The Licky Saw Tooth 100km AAA DIY Audax Fail

In the main I would never bother DIYing a 100km ride as it wouldn’t count towards the R5000 and all of the awards that are given for 100km Audaxes I will hit with 200’s anyway. However, in December when I noticed that the Kings, Castles, Priests and Churches was a AAA event, it prompted me to look into the AAA awards. This was the first time that I had seen the AAA RRtY. Looking forward over the season at the calendar events I had panned I realised that most of them were AAA. This meant that if I filled in a couple of months that I could do the AAA version of RRtY, without much specific effort to do a whole lot different from what I already had planned. The one month that was looking difficult in the schedule was January as I was not available for the limited options within a reasonable distance. I had somewhat resigned myself to starting this award again in February, until reviewing the requirements again and seeing that a AAA ride of any distance was acceptable. I had put together a hilly 100km route as a local run that took in as many of the local hills that I could and I was planning to ride this on Sunday anyway. I did a last minute submission to my local organiser and found it was worth 1.75 points. Result!

I left home Sunday about 11:30am. A later start than normal but with a rough goal of 4 and a half hours I would still be home before it got dark. The weather was overcast and just as I was leaving a very fine light rain started. Fortunately, this only lasted 10mins or so and I barely would have noticed if it hadn’t been for the specs appearing on my GPS screen. The route is pretty complex but unfortunately, this is a necessity to get in the required climbing. We have limited hills around south Birmingham and as such I had to keep routing back on myself to climb hills more than once on different roads. I had tried to commit to memory the trickiest bits so that I wouldn’t be messing around on the road and additionally I set my Garmin to turn notifications which is a mode I never normally use. This all certainly helped, but ultimately it was the complexity of the route that proved to be my downfall.

The ride was going well. I normally sit down spin hills on Audaxs in an effort to conserve energy but I had already decided that as this was a bit more of a training ride and it was considerably shorter than normal that I would try to low cadence the hills and work on a bit leg strength. Whilst I was certainly pushing a bigger gear on the hills I had been able to keep my heart rate under control, not going into the red to badly. Rose Hill had proved to be the only heart palpitation inducing climb but I think part of that was it being the first proper climb of the day. I then headed down Monument lane, through Rubery and over to the Clent Hills. My route crisscrossed Clent as much as was reasonably possible taking in some steep ramps and a few slightly longer ramps before heading into Halesowen.

I had been doing pretty well with navigation. Although the Garmin had got confused a few times in terms of which bit of the loops I was on, I was able to switch to manual (memory) and this allowed the Garmin to right itself. There were a lot of riders out around Clent, in fact there was a lot of people generally. I rode past a couple of the layby carparks around Walton Hill and St Kilmer’s Pass, which were all very busy. It was surprising as although dry the weather wasn’t really “winter family walk nice” but none the less people had braved the grey and were enjoying the outdoors.

After looping around Clent a few more times, I headed back east again, through Rubery and up the steep winding climb of Beacon Hill to the Lickys. It was around 55km in that I got to a turning that it appears I had clearly miss remembered. Having already correctly overruled my Garmin several times I had thought that it had got confused again… obviously it turned out that it was right and this time it was me that was confused. Unfortunately, I didn’t notice my error until I was about halfway down one of the longest descents (that should have been a climb) of the day. I stopped as soon as I could and desperately tried to work out where I had gone wrong and the best way to correct it. I stood on the side of the road looking at the Gamin… looking at the route on the Strava app (which is garbage by the way but that’s another blog post) and got I progressively more confused about how to get back on track. After 15mins of scratching my head, I decided not to dwell on it and just ride. Had this been a calendar event or a longer DIY I probably would have thought differently. As it was, I had been enjoying my afternoon and didn’t want to hold onto any frustration about this, so I just got on with riding deciding to abandon the DIY. I just wasn’t invested enough in this particular ride, so I took my favourite route home and finished having had an enjoyable few hours on the bike.

For those of you that saw Episode 4 of my VLOG where I did a couple of back to back DIYs visiting my Nan, you may remember me saying that her health was not great. Unfortunately, she had a bad turn over Christmas spending much of it in hospital. She made it back to the nursing home for New Year, however, she sadly lost her fight against the many things that ailed her on January 2^nd. I thought about her a lot during this ride, her cheery bright demeanour that touched people wherever she went. This was no more illustrated than the reaction of the staff at the nursing home. After closing her eyes for the last time there was a steady stream of carers all anxious to say goodbye and give their final respects. They commented that this was a loss to the entire residence and there was clearly a genuine sense of sadness from the staff. It was somewhat overwhelming to feel that in the year she had been there she had become one of the personalities of the home that people went to work for. Between the bright times, there was also moments of sadness that she shared with me on my visits. She clearly missed “her Burtie”, I feel part of her had died that day when he did. She spoke of wanting to join him and that she had had enough. This was difficult to hear but I always appreciated her honesty. I didn’t want her to maintain a brave face for us, I wanted to know who she was and how she felt.

I was there when it happened, sat with my mum and dad as my nan took her final breaths. When my Grand Father died I was racked with guilt that I hadn’t been there, I hadn’t done enough… all things which I think are probably natural and normal but none the less makes you feel pretty crap. Being there in someones final moments was a new experience for me. Whilst not a pleasant experience it is one I’m grateful for.  as I feel it has given me an immense sense closure. There was literally nothing more I could have done for her in her final year and indeed her final moments.