16/2 Early Bird Ride-Metin Goes Missing

Derek Back On Form

Goodbye To Andy's Alloy Villier

An unusually large turnout for our full length Early Bird' ride with ten riders meeting at the Harrow on a dull but windless day with temperatures at last back up to the seasonal average.This encouraged John V to turn up with bare legs, the first sign of spring? Our chosen winter route was 'high and over' which has a good mix of safe wide roads and lots of climbing in the second half. On the road to battle I once again suffered a puncture on my front tyre, was the rim tape the cause of all these punctures? Fortunately Malcolm was at hand and he had his reading specs with him so was able to give the tyre close scrutiny. The rim tape was OK but Malcolm managed to pick out lots of little bits of stone that had got into the rubber and finally managed to find the one that had worked its way through the kevlar fibres, the cause of all my recent puncture problems. Once fixed we proceeded without incident through battle, up Boreham street before the sharp turn south down to Wartling. From here we picked up the sustrans route through Rickney. Although perfectly passable the road is getting in a terrible state and at one point about a third of the width of the road had completely collapsed to give the 'mother' of all potholes.Andy wanted to stop for a pee but being such cultured cyclists we ignored distress calls from our bladders so that we could use the excellent public loos at Alfriston. Andy was riding his trusty alloy Villier for the last time as that afternoon he was picking up a brand new shiny carbon steed (looks like ally alloy is going the way of the dodo)

'Hi And Over', What A Pushover!

From Alfriston, the ride gets really interesting. About half the group had never ridden 'high and over ' before and didn't know what to expect. As it turned out, for some reason we all found it surprisingly easy today  and arrived at the top wondering what all the fuss was about. Good to see Derek is back to his old self and was only a little way behind me on the climb. From this point its the fabulous descent down towards towards Exceat. Here we came across lots of road signs declaring the road leading up Friston hill to be closed for resurfacing. There were barriers up and lots of workmen around but we decided to push our luck and cycle between the barriers. I think we all expected the workmen to tell us off but they didn't seem to care, so we carried on. The steep climb up Friston hill had been newly resurfaced and with no traffic on it, it was a fabulous ride, we felt like we were on an alpine stage of the tour de france with closed roads and billiard table smooth surfaces. Unfortunately, as the hill levelled off we reached the point were the resurfacing was still going on and the workers were scraping the old surfaces off in sections. We managed to get though by switching from one side of the road to the other. It was around this point we realised that Metin wasn't with us, the whole group was very spread out by now and with all the heavy machinery around we just had to press on before regrouping at the junction for the road to Jevington. Metin never arrived and without his mobile number there wasn't much we could do so we had to set off without him (Metin emailed me later and did get home safely- lesson to be learnt here is that everyone needs to give me their mobile number). Next up was the hardest part of the route, the climb up to the top of Beachy Head. Here the difference between abilities of the riders was really apparent and we became very stretched out along its length. With myself and Derek at the back I caught the occasional glimpse of some of the middle ability cyclists moving through the switchbacks but eventually we regrouped at the top and admired the clear view of the bay with Hastings appearing so far off in the distance. The decent down this side of Beachy is like a mini Alpe D'Huez and Malc made the most of it with his normal fast descending skills. Some of us stopped into the cafe at Pevensey for refreshment, arriving just in time to catch Chris P with some of the bacon butty boys.