Bristol to London for the Tour de France
100 miles in 5 Hours!
Man, James and I had such a sweet ride to London today (Friday). We had tail winds pretty much the whole way.We left Kingswood
in Bristol, just after 0730 and by 1030 we were in Newbury. Thats 60 odd miles in 3 hours. We actually managed to maintain
this average of 20mph for the first 5 hours and we were pleased to see the speedos say 20.0mph as we reached the 100 mile
marker.
Energy levels started to drop after Newbury and the hunt was on to find a pub, we found a Beefeater in Reading, put our feet up, ordered some monster 10oz burgers and drank pints of coke. We had a loooooong lunch cos we had made such good time in the morning. We met Mike between Maidenhead and Slough and fair play to him he sat out front and dragged me and Jim along for another 35 miles into the outskirts of London before he peeled off to head back to his sister's. Me and Jim slowly wound our way through London, listening to the instructions TomTom was shouting at us. The traffic was beyond awful, it took us almost an hour to 10 miles. we were aiming for Trafalgar square and managed to get our wheels on part of the Prologue course for tomorrow before some bored looking official kicked us off. We finally made it to the square and sat down for a well earned rest. We really enjoyed oursleves though it could have beena different story if it had been raining or had the wind in our faces. It brought back a lot of great memories from our big ride last year, expecially 'magic hills' These are those hills that look uphill but you can cruise up them no bother. It also works in reverse, you can hit a piece of road that looks flat and then strain your guts out just keep your momentum up.
There's also some pics of the TDF Prologue. They're pretty cool but its difficult to get an idea of the speed which is why I've uploaded some samll vids. If they're not at the bottom its because I haven't gotten around to resizing them yet.
Here's a few vids, they're all pretty similar but it gives you a real feeling for the speed they're taking the corner at, probably at around 30 - 35mph, which may not sounds fast but first try getting YOUR bike upto 30mph on the flat and then try taking a 90 degree corner at that speed without braking. You can see even the support cars are struggling to get round at the same speed.