100 miles, solo

Ever since I got my new Fuso at the end of June I have been enthused to ride more and ride longer distances. The last two weekends I have ridden 75 miles and I felt I was ready to try 100 miles.

It was an ambition that I had for some time now; I put the word out with the local group I ride with, that I might try riding from Summerville to Folly Beach, but no one showed interest in joining me. So last Saturday I decided to set out on my own.

The plan was if I didn’t feel up to completing the distance I would turn back early. I did not choose the direct route for two reasons. Hwy. 61 (Ashley River Road.) the direct route from Summerville to West Ashley, is not a safe road to ride a bike.

A narrow two lane highway with a lot of dangerous curves through old growth forest. A pretty road to drive, but make shift memorials of crosses and plastic flowers nailed to large trees all along the route, mark where drivers ended their days. The second reason, the longer route made the distance 50 miles one way; 100 miles out and home.

For my local readers the route I took was: 61 Hwy. for about 4 miles actually going away from the coast. Left on Summers Drive, a brand new road built in the last year or so; wide with bike lanes on both sides, and light traffic.

Left again on Clubhouse Drive, to Hwy. 165 briefly then Countyline Road another quiet country road that goes all the way down to Savannah Hwy. (17.) which is not a pleasant road to ride on, being the main route from Charleston to Savannah.

Traffic is extremely heavy, but there is a shoulder with a rumble strip to help keep cars off, and I was only on it for a couple of miles, before turning off on Main Road and over the Stono River Bridge (Below.) to John’s Island.

Left on River Road, left again on Maybank Hwy. Over the Stono River again to James Island. Right on Riverland Drive which bypasses the dangerous part of Folly Road and links with it where the bike lanes start.

Over two more bridges and finally on to Folly Beach; also known as “The Edge of America.”

Folly Beach is a narrow strip of sand that is a barrier island.

It has a nice beach, a pier (Picture below.) and a light house.

It turned out that I picked a perfect day for the ride. I had left at 6:15 am. when it was barely light. It was cloudy, overcast, even a little foggy in places; temperatures were in the 70s F. (21C.) The sun didn’t show until around 10 pm. just as I reached Folly Beach.

I took a 40 minute break and had breakfast at a restaurant on Folly Beach Pier. Omelet, hash browns and toast; two large cups of coffee, and several glasses of water. I also filled my water bottles for the return trip.

I felt good on the return trip; I started to sag a little at about mile 85. I stopped, took a 10 minute break, and drank a lot of water. That did the trick, I felt fine after and actually finished the ride at a pretty good pace.

Temperatures were around 85F. (29C.) by the time I got home; not too hot for South Carolina at this time of year. I arrived home soon after 2:00 pm. 7 hours actual riding time.

A nice sense of achievement to have completed 100 mile bike ride; my first in the US actually. The last time I rode a 100 in one day was back in England in the mid and late 1970s; and that was with a group, not alone.

                        

Six Day Racing

The above video is a brief look at a Six Day Bicycle Race held in Tilburg, in The Netherlands. If you click on this Vimeo link you can watch it in full screen mode.

Six Day racing started in America in the late 1800s and the reason it was six days was to avoid riding on a Sunday and offending the religious element.

Originally riders rode continually for six days on a tiny indoor track, but in 1898 the states of New York and Illinois, alarmed for the health and well being of the competitors, ruled that no cyclist could ride more than 12 hours a day.

The promoters, not willing to open the event half a day, realized if they made it a relay race with teams of two riders, each would only be riding the required 12 hours. Speeds rose, distances grew, crowds increased, money poured in.

This type of relay race became known as a Madison, after Madison Square Garden in New York where these races were held. In France it is known as the "American race" (course à l'américaine) and in Italian and Spanish as Americana.

Six Day races are no longer held in America unfortunately, but they are in Europe during the winter months when it is the off season for professional riders. I went to quite a few held at London’s Wembly Arena in the 1950s through the 1970s.

A small ten laps to the mile wooden track is constructed in an indoor stadium. Racing is no longer continuous, but is a series of different events with the same riders competing, and held every evening for six days.

