The Poor Student Audax one…

It was mint. Everything shone. I'm tempted to say it sparkled.

It may not have been a thing of true beauty to the purest, but to me it was perfection.

'It' was my first and brand, spanking new Cube carbon road bike.

I was so excited that even before I'd picked it up from the bike shop, a friend and I had entered a bike race to put it through its paces.

We'd chosen The Poor Student - a 200km Audax event through the heart of the Cotswolds.

Ambitious and brave you might think. And why wouldn't you, that's what I thought too.

However, this was my first Audax event. And I hadn't quite understood all that it entailed. The Audax ethos is minimalist and their events are self-supported with almost nothing provided, save the route. So, as we arrived into a service station, already soaked through, a few surprises came our way as we found registration. The penny was about to drop.

There was no big welcoming fanfare and no sponsor's signs. 'Registration' it turns out was a guy wearing a bin bag poncho stood in a bus shelter. There would be no aid stations. In fact there was to be no aid at all. When they said self-supported, they meant it.

To prove we'd completed the course, and to enter the Audax hall of fame, we'd have to get receipts from cafes along the route which would time stamp our journey.

Andy, my soaked-to-the-bone and luckless companion, then chirps up "so there's no medal at the end of it?".

I took an intake of breath. I thought better than to knock a man when he's down.

See Andy hadn’t had the best of starts to the day.

If getting up at 4am, travelling for 2 hours, and having to cycle 5km in the pouring rain just to get to the start line wasn't bad enough, we'd now taken a wrong turn. We could see registration (yeap, the guy with the bin bag) but we couldn't reach it.

Andy had spotted a path leading up a short bank which would act as a shortcut and save us going via a much longer route back on the main road. In Andy's defence, at this point I was totally onboard with his plan.

Andy tentatively rode through what can only be described as a small lake. I swear the damn thing was big enough to have fish in it.

As he approached the path he gave a couple of quick turns of the pedals to pick up speed to carry him over the small bank.

Sadly for Andy, and unknown to him, the lake he was crossing was actually a car park and there lurking under the water was a 5" curb.

The poor guy never saw it coming...

His front tyre slammed into the curb with the force of an Anthony Joshua right hand, sending Andy in one direction and the bike in another. Andy was left prostrate in the water, face down.

It was only 7am, and in spite of the rain, it actually came as a relief to get going.

It was a savage day. On reflection this was a perfectly typical January day which is why, on the whole, you don't get many bike events scheduled at this time of year.

Our waterproofs were wholly inadequate and the route cards we'd been given were compost within 2 or 3 minutes of le grand depart. This meant we were reliant on keeping up with others to follow the route.

This worked for about the first 100km.

We made our first rest stop, bagged our first couple of coffees and stank the cafe out with the whiff of drying-glove-on-radiator smell. We'd also got our timestamped receipt, though on leaving the cafe into yet more rain we realised we had no way of keeping the damn thing dry.

We considered taking the train home.

We pushed on and reached the sea. There isn't actually any sea in the Cotswolds but on this particular day in January there may as well have been. For what seemed like hours, we rode through foot-deep water, with every pedal stroke submerging our frozen feet into still colder water. It was a battle to keep the bike upright whilst playing pothole roulette.

On leaving our next cafe stop, Andy found a message written on the village phone box. 'Not dead yet' seemed to sum up our situation quite well and, albeit about as useful as the phone box itself, it gave us a modicum of hope we could see this thing through.

We also believed things couldn't possibly get any worse.

It was now approaching 6pm and it was pitch black. Our lights shone out into the gloom and we wondered if everyone else had gone home and was having a good ol’ chuckle about two crazies who were still out there. I was sure they had and convinced they were. If anyone else was still out on the road, we sure as hell didn't see them. Oxford felt a long way away.

Sadly for us, it was. We still had 3 hours of riding ahead of us.

As we rode down narrower and darker roads in the middle of god only knows where, my front and back lights died, simultaneously. It was almost like they'd colluded against me, wanting me to stop. This meant we were both now relying on Andy's lights. He turned his front light to flash-only mode; if his light went now it would mean a taxi ride home and a DNF to our names. We needed that battery to last.

On the up side, that battery did somehow see us all the way back to Oxford. On the down was a total inability to see anything on our route, including the road or each other. We hit every pot hole between wherever the hell we were and the main road that took us back into Oxford. I almost hit a badger at one point.

Somewhat defying the odds, we arrived into Oxford a full 12 hours after we'd started out. We'd clocked up 4 cafe stops, 208km and done half of it sharing a single flashing headlight.

I don't remember much about the post-ride meal or the trip back to London but I do remember the thought of getting on to my bike again once at Kings Cross. The plan had been to cycle to Waterloo to catch my train home. A mere short commute across London, or so I had thought.

Of course, the planning is often done from the comfort of a house or cafe, with warm drink in hand and a romantic idea of the challenge yet to be undertaken. Far less planning is done wearing a John Wayne walk and mild hyperthermia.

The last thing I remember is the slam of the mini-cab door and the words of abuse coming from the taxi driver. My dirty, oily banged up bike was making its presence known as he tried to get the Cube onto the back seats.

Cover image photo credit: Colin Watts