Piss Poor Planning Prevents Pacy Progress

Tapas – Day 2

I boarded the ferry at 22:00 last night and made for a bathroom in an obscure corner of the ship to take care of my daily hygiene routine. Then it was dinner and, foolishly, a blog entry introducing the trip and covering day one. It was 2am (UK time) before I headed off to the cinema room, where my reserved lounge seat was. Pitch black, I could just make out my seat, between two large ladies who’d made themselves comfortable. No bother; there were plenty of others. Unknown to me – until I’d kicked two of them in the head – people were sleeping on almost all of the available floor space. Some apologies later, I found an empty row of seats, spent a few restless minutes trying to get comfortable and then followed suit and took the floor, using my helmet and then shoes as a pillow. It was a crap 1.5 hours ‘sleep’ before my alarm went off, having lost an extra hour crossing time zones.

Despite the early alarm call I still managed to be late away. We docked at 07:00 but it would be another 20 minutes before I clipped in. Breakfast was too slow. Packing was much too slow. My morning routine needs work.

Wind the clock back to July 2014. I had been cycling for two months and encouraged a pair of mates (JT & Hawesy) to join me for a tour of the Normandy D-Day landing sites, as the 75th anniversary was looming. That was an incredible experience and I’d recommend it to absolutely everybody, by bike, car or any other means. I’ll try to add an entry on that another time. Anyway, the first stop on that tour was Pegasus Bridge, where the gliders of D Company audaciously (and with incredible precision) landed to capture the bridge, crucially intact, and begin Operation Overlord – probably the greatest military operation of all time. As I docked in Caen it also happened to be the first place I passed on my run to Bilbao.

So it’s Friday the 13th. With my recent run of bad luck it had been suggested more than once that I may be wise to spend today in bed or in some kind of safe room. Instead I was attempting to ride a brand new bike and untested kit across a foreign country, covering the biggest distance I’d ever ridden, having slept just 1.5 hours and carrying a significant sleep debt from the previous few weeks. It’s a good job I’m not the superstitious type.

Almost immediately after setting off I realised my mistake. Hurriedly planning my routes, late on Wednesday night and on Thursday morning, I hadn’t time for proper due diligence and while I tried to avoid any gravel ‘roads’ it wasn’t long before my route files sent me down them. I tried to route around them but they kept coming. It was hard to distinguish on the map just what quality a road might be and whether I needed a short detour, a large one or even backtrack to a main road. Would it be like this the whole way through France? Then I found myself on the slip road to a busy dual carriageway. I remembered thinking, when cobbling the route together, that N roads are good for making progress and suitable for bikes. This wasn’t. This was basically a motorway and the huge trucks, with turbulent wakes that threatened to topple me as they passed, began honking their displeasure at my presence. This was not a pleasant experience and just the short mile or so to the next junction left me scarred.

At a small Carrefour mini-market I stopped to take stock of the situation, while wolfing down a fougasse. I scanned my proposed route and it included a lot of that N-road, being the most direct route. After a bit of a sulk I had a strong word with myself, set the Garmins up so I had two maps showing (one wide and one zoomed in) and headed off again in roughly the same direction as my route guidance.

Usual dietary standards were left back in London. Portability, sugar and fat content were the order of the day.

I passed a village called Gouvix, which felt familiar, and then I remembered that we stayed at the Priory here when we did our tour of Normandy. It makes a good base for something like that and the chap who runs it is also a previous Masterchef contestant, so dinner and breakfast were a treat too.

When I came to plan this trip I was half tempted to recce my route from Belgium to CP1 at Clermont-Ferrand. Part of me felt it wasn’t really in the spirit of the race, though there are no rules against it any many competitors do. As much as I love France I also know that northern France can be a bit featureless, having driven through it so many times. Maybe it would be best to preserve that sense of the unknown for the race?

True to expectations, my journey across the northern part of France was rather dull and I’m in no rush to repeat that experience. I’ll almost certainly be riding similarly dull roads at the start of the race but I’m glad I won’t be weighed down with knowing that for certain. A recce would no doubt make me a quicker racer but it might break the spirit and, as I would discover later, that’s possibly more important than I realised.

I have ideas about the daily distances I’ll cover during the race. With that in mind I plotted two routes for today. The default option was Caen to Poitiers, 350km. At 330km I could switch to my bonus route and extend to 450km for the day, stopping in Angouleme. That was always going to be optimistic, given the ferry didn’t dock until 7am. With the navigation dramas on top of that (and the state I began the trip in) it was barely a couple of hours up the road before I admitted to myself that it would be a hotel in Poitiers tonight.