The last main event of each evening is usually a one hour Madison. Because the track is only a tenth of a mile around, it is possible for a rider to break away from the pack, and by riding flat out for several laps will catch the tail end of the pack, thereby gaining a lap.

The number of laps ridden are added up for the complete six days, and a clear winner comes out. Both riders of a team are on the track at the same time. One is racing; the other is circling slowly high on the banked track, resting and conserving his energy.

At any time the riders choose they may change off by touching the other rider. This usually takes the form of a hand sling. The rider in the race, as he approaches his team mate, grabs his hand. This has the effect of slowing him down. He then slings the fresh rider into the race.

Other races throughout the evening might be:

A Scratch Race: All the riders start in a pack and race over a predetermined number of laps. This is not a relay, but team members may block a chasing group, if the other team member is in a break. Or one team member may lead to other out in the finishing sprint.

The Devil Take the Hindmost: A race where the last rider over the finish line each lap is eliminated until you only have two riders left who sprint it out for the finish.

A One Lap Time Trial: This is shown in the video where one rider gives his team mate a hand sling for a flying start for timed lap.

Derney Paced: A Derney is a specialist built motorcycle for pacing in these type of events. The Derney has pedals so its driver can accelerate smoothly by pedaling. It is a highly tactical event, the rider with the inside track has less distance to travel than someone overtaking on the banking. The Derney driver has time his attack precisely; if he accelerates too fast he will drop his rider.

More on Six Day Racing and its history on Wikipedia.

                       

Wasting Space

Mark Twain once said, “Buy land; they’re not making it anymore.” As the world’s population explodes it is pretty easy to understand the amount of real estate each individual has at their disposal, gets less and less because… “They’re not making it anymore.”

I’m not just talking space to live, there has to be space for businesses for people to work and buy food and other necessities. The biggest user of space in our society is the automobile. If each individual has an automobile that vehicle uses more space than the individual that owns it, if you include roads, and places to park, etc.

Each factory or shopping mall has a parking lot bigger in area than the actual building structure. Every highway takes up at least twice the space of the actual paved road, if you include the verges at the side of the road, the median between lanes, and bridges and intersections can take up acres and acres of space.  

It is not by accident or some act of governments the two of the smallest countries in Europe are also the most bicycle friendly; Demark and Holland. (Netherlands) It is not so much that these two countries developed a bicycle culture; they never really opted out of it, while after WWII the rest of Europe followed the United States and gradually switched to a society dependent on automobiles.

Up until the 1960s even Britain still had a bicycle culture. Not only did the majority of the population not own cars, but most had never learned to drive. People rode bicycles to work, children rode to school, and ladies did their shopping on a bicycle with a basket on the handlebars. There was also a good public transport system; trains and busses.

Lack of space forced Denmark and Holland not to opt for an automobile society? When you look at the size of these two countries it is easy to see why; Denmark’s area is a total of 16,629 sq. miles while Holland is 15,892 sq. miles. Both these countries could almost fit into my current home state of South Carolina, at 31,113 sq, miles, and South Carolina is not a particularly large state. Compare this to California with 158,706 sq. miles, or Texas 268,820 sq. miles.

It is hard to convince the average American that we are wasting space it would seem there is still an abundance of it, but the more space used to accommodate the automobile, the more people are forced to live further and further away from the city center, and more space is required for roads to get people to and from work, and still more space to park once they get there. Not to mention the cost of fuel and wear and tear on a vehicle.

It then gets to the situation you have in Los Angeles/Long Beach/Riverside, California, where urban sprawl has reached 4,850 sq. miles. It is not unusual for people to commute 80 miles each way to work, because the only home they can afford is out in the desert somewhere east of the city. Five and six lane freeways still fail to move the volume of traffic, and become parking lots during rush hour.

In the above picture I count approximately 8 cars per lane, from the bridge to the foreground of the picture. With one individual per car that is 40 people using up this huge area.  

Let’s forget for a moment that fossil fuels will eventually run out. I can remember 50 years ago people said that oil would run out in 20 years, and still we keep finding more. Let’s also forget for now that burning fossil fuels is causing global warming. Both these may be sound arguments, but are a hard sell to many people.

One of the biggest issues I see with the automobile is the terrible waste of space. In time technology may find alternative fuels, but apart from multi story buildings and a few underground tunnels, technology cannot produce more space.

