When I got up to go cycling at 06:00 this morning the
temperature was already 33°C so yes, this ride like all my others recently, was
not going to take place in the UK. The ride would be through the somewhat challenging
streets of Khartoum, the city in which I now live and work. Riding in Khartoum
is not for the feint hearted and the unusual sight of middle aged men in Lycra
seems to inspire a lot of swerving, waving and cheering from fellow road users which
simply adds to the chaos in a place where adherence to any traffic regulations
seems entirely voluntary.
The inspiration for having a bike out here in Khartoum is because
we are preparing for our next cycling challenge. In 2007 it was Land’s End to John
O’Groats, in 2010 we cycled from Streatley-on-Thames in Berkshire to Venice, 2012
saw us riding the length of Italy from Venice to Sicily and the plan this year
is to ride across the Iberian Peninsula from Lisbon on the Atlantic coast to
Valencia on the Mediterranean.
Graham, Chris, Harley & Jeremy
somewhere in the Berkshire countryside |
|
For this trip there are five of us; myself, I develop strategy
for a food company in Sudan, which as you might imagine is not without its
challenges, Chris, sometime marathon runner whose life continues to revolve
around selling mountains of software to an unsuspecting National Health Service.
Graham, the archetypal grumpy old man who’s garden maintenance business seems
to have responsibility for cutting every front lawn in the South of England, the
small but beautifully formed Harley, an Uber programme manager for an oil
company and Jeremy, a man of a certain age still fighting the battle against pretentious
youth in a frightfully well-known software company.
 |
| Sam at the Mahdi's fort in Omdurman |
The four of us based in the UK have of course for some weeks
been putting the big training rides in, 100 and 120 milers not being unusual.
For my part I can only make shorter rides because if you ride in the middle of
the day here, both the traffic and the temperature will kill you. Yesterday by
the time Jonathan, my training companion and I finished our 75km ride, the
temperature was 37°C which made our 27.5km/h average speed reasonably
respectable. This morning, by the time I’d finished my 80Km ride, the
temperature was nudging 40°. So it was with considerable amusement that I read
Harley’s e-mail explaining that his morning ride had been called off because of
the driving rain and being soaked by an overtaking lorry.
It’s about three weeks before we depart for Spain. The route looks
like this:
Keep you posted!
