Sportive Spinning
Rise and shine for an EARLY Sunday morning rollout with the inaugural Colchester CTC 100 Sportive. You don’t normally associate a Cycling Touring Club with a semi-serious / semi-pro pedal-at-a-pace. You also don’t normally associate the lovely, lovely Colchester CTC ride with attracting sixty plus riders signing on at The Bricklayers Arms just before 8am.
Chapeau!
What was ACE about the Sportive was that it was a coming together of the different cycling tribes in the town. For all the huff and guff that Colchester is a Cycling Town, even the cynics can see that cycling is incredibly popular in Britain’s Oldest Recorded.
It’s not very often that the cycling clans come together, but on Sunday there was representation from Colchester Rovers, Velo Club Revolution and Chapeau Velo. Plus many other cycling folk attracted from out of town to take up the challenge of completing the 100km circuit in under the Sportive six-hour time limit.
Should be a doddle, right?
Um…
The glorious Sunny Colch sun may have been shining as the flag was dropped, but Sunday was still a morning for cycling tights.
In fact ANY morning is a morning for cycling tights.
You could sense the anticipation of what lay ahead as the pelaton made the neutral roll out around the hell that is North Station, ahead of some heavy pedaling once the wilds of Nayland Road were reached.
I’m not entirely sure of the exact route. I never am. There’s an app for that. But Braintree was more or less the turn around rendezvous. Probably best not to linger there for too long, Comrades.
You need to approach these Sportives with a strategy. A pre-defined tactic is required to see you around the route in the required time. My hangover heavy thoughts were to put on my best Race Face with the other lycra kids, bluff it out to Braintree and then rely upon a strong head wind and a strong double shot of whiskey at a local boozer to bring me back home.
Chin chin.
Failing that then there was always the ever-reliable CTC folk to guide me around the distance. The country lanes of North Essex are part of the DNA of their wrinkles and wind swept cycling faces.
It’s quite a look.
A clever race competition was built into the main race. Question cards were handed out, with en route answers needed to be entered come the close. No place for a lycra clad kid to cut out the main drag and look for the short cuts.
I was slightly disappointed that the long-established CTC routine of seeking out EVERY gardening centre in Essex to stop for a midday coffee was overlooked. The shout went out for a gel break. I pruned my helmet hair with a bit of Vidal Sassoon, before realising that the semi-pro riders were necking bars of gels that look like they should be sold with a warning in Soho sex shop.
For a brazen moment I was actually leading the pelaton and in serious danger of bluffing it all the way around the ride with my booze heavy bravado. This raw ambition was soon beaten out of me when I took a detour with some London riders, optimistically seeking for a cycling shop on the badlands of a Braintree industrial estate.
We’re not from London!
A rear end buckling incident almost brought the Sportive to a close for my Domestique. A bit of a ‘tea shop incident’ then followed, before I agreed on the plan of cutting the brakes and coasting it back down to Sunny Colch in the headwind that was behind us.
Except it was now in front of us.
Whoops.
The 8am fighting talk was now faltering. Heavy legs led to half-dazed conversations.
“Have you got a garden?”
I then held a conversation for almost a mile, enlightening my new found cycling buddy about the beautiful delights of my rodadendrums and veracious borders.
He meant a Garmin of course.
Whoops.
A late-September game of village cricket as we approached the surrounds of Sunny Colch was a delight to watch as the early morning sun was now struggling to go the distance. There was a metaphor in there for any CTC 100 rider wondering if the numerical figure represented miles or km.
But the end was in sight, and so was the Bricklayers. The time limit was achieved, buckled wheel, sore backside and a belly full of gel bars.
Chapeau!
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