London to Brighton Bike Ride
Yesterday the VIP team (Andy*2, Fani,
Julien*2, Karim, Rachel) went to cycle the
BHF London to Brighton Bike Ride - 86km of pure pleasure !
Rachel
designed and printed out some really fancy T-shirts (girlie flowers
vs boys stars) with our nicknames that most of the team was
very happy to wear:
The first 10 miles were quite annoying. Imagine 25,000 cyclists
launched on the road in just 3 hours... That's a pretty nice mess,
believe me ! We had to stop very often and even to push the bike in
the first slope... Little by little things went better. The sun was
shining (over 30°C), roads started to melt and skin to get red.
The route was slightly hilly all the way long and there was a very
nice steep uphill portion at the end, frightening people in advance
but that was only psychological, of course
.
We didn't stop for a big lunch meal as planned, but we took quite a
long time to complete the route anyway. We started at 9:30am, and
finished late in the afternoon. All this time eating only a few
cereal/energy bars ... Unfortunately we couldn't really cycle all
together, because of the crowd and split up in smaller groups.
Karim fell down of his bike in undetermined circumstancies (to my
knowledge). He was pretty hurt and couldn't really keep on cycling.
But I've been told that he recovered quite quickly in the first aid
tent...
It was a nice ride for a first test of my new bike ! Everything
went fine. As I'm more used to moutain bike, to break down and turn
hard, I was not very confident at the beginning which such tiny
tyres. Especially full speed in downhill sections while trying to
avoid the small button lights in the middle of the road. But at the
end I was fine, even maybe a bit over-confident...
Pictures should come very soon.
Many thanks to Andy for the organisation of this great trip !
