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Edinburgh-Manchester tandem ride: the final day

The Holy one and the Rood one, at their final destination

Well, that’s it, done and dusted, in a manner of speaking. We left Holyrood House, Edinburgh, on Monday, and arrived at Holy Rood Church, Manchester, this afternoon to a rousing reception. What happened in between, well you don’t want to know. At least, you don’t NEED to know. Oh, you do? Really?

Well, it went something like this. We set off from Edinburgh and quickly found ourselves riding into the teeth of the remains of Hurricane Katia. It might no longer have been a hurricane, but it wasn’t far from it. I have since learnt that Monday’s stage of the Tour of Britain was cancelled, so while Cavendish and Co wimped out, we soldiered on for as long as we could, until finally we were blown halfway back to where we came from. That was day one, a mere 27 miles instead of 40 that I had hoped for.

Day two was a little better, but still tough weatherwise. We lost half a day’s riding just getting back to where we should have been, so our 34 miles was some way short. Day three was the big day: we covered a full 60 miles, but our mishap with the campervan forced us, for security and logistical reasons, to decamp back to Manchester for the night.

And so we come to today, the final day, and what were we to do? We knew we would never catch up on all the miles we needed to put in to complete the distance, but at least a 30 mile out-and-back ride brought us pedalling into Swinton at the appointed time, to be welcomed by the reception committee.

We cycled 150 miles in all, 30 short of the quickest route from Edinburgh to Manchester and 60 short of what we had planned. Some of those miles were without doubt the hardest I have ever ridden in all my years. But I am convinced that, had the weather been clement, we would had achieved our goal. So, even if we didn’t pedal all the way from A to B (well, from Ed to Man) I still feel that, by my slightly immoral reasoning, we achieved a moral victory, and that’s good enough for me. And, of course, we  shouldn’t forget that the biggest achievement is that we did it for a good cause.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 15th, 2011 at 5:20 pm and is filed under Dennis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.