Improvers Spring Special Season Gets Underway

By tradition every Spring I organise some ‘Improvers Spring Specials’. These are for riders like myself who cannot manage a fast pace but still want the ‘fun’ of climbing/descending a very hilly route outside of our normal stamping grounds.

This year I thought we would start with one of our old favourites ‘The Mayfield Mayhem’. Although this is only 58 miles long, it has the second highest hill density in my collection at 106 feet per mile, which puts it in leg breaker territory.

On advertising this ride I pointed out that the ride would be cancelled for safety reasons if the weather forecast was poor, so all week I checked the forecast every day and on Friday the forecast looked OK, with just a bit of rain early on but dry thereafter. On Sunday morning I woke up to the unmissable sound of rain drops on my bedroom window and a text from Andy asking if the ride was still on. It was too late to cancel, so the answer was yes.

The rain wasn’t too bad once we were all assembled at Robertsbridge railway station. As well as myself there were the familiar faces of Malc D, Ivan, Derek, Steve D, Andy, Colin plus one of Colin’s mates Mike.  It intrigued me to compare what Mike and Andy were riding. Mike was riding a cheap second-hand alloy Giant defy (winter bike) while Andy was riding his immaculate very nice carbon framed Emonda including carbon wheels!

There is no easy warm up on this ride and we started climbing immediately after exiting the car park. Everything was going fine until we approached Snape wood. By now the rain had increased and everything felt dark and gloomy under the thick cloud cover. The lanes round this area are very twisty and the Garmins were getting confused. This was due to combination of not enough track points plus poor satellite signal leading to errors. To make matters worse Andy was using a brand new Garmin 820 and didn’t know how to turn off route recalculation. We kept literally going in circles plus Ivan and Steve got separated from the rest of us. Who knows what new rider Mike thought of us all. In the end we had to go old school, ignore the Garmins and trust Malc’s common sense instinct to get us back on route and find our missing friends.

Miraculously this worked, my Garmin showed we were back on route and after a few miles there was Steve and Ivan waiting for us. It was great to be all back together, but with only half the group having the route on their Garmins I wasn’t so sure we could manage to stay that way.

We will all pretty soggy by now but after a winter adapting to the cold, I felt warm enough. We were now moving into Ashdown forest and the climb up to Kings Standing. Colin wanted us to take a detour to the Kidd’s Hill climb to the top but I thought it best to stick to the longer smoother and more gradual climb past Coleman’s Hatch . This is one of my favourite climbs. It’s around 4.5 miles long and a bit of a grind, plenty of time for us to become very spread out. Last ones at the top were Malc and Derek. Derek said he didn’t realise how many hills there were and Malc said he felt cooked (too many miles during the week) they said they couldn’t go on and were going to catch a train back home.

Hours of cleaning await Andy!

The rest of us pressed on towards our planned café stop at Mayfield. This was only 13 miles but it seemed endless with another steep climb around every corner. The roads were absolutely filthy and full of wet loose gravel but at least there weren’t too many potholes. My rear brake blocks were getting dangerously thin and Andy’s carbon wheels were making alarming screeching sounds under the constant downhill breaking .Despite having good endurance from my winter riding  my leg muscles were in pain from all the unaccustomed climbing, this was becoming a real suffer fest but masochistically I was secretly enjoying the sense of adventure . Ivan however was not having a good time, he was wet and cold and said if there was a way out on a local train he would take it.

After a stop, myself and Andy got separated from the others but weren’t concerned as we knew everyone was headed for Mayfield. Approaching the town we saw a café and decided to pull in to see if there were there. Unfortunately Andy misjudged the curb and took a low speed crash. Fortunately rider and beloved Emonda emerged only a little scarred. There was no sign of the others and desperate for sustenance we took the Main road into Mayfield and the correct café. What a relief! Two lattes and a big slice of chocolate cake restored me to more or less normal. The rain had stopped and the sun was managing to partially break through the thinning cloud cover, even the Garmins were now happy.

The last ten miles were great fun with wider drier roads. Our only problem was that Ivan’s single speed chain decided to snap close to the end but Ivan managed to ride it like a scooter and arrived back only a few minutes after we did.

Despite the adversities there were smiles all round, hopefully this will set us up for the other forthcoming ‘Specials’ .

Steve C