem …

Ode to my bum!

Bump , bump, bump
Went my poor, sorry bum,
Bouncing in the saddle
All day long.

It’s the end of day one,
And my what a farce,
My legs won’t stand, but
I can’t sit on my arse.

Every muscle is sore,
The pain is quite rotten,
But the one that aches most
Is my poor, battered bottom.

The scenery is nice,
The road mostly smooth,
But the occasional rut
Jolts every nerve in my butt.

I admit it’s quite squishy,
And prepared to do battle
But the bones in my tushi,
My how they rattle.

The only relief,
From the pains in my arse,
Is born from a grape
And comes in a glass.

Just over a year ago a friend had the idea of a little cycle ride down to Paris, to raise money for Bliss, a charity very close to his heart (his son Joshua, now a healthy 20 month old, was born prematurely and spent two weeks in the neo-natal unit).  He stuck the idea on Facebook, got an avalanche of responses, and so Bliss Baby Bikers was born!

I immediately took leave of my senses and signed up, both to cycle and to be part of the small committee of volunteers who have put this whole thing together (Andy, Ringo, Ed, Abi, it’s been quite a journey already).

It has taken us a year of planning, researching, organising, begging, cajoling and fretting to pull it off.  Our 30 riders and 11 volunteer crew members have so far raised an amazing £28,000 for Bliss, 80% of our £35,000 target.  (Crikey, my eyes just started leaking, must be the carb overload!)

All that remains now is for the pedalling to begin.  I’m as ready as I’ll ever be, and the essential items are packed!

For my sponsors, and those who might consider sponsoring me a few pennies, I just wanted to share an email the team received from Bliss this morning, wishing us luck and saying what our £28,000 means to Bliss.

Just wanted to wish you all the very best of luck with your cycling challenge this weekend! I hope that the weather stays dry for you and that you have a fantastic time cycling together to Paris.

You’ve already raised an incredible amount to help the most vulnerable and poorly babies and I know this is thanks to a lot of hard work so thank you so much for all you have done so far!

I wanted to give you an idea of the difference that the money you’ve raised can make to the families that we work with. At the last look you guys had raised over £27,500.

It costs Bliss £10,000 to provide free counselling sessions to 40 families who are grieving or suffering from stress and anxiety following a traumatic birth.

It costs Bliss £15,000 to train 30 Bliss Champions who go in to hospitals to talk to parents about their experiences and let them know how Bliss is able to help them. These Bliss Champions are volunteers and many are parents whose babies started off needing life saving hospital care as well, who were supported by Bliss at that time.

It costs Bliss £500 to provide 250 families with the Bliss Family Handbook which is a life line and constant source of support and information for parents while their baby is in hospital.

Every year in the UK 80,000 babies are born too soon, too small or too sick. Bliss aims to reach out to every single family with a baby who stays on a neonatal unit. This is only possible with the amazing fundraising support we receive from people like yourselves so on behalf of Bliss and all of our babies and families, let me say a huge thank you for making our work possible.

I hope that thinking about the difference you make keeps your spirits up during any difficult parts of the bike ride.

I will be posting updates as we pedal our way to Paris over the next few days so you can follow our journey.  Your support and encouragement means a great deal and will keep me going through the tough bits, so thank you!

www.justgiving.com/rebecca-pointer

So that’s what 75 miles, with a fair share of hills, feels like!  A little bit achey but not too bad, so that’s day 1 taken care of.  I’m slightly nervous about how day 2 (98 miles, aaaaaaargh), day 3 (85 miles), day 4 (80 miles) and day 5 (61) will feel!

Another beautiful ride around Gloucestershire with Dad, complete with pub lunch (2 drink minimum) and puncture, was the last long distance training ride I’ll be doing before the off in 6 days time.  I am as prepared as I am going to be, I just hope it’s enough.  My legs are quite short.  I don’t have brilliant lung capacity.  And I’m a bit scared of going too fast on Rusty Bob.  I’m not built for speed so I fully expect to be bringing up the rear most days.  But, I have been working hard on making my short legs strong, so hopefully they will get me the distance.

I’ve come a long way since I started my training a few months ago.  I can now signal to turn, which is quite useful.  When I first started riding Rusty Bob, I couldn’t ride, break and signal at the same time without zigzagging wildly.  I no longer hang on to the breaks down every hill, with teeth gritted, braced for a fall.  And sometimes it doesn’t take 5 attempts to get my left foot back in the (still broken) toe clip.

The hotels and ferry are booked, the crew and rider handbooks issued, the routes sorted and a venue for the finishers party found.  It’s taken us the best part of 9 months to pull this together, and so far the BBB team of riders has raised an amazing £24,464.95 (70% of our target) for Bliss!