We can no longer support a situation where every individual owns an automobile; families will have to share one car. This means someone in the family will have to ride a bike, at least some of the time.

                       

Tuggos in Top

I set out for a ride last Sunday at around 6:30 am. It is best to get out early at this time of year in South Carolina; as by 11:00 am it is brutally hot.

About six miles out I needed to make a left turn, and checked my rear view mirror. I noticed what I can only describe as a huge orange “Blob” on a bike coming up behind me. I gave a hand signal and moved to the center of the road in readiness to make my turn.

The Blob followed and after I turned he came by me; a young twenty-something man on a bike, wearing a fluorescent orange tee shirt. He was huge; at a guess well over six feet, and at least 350 lbs., maybe even 450.

“Good morning,” I said.... Not so much as a peep from my morbidly obese fellow traveler. As he went by I saw why; he was wearing head phones. He had on a pair of baggy shorts, and his calves were shaped like huge upturned beer bottles.

He was riding in the highest gear he had, pedaling in slow motion but going 3 or 4 mph faster than me; I was happily spinning my medium gear. I wondered, do people who don’t know any better, think a bike is like a car that you shift up through the gears until you reach the smallest cog, and then you leave it there.

I had no interest in upping my pace; I was planning to do at least 50 miles, and I doubted the orange blob was going that far. Sure enough, not long after he disappeared from sight I spotted him again in the distance headed back on the opposite side. As we passed I gave my usual smile and a wave; I was totally ignored as before.

The whole incident made me think back to the 1950s when I started riding. Back in the UK we used to call people like that “Tuggos.” Now I just call them POBs or “People on Bikes.” The term Tuggo usually applied to the younger male. An old Geezer on a bike, or a female, would not be a Tuggo.

The orange blob definitely fell into the category of Tuggo. Don’t get me wrong; I am not knocking what this person was doing. He was out getting some exercise and at least trying to reduce his weight; but a Tuggo or a POB is one who hasn’t yet learned the little refinements, like position, gear choice, etc., that make cycling more of a pleasure.

When I started racing the smallest rear sprocket available was 14 teeth; so top gear was around 96 inches. The top gear, as it is today was reserved for downhill, and maybe a fast sprint finish with a tail wind. We would do most of our racing on about 81 or 86 inch gear.

This meant we pedaled a lot faster than today, and so usually trained on about 65 to 70 inches. Back in the 1950s there were a lot of Tuggos, people who used bikes as their only means of transport. Especially young people in their teens or twenties; most could not afford a car. I didn’t pass my driving test and own a car until I was almost 30 years old, which was pretty typical.

So we would be out training in a group of maybe ten or so riders; during a warm summer evening. We would be in an orderly pace line, and spinning, or “Twiddling” as we called it, at about 100 rpm. All of a sudden a Tuggo would come flying past us pushing his highest gear.

He was invariably out for the evening dressed in a suit and tie, which would be flying in the wind. Remember this was the 1950s and people dressed up if they went out socially. The average Tuggo was usually pretty fit as he rode a bike everywhere, and was good for a short turn of speed especially as he was in a much higher gear.

We usually ignored them, apart from whoever was at the back of the pace line giving a warning shout of “Tuggo in Top,” as he came by. We seldom gave chase, because that would just break up the pace line; and anyway the Tuggo usually stopped at the next pub; if not we would pass him again on the next hill.

Fond memories of a far simpler times, and Tuggos in top.

                       

Impossible Dreams

I’ve spent the last couple of days reflecting on Bradley Wiggins win in the Tour de France, with another British rider, Chris Froome (Albeit born in Kenya.) in second place. Considering there has never been another British rider on the podium before, this is a huge deal.

I thought back to over 60 years ago when I started racing in 1952. I had got my first lightweight bike two years previously when I was 14 years old. I could ride a hundred miles easily, but couldn’t race until I was 16.

So soon after my 16^th birthday early in February 1952 I was as fit as a butcher’s dog, and chomping at the bit to go. I won my first club event, a 25 mile time trial. The older more seasoned riders had barely been training for a month at that time, whereas I had ridden right through the winter months.