After many soul-crushingly straight roads I despatched the only real hill of the day and then made a stop when I spotted a KFC sign. TCR riders all note that McDonalds outlets are great for racers, despite avoiding them during everyday life. The theory is they’re clean, fast, consistent and usually have wifi too. I had a stop routine which I wanted to test. I locked the bike up by the playground, ordered some food in the self service machine and headed for the toilets to clean up. Preventing saddle sores is serious business and messing that up could end the race. They’re caused by micro-abrasions from salt build up and general impact, which then become a breeding ground for bacteria and develop into large boils. Grim to write about and excruciating to try and ride with. Once or twice a day I clean the area with a sterile wipe, add some anti-septic Savlon and re-apply some anti-chafing chamois cream. At night I also rinse the shorts to remove the salt build up, which becomes abrasive.

By the time I’m done with that my order is waiting to be collected. During the race I’ll grab it and go but today I took a seat and allowed myself to relax while my devices recharged. From unclipping to clipping back in again it was exactly one hour and 15 minutes. I felt embarrassed by the length of that stop and vowed to cut that down.

Britain’s Jackie Oliver and Belgium’s Jacky Ickz race across the finish line at Le Mans, June 15, 1969. (AP Photo)

Shortly after the KFC stop I was passing Le Mans, scene famous of the 24 hour race. As a Petrolhead this was hallowed ground and while a lap of the circuit isn’t possible (parts of it are fenced off) I could at least ride down the 5.7km Mulsanne Straight. I allowed myself an extra 50W of power for this segment and despite a headwind, luggage and a belly full of fried chicken I was still able to claim the third fastest time down the straight, averaging 38.4kph for my short time trial. That gave me a mental lift and now the focus shifted towards reaching Poitiers in good time.

With some relief I turned off the long straight roads and onto some smaller lanes. The surface wasn’t great but it was something different and it was at least tolerable. These little back lanes have a nasty habit of degrading though. Once I’d invested a couple of km into this direction the road surface changed from ‘shit but tolerable’ to ‘I will plan my route much better next time’ and eventually to ‘you fucking idiot’. You’re left with the horrible decision of whether to cut your losses and retrace your steps or to push on through in the hope that it can’t get any worse and you’re near the end. Only, it’s all guesswork, with judgements made quickly and with a fuzzy, fatigued mind.

Shitty roads shave speed off dramatically but they also punish rider and bike by rattling them to pieces. And then there’s the vastly increased risk of punctures. There’s also the more complex navigation to consider along with the heightened mental awareness needed to scour the trail in detail for the smoothest path through the debris. All in all, a detour on smooth roads would need to be very long before these gravel roads were worth considering. On the positive side, even over the roughest terrain I was able to stay seated without bouncing around too much. The Ti bike, the special sprung seat post and the tubeless 28mm tyres were working a charm.

Spirits were down as I fully accepted my distance would only be 350km today. I stopped for supplies at a mini-market and was lifted by the acquisition of half a kilo of dried figs and a big bag of dried fruit. That powered me towards Poitiers as I booked an Ibis hotel on my stem-mounted phone. Being able to filter the search results by ’24 hour check-in’ is a great feature.

I managed to find the wrong Ibis at first but eventually arrived at ‘my’ one and had my first negotiation about how the bike would be staying in the room with me. It has all my luggage on it and I have some daily maintenance to do. It was shortly before 1am when I arrived to my room and polished off the chicken tenders I’d saved as a post-ride protein hit. A can of Coke served as post-ride carbs and I doubted the caffeine would make any difference. Hygiene stuff taken care of, I plugged my devices in to charge and decided I’d give myself a chance to pay off the big sleep debt I’d accrued before the ride.

“I’d stared Fate square in the eyes and given it the big fuck you!”

By the end of Friday the 13th I’d ridden, quite coincidentally, for 13 hours and 13 minutes. The grim weather that was forecast never really materialised and I suffered no major bad fortune. All of the navigation problems were the result of me rushing the day before when I planned the route. I’d stared Fate square in the eyes and given it the big ‘fuck you!’ and now felt like I was back in control. I made a note to annoy Mike and the TCR crew by requesting cap #13 for the race. They’re not giving out cap numbers until closer to the race but I’m guessing there’s not much of a queue for #13 and I would love to continue my bravado posturing against Fate.

[Strava file]
Distance: 351.1km
Climbing: 2,591m
Moving time: 13h 13m
Stopped time: 2h 55m

Read more: Day 3 – The ball and chain of battery life