Greetings from Lisbon

So  we are here after a thankfully, an uneventful journey. The bike boxes made it onto the plane and off again at Lisbon from where we were whisked off to the hotel in luxurous black Mercedes vans. The Hotel Palacio Ramalhete is a beautifully converted old town house down near the harbour, a boutique hotel with small, nicely appointed rooms.

The hotel allowed us to use the cellar to rebuild our bikes so we worked away between crates of beer and wine with pliers and torque wrenches until the bikes were rebuilt and ready of the start of our journey tomorrow morning.

Happily bike building

Ready for Supper

We wandered down to the centre of the city this afternoon and visited an ice cream shop and a couple of bars where we attempted to work out what time we would have to leave the hotel tomorrow morning to get the 2 ferries we will have to catch if we are going to cover the 110 miles in time to get to bed at a sensible hour.

This evening we found a small local restaurant serving an interesting combination of fish and fava beans. The arguments over who will carry the spare tyre successfully resolved, we all headed back to the hotel and bed.

The Fellowship of the Chain Ring

So on my return to the UK earlier this week, I found myself immediately subject to the Spanish Inquisition who as we all know, rely on fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, an almost fanatical devotion to the agony of Streatley Hill. The role of Tomás de Torquemada fell to Harley who had been briefed to lead me up every hill in West Berkshire to see if I still could; after months of peddling along a nice flat Nile. The experience culminated in a ride up the aforementioned Streatley Hill, a long 16% climb, much favoured as a ‘King of the Mountain’ stage in the Tour of Britain.

Detailed Planning at the Bell

The look of a man 'in the right'

I passed and this trial by ‘heavy breathing’ and peddled onto meet the others for a detailed planning session in The Bell at Aldworth. Chief amongst the many issues we had to consider was how to deal with Graham’s day three problem. It has become something of a tradition that after three days of having to deal with the vagaries of the rest of us on these trips, Graham explodes, shouts a few well- chosen obscenities and as a general rule, cycles off into the middle distance. My colleagues were reminded of this the previous weekend when somewhere near Bere Regis, after 110 miles in the saddle, they made the mistake of choosing to challenge Graham’s confident assertion that there was a farm shop advertising Dorset Cream Teas just round the corner. Thankfully they made the wise choice of turning round and going off after him. Graham was of course irritatingly correct and they spent the next couple of hours sitting on a terrace in the warm, late afternoon sunshine consuming Cornish pasties, massive sandwiches, cream, jam, scones and endless pots of tea; makes my favourite Khartoum Tea Lady seem somewhat inadequate…

So off tomorrow, all the bikes are dismantled and packed up, transport booked, packs of nutrition bars and carbohydrate gels sent to each of the hotels for the following day’s ride. All set and the weather reports suggest it’s not going to be too grilling in Spain, after all.

Keep you posted! 

Warming Down!

OK it’s a week to go before we head off to Portugal and as I sit here enjoying the gentle browns and blues of a Khartoum dusk, I’m starting to think my training has not been quite so inadequate after all. You see there has been much concern from the chattering classes about next week’s weather forecast in Spain. There has been a debate from the British contingent as to whether it is in fact possible to cycle when the temperature gets above 30 degrees.

Over here of course it’s already 30 when you get up in the morning. In fact on Friday, I completed an 80 miler, finished about 11:30 and the temperature was already in the low 40s; read it and weep, Gentlemen...

The Khartoum Coach

Apart from high temperature training, my other distinct advantage has been training with Jonathan Lamont, who I’d like to thank for accompanying me on our somewhat buttock clenching rides through Khartoum. As I was saying to him this morning, as we waved to a nice man in a tank who though it amusing to track our progress with his 50 calibre machine gun, it’s more than likely that the last thing I ever hear is Jonathan’s soft Irish brogue whispering “It’s OK you can go, the lights are green”. Anyway Jonathan you see is a runner turned cyclist who used to be a member of the Irish international middle distance team and has a wealth of knowledge and experience about endurance training and riding, a rather useful chap to have in your corner.   

Well the training’s been going OK at this end, 120 miles last weekend and Jonathan and I did a 35 miler this morning to add to yesterday’s 80. We managed a respectable 18.3 mph average this morning and it certainly felt like we had been doing some serious work by the time we got in from our usual circuit around Khartoum.

The training route through Khartoum & Omdurman

It seems Jeremy has been wandering the planet with is bike, I think last weekend saw him peddling round the Isle of Wight, a couple of weeks ago he was to be found in Tenerife winning the ‘make up your own fantasy road sign’ competition.

The winning fantasy road sign

There seems to be lots of last minute activity related to getting the final route loaded into the Garmin trip computers, arranging airport transfers although as far as I can deduce, we still have no real idea of how we are going to get our bike boxes from one side of Spain to the other so we can get our bikes back to the UK when the ride is finished.

Katie...

There’s a lot of talk about ‘warming down’ back in the UK (I’d like to see them try that over here) This seems to take the form of Chris and Harley taking their daughters to concerts, Harley seems to have pulled the short straw by having to go to a Tinie Tempah gig, whoever that is. Chris on the other hand seems to be coping with the idea of going to  Katy Perry concert with rather more equanimity.

Graham I understand is warming down with vast quantities of beer, barbeques and fish and chips.

Back in the UK next week, they are taking me out to see if I can ride up a hill, haven’t cycled up a hill since January!

The plan is to cycle across the Iberian Peninsula in 7 days...

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!