Easing of Lockdown Week 24, 4th September 2020
The Chairman, James Hanscomb, is away again which leaves you all in my sort-of incapable hands this Friday. Last week, James mentioned the administration of Sunday rides, which is something I’ve been trying to address since I was appointed to this role last year. It’s been a slow process but I am now beginning to
Easing of Lockdown Week 23, 28th August 2020
I think we are all a little frustrated by the continuing restrictions on group riding. I tried to find out if it’s actually illegal for us to ride in groups of more than 6 people, but all I can find are fairly ambiguous statements about ‘guidelines’. Illegal or not, it doesn’t seem to be the
Easing of Lockdown Week 22, 21st August 2020
Very occasionally, getting on my bike and going for a ride feels like conquering a mountain. Impossible. Which is… weird. because riding a bike is one if the things I do best. I have endurance; I have plenty of routes in my head; I have loads of kit; and I have more than one bike.
Easing of Lockdown Week 21, 14th August 2020
Don’t ever remember looking forward to being cold and wet. I used to think the southern European thing of shutting down in August was madness but I do wonder who’s got it wrong. One thing I have noticed is that if you’re the one left in the office and everyone else is away, you definitely
Easing of Lockdown Week 19, 31st July 2020
We’re often accused of being the snowflake generation. Well, maybe not my generation, more the millennials who are my children’s cohort. We’ve not really seen war and pestilence in our lifetimes, and you might have expected such a so-called soft generation to have been somewhat broadsided by this wretched Covid thing. I actually think we’re
Easing of Lockdown Week 18, 24th July 2020
I shouldn’t be surprised I suppose, I’ve been riding bikes long enough. How is it possible that something as simple as a ride to the coast and back can produce such an overwhelming sense of wellbeing? That group thing, albeit sensibly small and distanced, a road trip, a cafe, some comic interaction with locals, including the
Easing of Lockdown Week 17, 17th July 2020
Let’s talk about kit. Rifling through my cycling drawer a few months back, I found my old triathlon ‘unitard’. A skin-tight, one-piece lycra suit that was designed for swim, bike, run. It’s tempting to say that as a 30-something I was whip-thin with washboard stomach and lantern-jaw, but sadly even then I looked more like
Easing of Lockdown Week 16, 10th July 2020
Quite early on in the pandemic, when we were deep in lockdown, a BBC news reporter door-stepped an elderly gent. His only human contact was with a charity delivering food for him. ‘It’s just so nice to see someone’ he said. My equivalent is the Amazon delivery guy. Though he’s not my only pal, I
Easing of Lockdown Week 15, 5th July 2020
Seemed to go alright didn’t it? Fancy giving it another go? We’ll run the same routine of staggered start times and different locations, still with a limit of 6 riders per group. I have repeated Niki’s beautifully conceived guidelines from last week at the bottom of this email; please do your utmost to stick to them and
Easing of Lockdown Week 14, 26th June 2020
If you want signs that the lockdown is done, check out the pictures from Bournemouth or Anfield. Let’s hope that this last few months of isolation have not been for nothing. In the mix of human tragedy and economic catastrophe, the distruption to the first half of our cycling year has been a relatively small inconvenience,