Mud, glorious mud

Given the downpour on last weekend’s Tour de Force ride in Richmond Park, I suppose it was no surprise that I have been commuting under a rain cloud all week. By some miracle, my proper soakings have come mainly on the homebound leg, giving me time to dry out my clothing, helmet, gloves and shoes before the ride in the following morning. Getting drenched on the way into work at 5.30am is no real hardship in itself, but with nowhere to dry clothes in the office, putting cold soggy clothes back on for the ride home that evening is seriously unpleasant. I have full waterproof clothing – trousers, jacket and overshoes – but when it’s raining really hard and there’s lots of water on the road too, it’s almost impossible to keep everything dry.

Perhaps then, not the best week to extend my home commute by 2.5 miles to take in the ride up the hill to Putney Heath. Not exactly the longest or most demanding col I know, but it adds a new dimension to the daily route and hopefully will bring some modest benefit to my climbing fitness given the rest of my commute is essentially flat.

During the week I’d started to notice that my commuting / winter bike was making a strange noise on every revolution of the wheels – like a rubbing noise, suggesting a tyre or wheel rim was catching the brakes or the mudguards. But there was no sign of the noise when I was spinning the wheels while off the bike, so nothing was rubbing, and the noise continued if I was on the bike, but not pedalling, so nothing to do with the bottom bracket or pedals. However, a quick inspection of the wheel spokes revealed several loose ones (front and rear!), which is very likely to be the cause of the mystery noise. I tightened a few up, but in the end decided that the bike shop was best placed to sort this out - my efforts were likely to leave the wheel distinctly out of shape and looking like it had been run over by a lorry. So the bike is now in hospital (the fantastic Holdsworth Cycles on Lower Richmond Road), getting a full service at the same time – and the mechanic has rightly pointed out that my rear wheel rim is severely worn out and needs replacing…so yet more expense (but still cheaper than commuting by train/bus and a whole lot more convenient and enjoyable).

To try to balance home, cycling and work life, I try to start my long weekend rides early in the morning to get home in time for the rest of the day. This typically means getting up before 7am – which doesn’t sound too bad, but hits the sleep bank after getting up at 5.15am all week for work and often coming after a late night out on Friday or Saturday. So you can imagine my utter delight when Cress suggested I do my weekend ride on Sunday afternoon while she hooked up with friends who have kids the same age as ours. Complete bliss – 2 consecutive lie-ins in one weekend, and we didn’t go out on either Friday or Saturday night, so a big win for shuteye hours.

Continuing the week’s wet weather theme, the forecast for the weekend was dire. The BBC website was expecting ‘heavy rain’ and high winds for the whole of Sunday – conveniently now presented in 3 hour chunks. And Saturday’s forecast also predicted consistent heavy showers. Not particularly inviting for bike riding. And since my winter road bike was now holed up somewhere dry and warm awaiting some tender R&R, and there was no way I was taking my ‘pride and joy summer bike’ out in this weather, I stayed in…well not exactly as it turned out. My third bike (extravagant I know, but my collection is still not complete – topic for another day!) is a beaten up old Scott mountain bike which I put together from some old parts I had lying around after buying the frame secondhand off ebay. The idea being, that I can ride it around town and it won’t get nicked (ha ha), and also use it to ride on tracks and towpaths with the kids. It’s not a particularly good fit, nor particularly advanced compared to some the amazing full suspension mountain bikes now commonplace. But it seemed like a great alternative to sitting on the turbo trainer – so I dressed for the poor weather and went out to Richmond Park for a couple of fun laps round the perimeter track, and a couple of circuits of a very muddy Wimbledon Common – 2.5 hours of seriously entertaining splashing around, and an excellent work-out. Got to ask myself why I hadn’t spent more of the winter doing this. Returned home with bike and self caked in mud, but with exercise needs thoroughly sated and still warm and toasty from the effort – Garmin suggested over 2500 calories burned, with an average heart rate over 140bpm.

To finish the end of the week on topic – I rode home from mates’ house on Sunday evening in jeans…in a biblical downpour.


Weekly totals
Commute – 85 miles
Other rides – 32 miles (offroad)
Turbo – 1 hour

Funds raised to date £569