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

There was some good news from the government shortly before Arrivée went to press, in that some of the restrictions that had required AUK to suspend validation of events were being eased, holding out the prospect of both permanent and calendar rides restarting by the summer. The announcement, on 22 February, applied only to England, but it’s hoped that by the time you are reading this, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland will have followed suit. This means that AUK is able to recommence the validation of events of up to 300km that take place solely within England from the 29 March. This applies to calendar and permanent events. Permanent events will initially be limited to 6 participants per event route each day until 17 May or, if later, the start of Step 3 when it will increase to 30. Permanent events of up to 600km will also be validated from the start of Step 3. Calendar and permanent events of any length will be validated from the 21 June or, if later, the start of Step 4. All events will be subject to the guidance and behaviour codes published on the Audax.uk web site, where you will also find the latest updates for each part of the UK as they are announced. You will remain responsible for your own compliance with applicable guidance and legislation. In particular, you should be aware of any restrictions on travel which will apply to travel to and from events other than by bike.

Rob McIvor CS

From Audax to Glaudax putting the glamour into long-distance cycling

Brothers Richard and Tony Evans have come up with a cycle tours business idea guaranteed to offer great scenery, comfortable accommodation – and absolutely no sleeping in bus stops…

What’s left for an Audax rider when he’s cycled round the world on a recumbent, completed five PBPs and four LELs, and founded the Kingston Wheelers Audax Chapter? Richard Evans asked himself that question as he inched towards his 60th birthday. The answer presented itself during the summer of 2020 – set up a cycle tours business with me, his younger brother. We’ve undertaken many tours together over the years – with Richard usually planning the course while I tend to deal with logistics, like accommodation. During the Covid summer we set off together on a six-day circular tour from my home in the Chilterns to the Snowdonia coast and back – around 130km per day, comfortable accommodation and plenty of time for a nice meal out and a couple of beers in the evenings. “We should bottle this and sell it,” said Richard – and so the Glaudax Cycle Tours concept was born. The following weeks saw us set up a limited liability partnership, build a website, effect countless changes to the route, and make around 300 bed nights of provisional hotel bookings among myriad other tasks. Some route changes were deemed necessary when we rode it in the summer – for example, a stretch of NCN track avoiding a busy section of A-road turned out to be not fit for purpose, and required a major route alteration. Many other sections were tweaked and improved in order to achieve their aim of finding “quiet lanes and spectacular scenery”. Having made these changes to both the route and some of the overnight stops, a further challenge remained – we would need to get back out on the road to check the entire Mark II route and to visit the newly selected hotels.

Google Maps, Streetview and Ride with GPS are all very well but unless you’ve seen it for yourself you can’t be entirely sure what you’ll find. The same can be said for Tripadvisor accommodation reviews. The whole country was now in various Covid tiers, and Wales was in complete lockdown, plus the shorter late-autumn days were hardly conducive to a bike route test of that length – we’d have been trying to check half of it in the dark!

A brief window of opportunity presented itself in early December after the Welsh restrictions were eased, so we set off by car on a three-day tour of the route at a sedate average of 30 mph for 500-plus miles. After a few final tweaks, the route and accommodation were declared fit for purpose, and another of our aims thereby fulfilled: “Meticulous route design”. Other features of a Glaudax Cycle Tour are secure bike storage at the overnight stops, luggage transfer and emergency assistance. Richard and I will accompany every tour in the Glaudax Sherpa van, and will hop on our own bikes now and then to join our clients – a maximum of just ten on each tour keeps things cosy. Glaudaxers will also enjoy a breakfast at the popular Musette cycling café in Aldury (musettecafe.co.uk) before setting off for stage one of the tour, and a finishers’ meal back at Musette at the end.

The Glaudax website was launched in December and the first bookings soon followed. The Grand Snowdonia Tour is scheduled to run four times in 2021. The first is due to depart on 2 May and has sold out. The next tour at the end of May is selling fast. Whether Covid restrictions will have been lifted sufficiently for the early tours to run is still up in the air at the time of writing, but with relaxed payment terms and a full refund guarantee if Glaudax have to cancel a tour, would-be Glaudaxers are able to book with confidence.

Oh, and did someone ask “Why Glaudax?” You’ll find the answer to that and many more questions at www.glaudax.co.uk

Sun-baked… Richard on PBP

Fellowship News the jewel in the crown of the Fellowship of Cycling…

Quarterley, 144 pages per issue. No adverts unless nostalgic. Packed with members’ contributions: literary, artistic, photographic etc and not forgetting the many Patterson drawings, Reduced subs to new first time members £15 for 15 months (5 issues). Normally £20 pa. (4 issues) Cheques payable to FCOT. Apply to Adam Pride, 76, Foredown Drive, Portslade, Brighton, E. Sussex. BN41 2BE

