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Persistently pursuing an irresistable urge
Persistently pursuing an irresistible Bristol-based Eleanor Jaskowska has conquered Paris-Brest-Paris on a fixed wheel bike, so she knows a thing or two about endurance cycling. Here she chats to fellow riders about the fascination of the Randonneur Round the Year cycling challenge
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42 THE RANDONNEUR Round the Year (RRtY) award is one of the tougher cycling challenges on offer. It requires a ride of 200km or more for 12 successive calendar months, and it entails consistent big rides in all seasons, a strong mind and a proactive approach to diary logistics. For the committed there are also awards for five and ten times RRtYs. Not everyone can ride a 1,000km, so 200km is much more accessible. Persistence and perseverance trump strength and speed. For this reason riders come at this award from a number of different angles. For some it seems like a challenge that strikes the right balance between being potentially out of reach and possibly doable. Some accidentally realise that they have many
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months of back-to-back rides so why not? For others, like myself, it is a challenge to keep riding longer distances consistently throughout the year.
We have different motivations. Sometimes the motivator is simply: “Can I?” All long distance rides are a challenge of endurance. A long distance challenge that requires you to persevere for a minimum of 12 months is a whole new way to test your sticking power.
Rides can go wrong, injuries happen or calendars get hijacked and a month can go past and that elusive 200km slips from our fingers. There is a pretty high likelihood of failure and having to start the 12 month streak from scratch.
Every long ride has its stories so I decided to question a selection of AUK members who all came at the award for different reasons.
No-one is born a Randonneur Round the Year, are they?
Well, there’s Laura Collett who jumped right in. Laura is a data nerd from Bristol and purveyor of fine rainbow cycling caps. She is our newbie and rode her first UK event 13 months ago. She didn’t waste much time cracking on with her RRtY.
Most of our riders took a while to find the world of point-to-point Brevet riding and built up to the RRtY. Judith Swallow was headhunted into AUK buy the then chairman, the late Rocco Richardson. Judith has now ridden more miles than almost anyone else alive; she has 25 grande brevets to her name and is well on her way to the 300,000 mile club.
Rocco took her out on the Paragon Potter in March 1997. Judith recalls: “He seemed to think that this was a good idea. As it was ‘only’ 120km, Rocco decided that we’d also ride the 50km to the start and again back. Things went from there”.
About 10 years ago a young and naive Johnatan Williams was chatting to a local Bristol cyclist about the
epic Wiggle Dragon ride he was training for. He says: “She raised an eyebrow and said it sounded ‘nice’. She then chatted to me a little bit more about rides and I found myself walking into the wonderful world of Randonneuring.”
Our Northern lass Sian Lambert saw a poster for one of Andy Corless’ hilly 200s and thought it was insane but she was thinking of applying for the Fred Whitton so a year later found herself on the Last Chance Dales Dance. Grace Lambert-Smith and I probably represent a new demographic of riders who found Randonneuring through preparing for ultra-distance race, the Transcontinental.
Judith Swallow points out that the popularity of the RRtY is a fairly recent occurrence. She says: “In the dark ages of AUK where I come from, the longest rides in winter were 100km brevets. It’s only in the last 10 years or so that there have been many winter calendar 200s, so riding an RRtY isn’t automatic.”
I asked her when first decided to do an RRtY? “My RRtY started when foolishly I was persuaded with a non-riding friend to attempt the 2013 LEL,” she says. “I’d done a few 100km events but nothing over 200km until the preceding summer when I tried and completed two back to back 250km rides.”
Along with LEL, PBP qualifications are another motivator. Grace Lambert-Smith decided to work towards her first RRtY at the start of 2019 when she was qualifying for PBP. She says: “I had motivation for the first seven months, given I had a 1200km goal to work towards which left only five months of self-motivation.” Wise lady. And so what motivated her? “I wanted to do it mainly because there’s a badge at the end of it,” she says. “But also because it forced me to do a big ride at least once a month. It means I keep my hand in and never lose touch with the skillset.” Liz Bruton’s first was supposed to be a celebratory challenge of being back in the saddle after a bad crash left her with a badly broken ankle in 2018. She says: “Being off my bike for nearly three months reignited my longstanding love of cycling and I was looking forward to getting back to cycle touring that summer and getting some longer bicycle rides in.”
