Feeling at home under big skies

American cyclist Dan Rudd only joined Audax UK in 2021, but has already discovered the delights of Britain’s long-distance cycling community. Here he describes finding echoes of his native Idaho in the landscapes of Kent

Feeling at home

BEFORE TACKLING my first Audax, I spent a lot of time thinking about time. Family life is fraught, and you spend a lot of time just keeping things on an even keel. My wife has no interest in Audaxing, being a runner, but we’ve managed to work out a mutually beneficial arrangement. Sometimes your most important training partners aren’t with you on the road.

So I did a lot of thinking before that first Audax ride – a DIY fixed-wheel 200k in late November. Thinking about time, finding a steady pace in the daylight, rolling safely in the dark, and arriving home before the kids’ bedtime story.

I should have gone to look at the sea before setting off from Whitstable. My day would have had a symmetry – north coast/ south coast/High Weald. But I left the thematic trickery slide, and instead set off early. I crept out of one of Whitstable’s overgrown alleyways and on to the road. The day was forecast for a bit of sun and a dependable westerly, which meant a day of easy spinning.

My route from the top of Kent down to Hythe was finger-kissing perfect, staying west of the Roman Stone Street which bisects the Downs south of Canterbury. I cut along the bottom of the green valley with clusters of yew, beech and ash trees on the ridge off to my right. I felt a few moments of despair for the ash, forever losing their battle to dieback disease, but otherwise it was peaceful as I moved south along the western shoulder of the valley with barely an incline.

The no-hills section to the south coast was like cheating but also like magic. With no real climbing behind me I descended, skirting Hythe and on to the wide Romney salt marsh. I’ve always loved it here. The saturated plains are like a photographic negative of the high desert steppe on the edge of Idaho’s Lost River Range where I grew up.

I don’t feel nostalgia – it’s more like entering a time loop where past geography circles around and overlays itself on to the present. The canals become straight highways, the sheep turn into rabbitbrush,

under big skies

and about 50 miles away, Calais becomes one of the volcanic Menan Buttes. Exposed to the big sky, I feel at home here.

Moving through Romney I purposefully routed past the famous Thomas-a-Beckett church in Fairfield, but lacking true Audax experience I hadn’t built in time in to go inside. I regretted not being able to see the huge beams clustered down under the roof or the pew boxes crammed underneath. They sit so straight, strict little metaphors for a Protestantism now long past.

From the road I took in what I could of the church, all alone and exposed in the marsh but seemingly unworried – a good metaphor for Audaxing, I thought. I left the church grounds and wondered if the historical St Thomas really did fall in one of those canals nearby, and then I wondered what an 11th century canal might smell like.

I escaped the gravity of Romney and entered the High Weald’s canopy and rolling roads which were a kind of relief. I enjoyed the Weald but in a mercenary turn I had only come to this area for a turnaround at Broad Oak and leverage its proximity to its straight and wildly charmless B-roads.

But well played me! With a tailwind at the route’s highest point I positively danced all the way downhill on the Udimore Road to Rye – and then beyond as the tailwind continued to carry me without much thought. I was still flying, blown through Camber Sands and on to Dungeness. I spun like mad, wasting the wind as it swirled faster than I could hitch on to it, felt it blow past me, then out over the arcades, curry houses and chippies, holiday bungalows and Dungeness powerlines and finally off over the beach into the North Sea. What a wind. I think of it often still.

But then at the Coast Drive T-junction on outskirts of Lydd-On-Sea the tailwind disappeared. I turned north and it was as if time stopped, or folded back on itself. Coast Drive at Lydd is set way back from the sea and the depth of the Mojavecoloured beach pushes the sea even further from view and into a thin strip.

Startled by the stillness – it seemed no-one was anywhere and the sea had turned grey – I rode past bungalows which hemmed the beach for the next five miles. Every home seemed about one foot tall, hiding from the sea or the beach or even the road. As I passed the tiny houses I looked through the front windows expecting to see dollhouse furniture.

But its inhabitants were asleep, sucked into armchairs in cavernous, ballroom-like sitting areas. It reminded of the book House of Leaves where a family moves into a large and creaky home only to discover that the house is impossibly larger on the inside than the outside, full of dark chambers and unconnected but unending corridors. The book is dark and quite unsettling but is also a love story, though not the kind where the characters love for each other is allowed to occupy the same space or time.

I felt as old as the occupants, like I suddenly had a sparrow skeleton, and pedalled easy northwards. The homes started getting taller, each roof rising a bit and I saw some younger people, or at least more elastic, finally moving about their houses and occasionally padding around gravel drives. I breathed a little easier, the sea finally playing the hypotenuse by clawing away at the beach until the water nearly met me in town at the Grand Parade. The temporal interlude fiasco seemed to right itself. Out of Lydd I headed back across Romney Marsh, this time south of the St-Thomas-aBeckett church and the sun, which had been obscured by clouds for some time, finally disappeared for the day. I climbed out of Hythe where it turned into Christmas evening – or at least it was dark and I saw houses with Christmas lights already up. Christmas and December are too much for me; I prefer November and January. November holds in with anticipation the dead but not freezing air before the December shenanigans, and frozen January frozen when everything finally gets bitterly cold.

I headed north along east side of Stone Street. It’s less scenic but even flatter and I was north of Canterbury in no time. My only low point on the ride was just outside Whitstable on Owls Hatch Road. It’s is completely empty but runs alongside the Thanet Way and its thunderous traffic feels like it’s right on top of you. I wanted to be home, and the parallel spectre of traffic messed with my head quite badly.

Twenty minutes later I was home, a terrible American beer in hand. Ten minutes later my wife came in the back door with my two kids trailing behind. Perfect, I thought, I made it just in time.

Dan's fixed wheel Genesis flyer

Born and raised in Idaho, USA, Dan Rudd has always been a keen fixed-wheel cyclist. He moved to London in his mid-twenties and joined a community of like-minded riders – the LFGSS (London Fixed Gear and Single-Speed). He’s had adventures in track cycling, single-speed cyclocross and night riding – and eventually found Audax UK. The father of two says: “I’ve always loved a challenge, and Audax seemed to be just my ‘vibe’. My ultimate dream is to be a fixed-wheel SR… and I look forward to mixing DIYs and calendar events with life as a busy dad!”