David Twitchett CS

Be careful what you wish for…

Randonauting (via the Randonautica app) not to be confused with randonneuring, is a craze sweeping the world. The premise is the random choice of places to walk, ride or drive to, that have been selected, in part, by the quantum influences of your own thoughts. During lockdown this free app has proven very popular among walker, cyclists and ramblers seeking to extend their experience by incorporating Augmented Reality (AR) into otherwise repetitive daily exercise. Joshua Lengfelder, the mind behind this app, developed the idea that random exploration could divert people from their “predetermined realities” while trapped with reduced outlooks due to the pandemic, a worthy idea in itself without having to conjure quantum entanglement you would think. Some users report interesting and sometimes spooky synchronicities and coincidences resulting from this AR – probably because it takes you to places not visited before. Some unusual discoveries have also been claimed, such as money, drugs and even body parts in suitcases. The idea that there are any quantum influences at work with this app has been countered by physicist Daniel J Rogers in the New York Times who attests that it’s a simple random number generator wrapped up in science jargon – I have to say that I was at a loss to comprehend how my old iPhone 8, built long before quantum computers, could have such spooky abilities wired into its ageing OS… But I understand that quantum entanglement is little understood and deeply troubling, even to some of our greatest minds, including Einstein who was proven conclusively wrong in his disbelief – entangled particles are a thing, furthermore they have been around since the big bang and our atoms could be full of them. Having said all that, it’s a great idea and certainly something to entertain before we all get back on the road. if you fancy an alternative adventure you can download the app from apple and android platforms – but take care about what’s on your mind when you plot your first target… Audax member John Holding brought our attention to this pertinent development after reading the story about e-bikes in our last edition. This extraordinary invention is a recent, and still developing, system that uses the downstroke compression together with the weight of the rider to harness energy. Quite good for those of us who carry a bit of reserve up every hill… it claims to be equivalent to an electric motor but without the battery, so could be used on any Audax ride. Initial energy efficiency improvements against a standard wheel of as much as 30 per cent have been observed and more precise measures are being made. It uses a weight to energy conversion system through coiled springs that return power during rotation. Bearing in mind that cycling is already considered the most energy-efficient means of transport, my interest was certainly piqued, so I got in touch with the French/Irish development Flashing through the pages of Arrivée are snatches of the poetry of the life awheel. For whatever reason we ride a randonnee, at some point on the road the mind turns to musing. A hot summer of 2021 could bring to mind Louis MacNeice, in The Cyclist, imagining a group ‘riding their heat-wave/ Feet on a narrow plank and hair thrown back/ And a surf of dust beneath them.’ My Thorn Audax bike surprised me the other day, because it’s gone unused for so long. ‘It isn’t / a translucent insect,’ writes Pablo Neruda in Ode to Bicycles, ‘humming through summer / but a cold skeleton / that will return to life / only when it’s needed, when it’s light.’ This past year has taken the wind out of many cyclists, with the disappointing exhalation of a puncture. In La Foratura the Italian tourer Gigi Mondani has written the only poem I know of specifically about a puncture: ‘E all’improvviso Pfffff/ come una lagna! (‘All of a sudden pff! Like a whingeing moan!’) Soon tyres can sing the song of smoothrunning and we’ll hear the wind in the wheels. In Derek Mahon’s The Bicycle, they sing ‘in the memory, stars that turn/ About an eternal centre/ The bright spokes glittering.’ Cycling long-distance and poetry both revolve around dreaming. Where does it end? Do I sell my car buy a tourer with a fatter downtube and live the hippy dream, go on beyond the end of an Audax ride and on, overland to Asia? The Japanese haiku seems peculiarly well-fitted to describe endurance cycling. Matsuo Basho went on foot of course along his Narrow Road to the Interior. His haikus are simple enough to recite with pleasure to oneself on a long Audax ride. ‘The guardian spirits of the road beckoned,’ writes the Zen master, ‘and I could not settle down to work.’ Running along the backlanes of Britain supplies something of the solace sought by a monk departing the metropolis in search of tranquillity. Miel Vanstreels has published a book of his own two-wheeled haikus, but no-one has yet translated them from the Dutch. For a poem not about the bike or touring but racing in a group, Tim Krabbe offers some lyrical descriptions in The Rider. The Danish writer Jorgen Leth exquisitely captures that critical point when the candidate for victory makes a break: ‘I see the many signs / The eyes of the men facing inwards / I see myself getting ready to jump / I get out of the saddle / look around one last time / I hear the heart of the peloton beating.’ Leth of course was director of the Paris-Roubaix documentary ‘A Sunday in Hell’, and his poetry comes closer than anyone I’ve yet found to distilling the essence of cycling, its rhythm just like that of his opening shot, the clacking of the chain running through the derailleur, that purr of the paintbrush loading oil on the transmission as it ticks by. But it is the best cycling poem? The road to find it goes ever on. ● Ben Lowings is an Audaxer from Berkshire. He’s planning a ride In Pursuit Of Spring. It follows the London-Somerset bike route taken by the poet Edward Thomas in his book.

CS

team and they very kindly agreed to send me one of their latest production wheels for review in the next issue of Arrivée (152). That is if we can get anything delivered from the EU in the short term…

Until then, the latest news about the Superwheel system can be found on their facebook:

www.facebook.com/superwheelsystem CS