Saturday April 11

The past few weekends have been dedicated to some hill training (and one sportive) in an effort to get Sandy into shape for his Madrid to Lisbon cycling holiday.

We started with what should have been the easiest route. Although it included a lot of climbing, it didn’t have any single long or steep climb. The only real challenge would be the Darvel Mast climb which was to arrive right at the end of the day.

Sandy arrived at my house right on time which was a bit of a miracle since he had to get the train. I guess there were no ‘leaves on the line’ that morning. It was a pretty miserable morning weather wise. Windy and cold but no rain as yet so we set off confident we’d still get round in good time. Such confidence is simply a target for the weather and navigation gods to attack. The wind nagged at us all the way over to Eaglesham. Never really strong but still enough to make the climbing effort over the moor tough. This is when the navigation god decided to play with us for the first time today. My Garmin decided it didn’t want to direct us anywhere so at a junction I took the decision to go right (i should have gone left, guessing isn’t my strong suit).

There was a short but steep climb ahead of us, so we decided that we should get over it then reassess the direction we were heading. Right on cue, the weather god decided to pitch in and sent a torrent of hailstones our way. After sheltering briefly from the hailstones we turned around, made another wrong turn then eventually made it onto the correct road to Strathaven.

We managed the rest of the route to Strathaven without further mishap and settled into some well deserved coffee and scones. I decided to check my garmin at this point to ensure we wouldn’t make any further navigational mistakes on the way home. To my surprise my garmin was reporting a low battery warning which was entirely unexpected since I had fully charged it the night before. So I was effectively left directionless. A quick piece of thinking made me try to download the route to Sandys garmin over Bluetooth before my battery died completely. This worked giving us our navigator back. Resigned to the fact that I had no garmin to track the rest of the days cycle, I resorted to recording it on my phone, via the Strava app.

Resuming our journey, we were faced with a pretty brutal headwind on the road out of Strathaven toward Muirkirk making the next 10 miles or so seem like 20. We were beginning to run out of time now due to our slow pace in the wind. Sandy had to be on a train around 5pm so we decided to miss out the Darvel Mast climb and save it for another day. The wind abated a little as we approached Darvel so I decided to pick up the pace a little in order to get Sandy to the train on time. I think I overdid it a little as on the few occasions I looked back Sandy had dropped my wheel. I slowed to let him catch me then put the hammer down again. He suffered a bit on that last stretch but thanked me for it later.