Despite a broken spoke she finished the Barbury Bash and it became the start of her RRtY. “I was utterly, utterly exhausted by the time I got to Chris and some very welcome grub at the Arrivée,” she says. “I thought it would be an end point, marking my complete physical recovery but rather it was a beginning.” Fiona Ridley didn’t mean to do an RRtY, She discovered cycling in her late 40s and thought the entire world of long distance cycling was not for her: “I have poor eyesight so night riding is challenging, especially if the weather is bad and I’m also nurturing an 11-year-old full knee replacement,” she says. “I didn’t think it was wise for me to be do longer distances and risk compromising my knee.”
And it wasn’t a walk in the park but she picked a good tactic of starting to leave her comfort zone on her terms in a familiar area at short notice because the weather looked favourable.
She adds: “On a whim I entered GWR Chalke and Cheese in mid-January days before because the weather
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forecast was good and the night riding was known and I would be close to home if I had to call the broom wagon. I got round, just surviving 80km of near gale headwinds and an ethereal ascent of Cheddar Gorge at night. I was lanterne rouge.”
For those of you reading this who are new to the world of randonneuring, it’s highly addictive. Olaf Storbeck says the only thing harder than completing an RRtY is escaping the treadmill. “It took me several years, and a nasty crash,” he says. Desperate measures.
No long distance ride is ever the same. Even the same route will have a different personality in different weather. My longest ride of the RRtY was the Mille Cymru and I went from overheating to hypothermia. Do any other rides stand out? Judith Swallow wins the unusual bike category, with trike and tandem trike rides.
A few of our riders also ventured overseas, Judith putting in 1200s as far afield as Australia, Israel and the USA.
As residents of the UK there’s a good chance that rain may have coloured a few rides. The weather stood out for those who rode the 2019 Rough Diamond. I, for instance, don’t want to revisit a 45mph headwind on a fixed gear any time soon. That ride certainly reminded me that I’m capable of more than I think. Riding up the long climb to Chepstow when I was certain that my legs had given everything they could, is probably not how I’d advise doing your first fixed 300km. David Squance (aka Squancey), our token Cornish rider, completed his first RRtY in October 2019, powered by jersey pocket pasties, sea shanties and Betty Stogs Ale. It sounds like the weather stood out for most of Squancey’s rides. He says: “The year kicked off with a
44 soggy 300km from Newquay back to Bristol. The interesting weather set the theme for the rest of the year, with the final ride of the RRtY, the Ride the Trafalgar Way, from Falmouth to London, never have sea shanties been more apt.”
So what about injuries? Ironically for a chiropractor, Johnatan Williams has had a few RRtY attempts thwarted by injury, and Squancey picked up an injury in June as a result of changing his cycling shoes, forcing a DNS.
Few of us will comprehend the mental and physical strength shown by Sian Lambert in 2017. She says: “By the time I rode the Delightful Dales in early April 2017 I was pretty stressed; I was behind on my training for LEL and was having tests for some unexplained abdominal pain. But keeping my RRtY attempt on track gave me something to focus on and the tiredness after the event gave me a couple of days respite from the extreme anxiety I was feeling.
“Then I found out that I needed a hysterectomy and had surgery scheduled for late May. ” That would have put an end to her riding for a few months surely? “According to my doctor, there was no way I’d be able to undertake something like LEL nine weeks after surgery,” she says. “I didn’t ask him about riding a 200km five weeks after the op.” She finished LEL in case you were wondering!
Keeping a run of 12 months doesn’t sound easy – because it isn’t. Johnatan Williams had tried a couple of previous times to do the series but a combination of bad health and crashes ended those attempts. “The biggest struggle for me is riding through summer as I have two young kids and don’t want to miss the school holidays with them,” he says. “But the use of days off in the week allowed me to do it.”