So, all that remains is to get Rusty Bob serviced, pack a few things, eat several kilos of pasta and ride to Paris.

Rusty Bob now has Bob Cam installed so, internet connectivity and camera skills allowing, I’ll be posting updates along the way.  If you’d like to help us reach our £35,000 target, please donate at www.justgiving.com/rebecca-pointer

An English summer’s day at its best: sunshine, a bike ride with my Dad, and a ham and cheese sarnie and 2 glasses of Sauvignon at a riverside pub in the country!

OK, so the eye watering arse burn that I suffered for the first half hour following yesterday’s 66 miles took the shine off the start, but otherwise all felt good.  The lower back and shoulder ache I was worried about wasn’t too bad.  I now know I can get on the bike two days in a row without too much pain.  Not sure how five days is going to feel.

A cup of tea and two rock buns to refuel the tanks at Dad’s an hour and a half in was very civilised, before pushing on from Ebley to Ashleworth for lunch.  We got lost, of course, and took a bit of a detour via Frampton on Severn, then went back and forth on the A417 a few times for good measure.

The A roads and dual carriageways around Gloucester were a bit intimidating for us country bumpkins, but good training for the streets of London and Paris.  (That’s going to be scary!)  I need to replace my spare tube.  Not us this time, but a fellow cyclist we passed pushing his bike with 19 miles still to go.

My two glasses of wine theory stands firm!  The ride back home after lunch was fab, and not just because it was mostly downhill.  I may be forming a rebel faction on the big ride to ensure a least one watering hole is sampled each day.  Either that or I really will have to decant a bottle of Sauvignon into my camelback.

We covered 58 miles today, so that’s 124 in the last two days.  The first two days of the ride to Paris will see us cycling 169 miles.  That’s a sobering thought.

Ha haaaaaa! 3 Marlborough hills conquered … each in one go! There was drizzle (nice and refreshing), there was blustery wind (not so nice), there was a quick pit stop 37 miles in for a sarnie, and there were a beautiful couple of glasses of Sauvignon when I got home.

Tomorrow is the real test. Not sure how I will feel about getting on Rusty Bob again tomorrow but it must be done, the Stroud Valleys await. In 2 weeks and 6 days I have to get up and get back on Rusty Bob for 5 consecutive days.

Sung to the tune of Twelve Days of Christmas (obviously):

Twelve miles an hour average
Eleven miles an hour winds
Ten squashed roadkill
Nine mental wobbles
Eight … hundred and 77 feet high
Seven little towns
Six … ty six miles cycled
Five faaaaaaat flies
(A)Four 29 quite scary
Three big climbs
Two white horses
And a pint of wine when I got home!

I’ve been pouring over the route maps, in particular the gradient, of our jaunt to Paris, alternating between deranged excitement and palpable fear. There will be hills. Steep ones. And long ones. So, having aborted our ride over the Marlborough Downs last weekend, I squeezed in a short ride yesterday, this time fully prepared with spare inner tube, appropriate tools and a pump!

I chose the Stroud Valleys as my nemesis. The 32 mile ride was out and back mostly the same way, so every wonderful whizzy downhill had, in turn, to be climbed, including the lung abusing Bear Hill. Bear Hill is a climb of about 500 feet in one mile, to the top of Rodborough Common. I made it without getting off, passing out, or crying, but not in one go. Several stops were required.

By comparison, we have a similar climb of about 500 feet on day one, but over several miles. Is that better or worse? It may not be as steep, but it goes on and on and on! And it’s one of many hills. I think the point is, there will be many hills, some of them quite unpleasant, so hills ought to be a key feature of what few training rides I have left.

Hill burn aside, I really enjoyed the ride. The scenery, especially over Minchinhampton and Rodborough, was stunning and the cows, horses, and donkey on Minch Common were a lovely distraction.

I was even tempted, if only for a nanosecond, to throw in Gumstool Hill on my way back through Tetbury. Only for a nanosecond mind!

“How about the Marlborough Downs” suggested Dad.  “Oooh, that’ll be pretty” thought I.  Pretty bloody steep!

5 things I learned during yesterday’s shambolic ride:

• Always carry a spare inner tube and appropriate tools!
• A loose fitting cotton t-shirt will not keep you warm on a cold, windy day
• A waterproof layer would be useful
• The hills still have the better of me
• My wine theory needs fine tuning

When I said I wanted some hill training, I hadn’t properly thought it through.  Good job then that our 70 mile ride was cut short at 15 miles by a puncture in the middle of nowhere on the first hill.  What lay ahead was a hill of vomit inducing proportions, somewhere around a white horse which, had we attempted it, might have caused a variety of symptoms of ill health.

