Back to the future

Great morning with my future London to Paris ridemates - 80km at a steady pace around the Surrey Hills.

Although the L2P has a 21st Century sportive air about it, the ride was like a time-machine back 20 years to the last time I went on a proper, old-school club run.

The same language ("Car up!" "Car back!" "Squeeze in!"), the same steady warm-up before the mad dash for home, and the same characters -- it's as though central casting decree that every group of Sunday morning roadies must have, in no particular order: the bunch engine; the joker; the nutcase who wants to drop the hammer before you even leave the car park; the equipment bore; the bloke who goes on and on about heart rate and lactate thresholds and then gets dropped on the first hill; the old bloke who sits in and never does a turn on the front (err...that was me actually); the fat one who goes surprisingly fast and the eejit who couldn't hold a line if his life depended on it, which come to think of it, it does.

Around 60k, I developed what a young lady in the group referred to as "exercise-induced Tourette's" -- swearing liberally every time the road went upwards.

Our club runs used to finish at a greasy spoon in Wembley, today we all gathered for top class coffee and fiendishly expensive pastries at Carluccio's. 

My amazing technicolour Sidi's were much admired -- one woman even asked if I'd had them specially made -- and I learned a few things along the way.  Most important, I can still hold a wheel, I'm not as slow up hills as I thought I was, but I need to practice my descending as a matter of urgency.