The First Annual London to Haywards Heath Night Ride

While you were getting into your pyjamas last night, brushing your teeth and tucking in your teddy bear, James and I were hot footing it over to Clapham Common for the London to Brighton Night Ride.  I say hot-footing it, but I mean desperately calling a taxi as the trains were unexpectedly not running (I did check, before you say anything).

Things had not, therefore, started well.  We had also discovered earlier in the day that we'd been given different start times (I had 23:30 and James had 23:00) and that James didn't have a bus ticket.  We managed to sort all of these things out eventually and we lined up to set of at half past eleven with a load of pretty much identically dressed folks - black lycra bottoms and fluorescent yellow lycra tops were the order of the day (or, rather, night).  A lot of people had really gone to town on their lighting displays with many looking like they had mistaken it for a Christmas event.

The first several miles were through London suburbia, largely uneventful but punctuated by the "encouraging" shouts, chants and other vocal exuberances of the pub chucking out time crowd.  We went past one group of girls shouting "Tour de France, Tour de France" at the top of their voices, in the most un-French accents imaginable - we weren't sure if they were genuinely confused or trying to be funny, but it was definitely us laughing rather than them...

The route for the night ride is substantially different from that for the day ride.  The day ride has quite a lot of big hills, but they are spread out and mostly short, sharp shocks.  The night ride starts by giving you an enormously long, slow climb which somewhat takes the wind out of your sails and makes the next few miles arduous as you try to recover.  It seems never ending, but when you do reach the top, you are rewarded with the first rest stop.  We needed a cup of tea and a sit down by that point, so that's what we did.

After that rest stop, we had a bit of a down hill run, which was a blessed relief after the gruelling start.  About three or four miles further on, there was a sharp downhill under a railway bridge into a sharp right hand bend.  As I went under the railway bridge, holding my line on the road, a car decided to overtake me.  It had the stereo blaring and was going too fast for the road layout and the fact that there were so many other vehicles (bikes) on the road.  As it came past, it swang wide in preparation for the right turn and clipped my front wheel, not hard enough to do any damage to the Beeblemobile, but enough to slam my already ailing left shoulder (from my whiplash injury a few months ago) into the wall of the bridge - in some ways I'm thankful the bridge was there, though, as the result if it wasn't could have been far worse.  Because of the right turn, no-one got the car's licence plate and as I thought I was relatively unscathed and I had somewhere to be, I left it and carried on.

Just after that incident, the route surprised us with another hideous hill, a spike at the 20 mile mark.  We were still only a third of the way in and already most people, including myself, were walking up the hills.  When I eventually made it to the top, James was waiting for me.  We had a drink and a rest and then decided to set off again.  At this point, James realised that he had a flat tyre.  We had planned for such eventualities and had a spare inner tube.  We realised that the puncture had been caused by a shard of glass that had slashed the rubber and left a hole.  It took quite a while to change the tube, but James managed it and we limped the ten miles to the next rest stop - James found this hard going as although he'd done the best with the pumps we had with us, it transpired he'd only got the fixed tyre up to about a third of the recommended pressure.  The very helpful service man at the rest stop quickly rectified this and we were on our way again.

At this point the sky was starting to get a bit lighter and my shoulder was getting a lot sorer.  Just before the rest stop, I'd hit a pothole hard and it made me cry as the impact jarred the whole of my left side.  James suggested that it was perhaps inadvisable to continue, but I'm a stubborn being and we weren't even half way.  So, on we pressed, past the half way mark and up another bl**dy hill.  It was becoming apparent that I could no longer control my bike at low speed and the proximity of other cyclists and cars on the road was making things a bit hairy.  We came to a place called Balcombe which had a station and we were ready to call it quits.  However, the first train from Balcombe on a Sunday is at 7:30 a.m. and it was only six o'clock.  We took a look at our map and realised that our best option was to carry on another four miles and then take a left turn into Haywards Heath when everyone else was going right towards Devil's Dyke and, eventually, Brighton.  And so it was that at 6:58 a.m. we got on a train that would take us home (well, nearly home), and I was in bed by 9.

We made it to forty miles, two-thirds of the way.  The night time course is significantly harder than the day time course and I'm not sure if I want to give it another go next year - I may have to accept that I'm beaten on this one.  My shoulder is still very sore, but I have good painkillers and I'll be booking to see a specialist about it as soon as I can; I'm not sure they will be able to do anything other than tell me to rest it.  I'm glad we stopped when we did, although I'm sorely disappointed not to have made it the distance (and I don't have a medal).

James and I would like to thank everyone who sponsored us for this event and we're really sorry that we didn't complete it.  However, rest assured that the donations you made will be just as valuable to British Heart Foundation in continuing their excellent and much-needed work.