Woodcote cyclosportif

While our athletes were bringing home the bacon from Beijing yours truly was ploughing a furrow at the less glamorous end of British sport. The Woodcote Sportif was Matthew’s idea and, as is often the case when other folks are in charge, I turned up unprepared. Last minute snacks from the garage and air from a borrowed track pump saw me through scrutineering (or is it scrutinising) in a somewhat muddy field and before I had time to say “I’ve just cleaned this bloomin’ bike” we were off.

Actually I did have time to say just that but we were off in any case. The route seemed largely unmarshalled but it was very well marked with lots of orange signs and little bits of orange streamer tied to bushes to confirm that one had taken the correct route. The hilly course is more or less cupped in a meander of the Thames between Benson and Shiplake and passes through Sonning (although some way from the river). This proximity to my old boating ground gave it a lovely, homely English feel. By contrast the arable uplands were very Tour de France in feel with bright yellow fields of corn and the odd wizened field of nasty CAP alien rapeseed.

The very brightness of the open spaces made the narrow tree covered lanes seem dark and introduced a genuine element of danger. The recent heavy rain had washed lots of gravel onto the road arranged it in unpredictable rivulets. In some cases you had to just point the bike and hope that nothing was coming the other way. The flint component of the local geology was playing havoc with tyres. One chap we met had had four punctures and the roadsides looked like something from the retreat to Dunkirk – scattered as they were with partly dismantled machinery.

Performancewise it was something of a curate’s egg. El Punisher was somewhat faster than me on the flat and Matthew D was perhaps a slower on the descents. I was generally pathetic on climbs. My biggest humiliation came when I was tipped into a thorny thicket by the draft of a passing white van and the prize for ‘most like the set-up scenes from Casualty’ goes to our encounter with a huge piece of farm machinery and a highly volatile tanker.

On the whole I think we did relatively well to knock off the 75miles in five hours something (which included a lot of cake eating).