It has been some time since this little series came to a temporary standstill. I have been inundated with no letters at all from readers asking when it will resume. Well, we can finish the account of the cycling here. And then maybe some other time, there will still be running, darts and pool, chess and etcetera to look forward to.
We resume the story in 1996.
Something told me it was over, riding past Kemble airfield early in the morning on 25th August, 1996. It felt more like the end of something than the beginning of a third consecutive ride in the WTTA 12 Hour. Three weeks before, I had taken 15 minutes off my previous times for the trial ride from Portsmouth to Swindon and back, improving from 8 hours 55 to 8-40, but although by then I felt llike an old hand who really knew what he was doing, I knew I could turn out another respectable ride by doing what I'd done before in almost identical conditions, it wasn't any longer on any great voyage of discovery. I thought stretching the stamina issue to the 24 Hour event was out of the question despite my dad's optimistic suggestion of the idea and it would need exceptionally favourable conditions to achieve the 225 miles that I vaguely thought might be possible for the 12. Once you've benefitted from a mostly helpful south-westerly wind all morning, riding back into it during the afternoon meant diminishing one's losses and aiming to make it to the finishing circuit rather than sustaining the approximatiion of 20 mph recorded for the first 100 miles.
In the twenty years since these events, some things that happened one year migght have got mixed up with those of another. This might have been the one in which I ran out of fuel at about 170 miles, the muscles all go limp and I stopped and ate any last remnants of food still in my back pockets before pushoing on again and, gladly, seeing the car with new supplies a few miles later. But it proved how true it is that the body is an engine and needs fuel to run on. As I set off again, I could feel the energy coming back as the blood distributed the calories back into the arms and legs.
The great Andy Cook would have caught me from 46 minutes behind after 4 hours or so and offered a few kind words as he went by at 25 mph, or something like it, because that always happened but even if he had covered more miles than I finally did in 12 hours, he packed in all three of our head-to-head encounters in the discipline because 215 miles might be good enough for me but 255 wasn't going to be good enough for him and so he rode somewhere else the following week to gain satisfaction.
On the finishing circuit, I stopped at a gate and went behind the hedge for an unprecedented second call of nature. Previously, I had manage with just the one such comfort break which I used to pass comment on the sport of golf on the course at Burford. But as I went back to the bike, I saw Gwen Shillaker glide by in her stylish way and that concentrated the mind a bit more. Although she was now in front of me on the road, I thought I must be still ahead of her on miles. She was something of a hero of mine and her example of riding round all day with a cheerful wave and a word for all the supporters had been one of the things I had wanted to emulate in taking up the 12 Hour event in the first place. So I got back on and followed in her tyre tracks.
One has a fairly clear idea of how far one has been and you know exactly when your time is up, 12 hours after you started, and it didn't look as if I was going to post an improved figure on 1995's 217.888 and so, realizing that tyhe next timekeeper on tyhe circuit would be the last I saw within my time, I weaved and wandered across the lane towards him, deliberately using up time in a way that would otherwise be criminal and profligate in a time trial and stopped by the timekeeper and said I was finishing there.
But you've still got some seconds left, carry on to the next one and you'll get credit for it.
No, no, this will do, thanks, I said.
And so my career could have continued for two more miles that would have given me a few more yards calculated onto that ride. And now that I look at the result, in which I finished 15th out of 31 finishers, as ever just above the halfway mark, with 215.131 miles, I was only 0.044 miles behind 14th place, which is perhaps about 80 yards. And so, as little as it really matters, I showed a complacent disregard for doing my very best and settled for something not quite as good.
But not by much. There are some good names below me on that result sheet and some more, including the legend, Keith Wright, 4th with 240 miles, above me. It was quite some privilege, especially looking back in disbelief at this distance, to have shared the road with them but only now do I notice that Janet Tebbutt wasn't one of them, and didn't ride any of the 12 Hours that I did, which is a shame. Ahead of Derek Randall, Basil D'Oliviera, Alex Higgins, George Best, Ricci Dohman or Kirkland Laing, she was my biggest sporting hero of all, who was as tough on a bike as she was gentle and unassuming off it. But the one-time Land's End to John O'Groats Ladies record holder was still there, churning out big long rides at her steady pace after I'd become a minor official as my dad graduated from circuit timekeeper to chief timekeeper and then event organizer, including when the race carried the Natiional Championship title and superstar riders like Zak Carr turned up to show what could be done on those roads, although quite clearly it wasn't the easiest of courses or else they would have done even more.
I didn't pack up completely in 1997 but that year wasn't scheduled around training for the big event. I think I did 2000 miles rather than 5 or 6 thousand but I'm afraid, once you've let it go, it's hard to get back, especially entering middle-age and when the whole object of training is to make oneself good enough to take part, let alone be properly competitive.
I made some effort to come back in 1999, pushing myself up hills and srcutinizing the stopwatch for any evidence that training times could be translated into acceptable 10's or 25's, knowing that you have to be at least back to what you could do for short distances before investing in new bikes and 200 miles as week of training through the summer to get back into the all day event. It was never quite there.
Being the sort of babe magnet that I have always been for a certain sort of boho chic, intellectual girl, it was eventually necessary to go on holiday with two girls rather than one and so we rode coast to coast, not quite across America, but across England at its narrowest point, from Newcastle to the Solway Firth but the rented mountain bikes rode like old Russian army tanks compared to a lightweight racing bike and so cycling for me eventually became two and a half hours on Sunday mornings but you notice the difference when you realize that any cloud or chance of rain has become an excuse to stay at home with the Observer crossword whereas a few years before you wouldn't actually set out in the rain but otherwise you'd chance it because you wanted the miles, it was an obsession and it was what you wanted to do.
It must be four years ago now, or maybe five, when I started to get a bad back just at the point when, having escaped from the city and got up the hill and through some fiddly bits of lanes, I was ready to give it a proper go but found myself instead sitting on a bench at the side of the road deciding that I had better make the best of my way back home.
It was a sad, disconsolate end to the best thing I ever did but isn't that so often how it is. Ask David Cameron. Or you could have asked Margaret Thatcher.
And now cycling is almost the national sport, contributing the foundation of the success of Team GB to the inevitable if somewhat gauche medals table in which this country is ahead of China and only gives best to the USA. My obscure place, and the long tradition in my family, in what was for such a long time a minority sport, are less than footnotes in a time up to and including when Chris Boardman's example kindled something about bikes in this country and then it caught fire. I'm so glad I did it at a time when nobody else knew enough about it to understand that I was actually no good at it.