It had been slow going to that point, a combination of several stops to identify and fix the source of rattling coming from Rusty Bob (my faithful steed); the bracing wind; and a hangover.

Fifteen miles in we tackled the first big hill.  After about a week, or so it felt, I rounded a corner and through the sweat dripping into my eyes saw Dad beside his bike looking a bit wobbly.  “Shit he’s having a coronary”, I thought, but no.  He had stopped to wait for me and seen a speed bollard to lean on; only they’re not solid like they used to be so he, bike and bollard fell unceremoniously into a thistle.  Whether it was thistle or bramble that caused the puncture we don’t know, but as he set off again that front tyre was flat as a pancake.

It took us a good ten minutes to figure out what to do, what with dithering being a family trait.  Being technically unsophisticated in the gear department has its benefits and I could have walked, but Dad with his cleats on could not.  Not that there was anywhere nearby to walk to.  We called in the cavalry, and in the 50 minutes it took Andy to find someone to sit with the kids, remove the back row of seats from the Pointy Love Bus to accommodate 2 bikes and get to us, we amused ourselves with silliness, admired the view, decided we would have a pint with lunch and watched as our extremities turned blue.

It was cold.  It was windy.  Hypothermia was setting in and the rain was on its way.  Upon our request Andy drove us to Marlborough with the intention of getting Dad’s puncture fixed in the bike shop there and continuing on our way (cleverly missing out aforementioned white horse hill), after a warm and a feed in a local hostelry.

By the time the bikes were fully functioning again, and spare tubes had been purchased, it was 2pm, we still had at least 50 miles to go, the rain had set in and the blue tingling extremities were no less blue.  So as any sane person would, we bailed out and went home to warm baths and cups of tea.

A tad disappointing, as despite the very late night (1am), the 2 bottles of red wine, the wind and the cold, I was in the zone and I am running short of training opportunities.  We’ll chalk that one up to experience.  I’ll get Rusty Bob serviced (the gears are very temperamental) and get the computer fixed (the source of the rattling) as I’m sure I wasn’t doing 20 miles per hour up that hill!  And, in future, I’ll be properly prepared before I go out and might also stick to 2 glasses, rather than 2 bottles of wine.

One month from today, on 14th September, I will be setting off from the Market Place in Cirencester on my Dad’s 25 year old, slightly rusty racing bike, with broken toe clip and temperamental gears to cycle the 450 miles to Paris in 5 days, with 34 other game souls!

A mildly alarming thought as so far my training has comprised two 30 mile rides around the fairly flat local countryside, a few RPM sessions which leave me a violent shade of purple and my heart desperately trying to exit my body via my ears, and most recently a 68 mile ride with my Dad, who at 71 is far fitter than I am.

Still, at least I now have a proper pair of padded shorts (borrowed from afore mentioned father) and a pair of cycling mitts with appropriate padding.  These landed on the door mat this morning, just in time for a 30 mile training ride this evening.  Feel free to laugh at my expense, for I do look a proper egger in my cycling outfit.

That said, the acquisition of padded shorts and gloves has made me very happy for on the 68 mile ride with Dad, I had neither.  By the end of the ride my arse was screaming in pain the way I imagine a banshee would scream were she being attacked by a hundred enraged souls with forks.  The soreness in the palms of my hands, made worse by the handlebar tape peeling off, was marginally eclipsed by the persistent stinging of my skinless knee.

Dad and I are going out again at the weekend.  This time we’re planning a slightly hillier 70 miles around the Marlborough Downs.  I have promised not to crash into the back of him this time.  If he were entertaining any thoughts of lending me his uber flash road bike for our jaunt to Paris, he isn’t anymore.  It wasn’t pretty, but I am grateful that the car behind had the good grace to stop and wait patiently whilst I hauled my carcass out from under the bike and shuffled back to the curb.

Bruises, grazes, sore bits and the last 15 slow, painful miles aside it was a very enjoyable day.  The sun shone, the Cotswold countryside (except maybe the short stretch of A419) was beautiful and the 2 hour pub lunch complete with a couple of glasses of wine, by the river at the Trout in Lechlade was lush.

I am steadfast in my belief that the anaesthetic properties of a few glasses of wine here and there will be pivotal to the success of this ride!

I’ll let you know how the training goes over the next few weeks.  Any encouragement you care to give, either by leaving a comment or sponsoring me will be very much appreciated!  You can sponsor me at http://www.justgiving.com/Rebecca-Pointer

And you can find out more about the ride at www.blissbabybikers.com