CYCLING
SHORTS Cycling Shorts is your platform for news, call-outs, views and opinions on anything cycling-related. We’re keen to hear your biking tales, old or new. Drop us an email with the details. We’re looking for all types of short stories from Audax riders, with a picture of yourself too if possible. Send to: gedlennox@me.com
Here comes the future… E-Brevet is a smartphone app that aims to replace a paper Brevet card, writes Dave Allison. It’s not a navigation tool, simply a recording one. It knows the location and distance of all the controls on a ride and uses the phone’s GPS service to check when you’ve arrived. It’s simple to use – you arrive at the control, click the control button, and your progress is logged. At the end of the ride, you upload the results to the web, and the organiser can check and validate the ride. It’s simpler for organisers to process than a GPS track, and, particularly with the current pandemic situation, avoiding the need to collect receipts is helpful on the ride. Once you’ve downloaded the Brevet details, you don’t need a phone or wi-fi signal to use the app, and battery usage is minimal, because it doesn’t track the whole ride.
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The app is free to use for AUK members. It’s only available for Android phones at the moment, but an iPhone version will be added later. It is permitted only for selected Permanent rides (where the organiser has agreed to its use). This list of approved rides is short at the moment, but will grow, and use may be extended to Calendar events in due course.
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For instructions on the app, and how to identify E-Brevet approved events, look on the Audax UK website at https://audax.uk/news/e-brevet/ Thank you to the riders and organisers who have helped with testing, and for their comments and suggestions, many of which have been CS incorporated into the design. Dave Allison
BOOK REVIEW Endless Perfect Circles: Lessons from the little-known world of ultradistance cycling by Ian Walker
Wheels within wheels… How did a middle-aged man who hated sport as a child, turn himself into an internationally-renowned ultradistance cyclist? We review a page-turner which astounds and inspires in equal measure. Endurance cycling is as much about the mind as the body. Dr Ian Walker, an environmental psychologist at the University of Bath, is an example to all those who fear that sporting achievement is beyond them. In Endless Perfect Circles, he vividly describes an astonishing personal journey from flabby forty-something couch potato to a champion sportsman… and his belief that this path to self-improvement is available to all. On one level the book is a lurid portrayal of the painful, gruelling, muddy struggles of a cyclist attempting to break a world record; cycling from the Arctic down to the far south of Spain – a distance of 6,367km, unsupported and in just 17 days. But it’s more than just a tale of sporting endeavour. His keen focus is on the mental battles we all face, regardless of the task. Ian Walker’s narrative is honest and conversational, and digs beneath the surface of the glamour of success. His is a different perspective – on why, and how, to achieve such feats. As he guides us through every puncture and wrong turn, Ian links his professional work as a psychologist into his way of tackling the monumental task ahead of him. He applies an almost meditative perspective to his riding, harnessing his emotion, delight, anger and fear, to drive him onwards, and take the reader with him. His easy-flowing writing style, interspersed with travelogue notes on each place and problem encountered on the route, highlights the strategies for finishing a journey of this scale in one piece while
still maintaining a poetic reverence for the heart of the sport, the stunning beauty of the scenery, and the exhilaration of movement. Throughout the book, Ian repeats a doctrine of dedication, passion, and love for the journey as much as the finish line. His humorous take on recordthreatening problems encountered along the way makes it clear that with commitment, stubbornness and pragmatism, truly incredible achievements are possible. Endless Perfect Circles delivers valuable lessons which any cyclist would profit from reading. Ian’s assurance – that it is about how you think as much as what you do – is an oft-repeated mantra and one which will resonate with any aspiring sportsperson, amateur or professional. A highly recommended Christmas read. • Endless Perfect Circles: Lessons from the little-known world of ultradistance cycling, is available from major bookshops in paperback at £9.16, or in Kindle edition at £4.29
Megan Pelta CS
My husband and I… the Bentons at 80 The first time I met Ann and Keith was outside Versailles Palace before PBP in 2003. I was fairly new to audax back then and had no idea I was mixing with audax royalty. Since then, Ann and Keith have become good friends and I’ve stayed at chez Benton before Keith’s Wiggy 300 event on several occasions and been treated to a wonderful pre-ride meal. Several PBPs, LELs and Wiggy 300s later, Dave Atkinson and I met up with Ann and Keith outside Spa Gardens cafe in Ripon to mark their joint 80th birthdays with a DIY 200 – with sadly restricted numbers, appropriate social distancing and staying outside of course – but at least the rain held off until in the afternoon. Keith, a lifelong cyclist, active member of York CTC and the North Yorkshire DA since the 1970s, has managed
to balance distance riding with family commitments and a career HMRC. He started Audax riding in the late 80s and has an AUK number below 100. He rode his first PBP in 1987 at the age of 47 and since then has finished four more and was one of the select group of riders for the first LEL in 1989. He’s ridden it three or four times since then and run a control with Ann in Hovingham in 2005. His advice for doing the ride… “Don’t leave it until you’re 47 to do your first PBP”. AUK treasurer for many years in the 1990s, Keith went on to become chairman for several years after that, then vice-chair of Les Randonneurs Mondiale in 2011 and then chairman in 2014. In parallel he was chairman of VC167 for about 11 years. Keith is a stickler for following the rules and woe betide anyone who turned up for an event without the
