London to Cambridge 2010 – Sunday 25th July
So yesterday was the big day and we were sort of ready for it.
We’d prepared the bikes the day before and put the main part of the carrier on the car the day before. At 6am the next morning we all got up, but ended up being slightly late leaving due to the carrier not being quite as easy to complete as expected.
It turned out that even though we had a 7.30am start, there was no rush. In fact it was a case of hand over your start card, get a map, queue at the traffic lights and go. We started at about 8am.
The ride didn’t start too well. There were lots of cyclists everywhere and a lot of traffic. Because we usually cycle countryside roads, London cycling is a little intimidating! One driver (red car) was very angry at me (I think) for overtaking some of the slower cyclists (was no where near the centre line) and tried to knock us off and others down the road.
The first section of the route is through outer London, followed by a hilly section. We arrived at the first stop about an hour after starting. My left shoulder was absolutely killing me – think I jarred it when lifting one of the bikes to the carrier in the morning. Stopped and asked one of the medics if there was anything I could do to stop the pain. He wasn’t too useful – told me to find a chemist and get some ibuprofen… Anyway, the stop alone seemed to cure the problem; didn’t have any more pain from then on.
The rest of the ride from then on was mostly lovely countryside with a couple of very large hills.
We took jelly babies, peanuts and chocolate raisins with us and that combination seemed to work very well. We were going fine until about the 40 mile mark and then we started to feel the pain and got slower. At about 10 miles to go it was a case of, I have to finish this, rather than I’m enjoying this. Once we got to the edge of Cambridge though, we both picked up a bit and arrived across the finish line at 2pm!
So in total it took us 6 hours including all the stops we made, which we were both very proud of! We have so far raised over £600 between the two of us:
http://www.justgiving.com/sylviascales
http://www.justgiving.com/victoriascales
Not to mention all the people that sponsored us (offline), which was handed to Breakthrough Breast Cancer at the finish line. And thank you to Les at Pedals in Biggleswade.
Thank you sponsors!
Would we do it again? No!
I would also like to say a big thank you to all the cyclists and the police officers that would come past, read our names and cheer us on! If it wasn’t for all those people, the ride wouldn’t have been as interesting and we needed the morale boost near the end. So it was well worth getting the personalised T-shirts!
I would also like to thank my mum and apologise for putting her through that ordeal (she might hate me now, but I think she will agree it was worth it!).
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