The flip side is that the lure of the RRtY cloth patch can actually help us weather long, dark British winter as Laura Collett recalls: “The night I finished my first 200, a damp and windy January evening, I was tired, happy and content with what I had accomplished, with an added realisation that long-distance cycling might just save me from my yearly struggle with seasonal affective sadness. “Finally a reason to get out of bed before dawn, and this monthly delight of riding my bike all day, come rain or wind, through darkness and light, held me close and I felt its beacon of promise guiding me through to spring. As it happens, it guided me through the entirety of 2019.” Companionship is a common theme. My initial assumption was that to keep going with minimum 200km for 12 months I’d have to complete a lot of solo DIYs from October-March. But in the end only one of my rides was completed solo. A huge advantage of the growing popularity of randonneuring is that you can fire off a message to a WhatApp group on a Wednesday and have six cyclists ride to Brecon and back on Saturday.
Bristol is famed for its density of AUK members but other regions are quickly gaining critical mass. “I’ve really enjoyed hanging around with the Peak Brevettes,” says Grace Lambert-Smith. “We ended up doing some DIYs together because a few of us were chasing the award.”
These rides are also an opportunity to learn the craft of long distance riding from more experienced friends. Johnatan Williams says: “I rode many RRtY rides with Neil Veitch who is as experienced as it gets, and David Lane, who was doing his first RRtY and SR. The shared experience was the highlight of the year. I’ll remember the RRtY as a right laugh in great company.” David Lane nearly had a disastrous end to his first RRtY. After a mechanical nearly forced him on to a train from Yeovil he was then stung by a bee that flew down his jersey. ”To say I was in pain is an understatement,” he says. “After ten minutes of crying at the side of the road I managed to get going again although my pal was struggling from laughing so much.” Fiona Ridley completed her RRtY in December 2019 on the new “GWR Airmail” which brought her journey full circle because she finished with Laura whom she had met on Chalke and Cheese in January. They kept on bumping into each other before realising they were both on the same mission.
“Without the support of Laura, Blair and Club Bristol I doubt I would have made it,” says Fiona. “Also, my social media cycling pals gave plenty of online encouragement, and lastly my husband Steve for ferrying me to stupidly early departs when the ride to and from was beyond me.” For some the standard RRtY isn’t enough. Robbie Fargo, an American living in Aberdeen, achieved three RRtY in his first few seasons, and was inspired to commit to multiple rides every month to do RRtY. He says: “After some foolish discussions about how no one has ridden the 4.75AAA Snow Roads 300 in the winter, I have undertaken to do this perm 12 months in a row.
“I started in December and, riding with Niall Wallace, managed to finish with 30 minutes to spare after a few mechanicals and a spill on black ice.”
You may think that bonkers, but what about Andy Curran? He completed a Super Randonneur Round the Year – a 200, 300, 400 and 600km ride every month for 12 consecutive months!
I don’t want to leave you with a feeling that if you’re not doing an RRtY then you’re missing out. It isn’t for
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everyone. Graham Steward is an accomplished rider, with five Super Randonneurs and three Hyper Randonneurs to his name. It took him a mere 52 hours to finish PBP last year. He clearly has a good head and nothing wrong with his legs but no RRtY. Why? “Sometimes I’ve ridden at least a 200km for 11 consecutive months but then missed the twelfth,” he says. “It’s often due to family commitments or simply not realising it until after the final month slipped by. It’s just never happened. I’ve never actively sought out the RRtY though which is probably why I’ve continued to miss out on it. Perhaps it’s for that reason I just don’t deserve it. Some things have to be worked for to be earned after all!” Will they all keep going? Judith Swallow has completed seven RRtYs. “If my vasculitis lets me remain properly a-wheel, reaching 10 RRtYs would be kind of nice,” she says.
Richard Parker is into consecutive year eight and feeling optimistic. “I’m chugging along, feeling fit even in the winter months, knowing the spring is not too far away, and upping the distance is not going to be a terribly painful experience,” he says.
“The best part of completing it is sometimes the sheer bizarre experience of getting out there mid-winter, seeing the sun rise and set on the same ride. And there’s a genuine feeling of pride in doing something many other riders would never do. All too often life can intervene to stop you doing it.”
“The beauty of the RRtY it is that it can be as easy or as hard as you want it to be. You can ride it as a 600 every month if you want, ride every weekend or just once in a month; ride alone or always with others, plan your rides to work around childcare, shifts, whatever you need. You just have to find the time, energy and determination to get out for at least one decent-length ride every month. How difficult can that be?”
Tempted? You should be!
