100 Miles And Counting

Tired of cycling in circles, Richard Abraham rides from London to Birmingham and has some sage advice for other cyclists wantingto take on a similar point-to-point adventure

Victoria Pendleton once explained the draft title for her autobiography to me. She wanted to call it Going Nowhere, Fast. The idea, she said, was to highlight the absurdity of her career riding around the velodrome time after time and to sum up how dis satisfactory it was both physically and emotionally. The publishers felt it was too downbeat and went with Between the Lines instead.

But Pendleton had a point. Even as road cyclists, that’s all we ever do. We leave home, we head out into the lanes (that we probably know pretty well already), we make a few more turns in a certain direction than we do in another, and sooner or later we come back to where we started. We go nowhere, fast. It doesn’t have to be like that.

Sometimes we go somewhere. And when we do, it is exciting. This explains why I rode up London’s Edgware Road at six o’clock on a spring morning with such a grin on my face. Past the hookah bars, the mini-markets and chicken shops; flying alongside the binmen who were out cleaning up the mess from the evening before.

Being cut up by minicabs and breathing in lungfuls of bus fumes had never been so full of excitement and anticipation. Avoiding potholes on Shoot-Up Hill (good name for a road cyclist to be on, that). Up and over the North Circular on a flyover utterly inappropriate for cyclists but clearly part of many riders’ daily commutes judging by the trickle of two-wheeled daredevils coming the other way. None of that mattered. Awaiting me was the fresh spring air, the open road, and a day full of asphalt and expedition.