People started telling me I was good and had great potential; something I had never experienced before in my entire life, no one had ever said I was good at anything. I loved it, I lapped it up, and cycling was my whole world.

The Tour de France was the big event of the year for me even back then. There was no live broadcast on television at that time; even if we had owned a TV. I did get to see a black and white film of highlights from the 1952 Tour when Fausto Coppi won. This was pretty wonderful, I saw it at the annual Bike Show at Earls Court in London.

I would order the French cycling publications, But et Club (Above.) and L’Equipe; these would arrive in the mail about a week after they were published, and through the magic of these often full page photos, sometimes a double page spread; I got to know all the giants of cycling.

In the naivety of my youth I began to dream of one day riding the Tour de France and even winning stages with a long solo break-away. I think this fantasy lasted about a year, when reality set in. In 1953 England’s top time-trialist was Ken Joy, who held competition record for 100 miles in 4 hours, 6 minutes was invited to ride in the Grand Prix des Nations.  

This event took place in France, and was considered the unofficial world time-trial championship. There was no World TT Championship at that time. There was much speculation as to how well Ken Joy would do; the event was 142 km, just over 88 miles. We knew Joy could do a 4h, 6m. hundred, so he must be in with a chance.

The event was won by a then unknown 19 year old French rider named Jacques Anquetil. Not only did he beat Ken Joy, he started 16 minutes behind the British rider and caught and passed him. A nineteen year old kid, just two years older than me, had trounced the best that Britain had to offer.

Britain was in its own little world back then when it came to cycle racing. France and the rest of Europe was only a short boat trip across the English Channel, but it might have been half a world away, when it came to the class of racing and the level of competition.

Britain is at a disadvantage anyway when you consider there are no big mountains like the ones in central Europe. But if the only racing available to British cyclists are time-trials held on the flattest courses you can find; avoiding what hills you do have. It is hardly conducive to producing world class riders.

Plus there was no road racing on the open roads in the early 1950s; with the exception of those run by the British League of Racing Cyclists (BLRC) a small group of “Rebels” who had broken away from the National Cyclist Union (NCU) the then British governing body for cycling in the UK.

Road racing was not banned by any law or government decree; but was upheld by the amateur officials of the NCU along with the Road Time Trials Council (RTTC), because the status quo, and their piddling little time-trials suited them. It took a lot of balls for a small group of cyclists, lead by Percy Stallard, in 1942 to say fuck you, we’ll hold our own road races.

The BLRC drug British cycling out of the dark ages, and is the main reason the UK finally has a winner of the Tour de France. From 1948 on, the BLRC entered a team in the Warsaw, Berlin, Prague stage race. This was held behind “The Iron Curtain” and was known as the Peace Race.

In 1952 Scottish rider Ian Steel, who had won the BLRC’s first Tour of Britain race a year earlier, won the Peach Race. This lead to partial recognition of the BLRC by the UCI. The NCU tried to block the vote and walked out of the UCI meeting in protest.

What Percy Stallard and the BLRC did was to alert the UCI that there was a problem within British cycling; the NCU (In cahoots with the RTTC.) was acting in its own self interest and not that of the sport. The UCI had told the NCU to settle its differences with the BLRC or the UCI would recognize the BLRC as the British governing body.

Thus the NCU was forced to amalgamate with the BLRC in 1959 to become the British Cycling Federation (BCF) now British Cycling. The ban on road racing was also lifted at that time, and not a moment too soon. Had it waited until the late 1960s or 1970s it probably wouldn’t have happened because of the interests of the motoring public.

So does it surprise me that it is 60 years since my own “Impossible Dreams” of Tour de France participation, that we finally have a British winner? Not really when I think of all that went before. Percy Stallard died in 2001 a bitter man, and rightly so. He was shafted by the BCF, unrecognized and not asked to manage any international teams; even though he had proved himself as a manager in the Peace Race.

I do hope those early BLRC pioneers will now get the recognition they deserve. Because with all the hard work put in by Bradley Wiggins, Chris Froome, and the whole Sky Team. With all the money put in and the efforts of British Cycling; it still would have not happened, because there would still be no road racing in the UK, had it not been for Percy Stallard and the BLRC.