Now I’ve also registered for the Tour de Victoria.
Unlike the Royal Victoria Marathon, there was no option to customize the announcer’s comment for my finish. If given the choice, I would have requested another Simpsons quote:
“Pump those scrawny chicken legs, you stuporous funker!”
For I envision being in this condition as I roll across the finish line:
Last year, I completed the 100km distance with relative ease. This year, I’ll be going big before I go home and have registered for the full 160km. Before doing so, I loaded up on reassurances from folks I ride with. The fast ladies I ride with seem to have complete faith in me. Yann, who has ridden with me more than anybody else, was also encouraging until I pointed out that the last time I rode farther than 130km, he and I were still together.
We split up 6 years ago.
After a brief pause to consider this information, Yann resumed his support.
The encouragement of these people, a glimmer of self-belief, combined with a code to waive the fee, led me to register for the event. On the off chance the broom wagon catches up with me before I cross the finish, I’ll be out $0.
I warned Gabby that I would likely keep up with her until around the 100km mark.
“What, you’re gonna turn into a pumpkin at 100km??“
I’m less concerned about turning into a pumpkin during the Royal Victoria Marathon, even though it happens right in the middle of pumpkin season. I have two more months to train for the marathon, whereas the Tour de Victoria is less than two weeks away! Intermittent dread aside, I am looking forward to it. I swear.
Now I have hit the part in this blog post where I reflect upon my time in London. I’d asked Ed whether there were things I hadn’t covered about my time in London before moving on to the Slovenia part of my vacation. He was quick to come up with a list of overlooked moments and didn’t hesitate to take a jab at my dependency on my Garmin.
He wasn’t wrong.
I’d recorded my worst sleep score yet on my flight to London:
While there, I attempted to make the most of the watch’s Jet Lag Advisor. What I didn’t realize was that it offers guidance on when to rest, sleep, and eat a few days before the trip to help me ease into the new time zone.
Also on Ed’s list: my habit of taking 30-minute naps at exactly 4pm every day as I struggled to adjust to London time. Let the record say none of these naps were Garmin-mandated: they were the result of me listening to my body.
The evening we backed out of travelling to bustling Camden Town for a deaf drag show, Ed and Hannah showed me the film they made about their caravan journey around England, which culminated in Ed jumping off the Ribblehead Viaduct.
The roles in this 2012 film, Sightseers, were played by actors Alice Lowe and Steven Oram. While neither actor was a dead ringer for the real-life couple, the physical similarities were still rather unsettling.
As the film got progressively more disturbing, I’d turn around and see the two laughing on the couch adjacent to where I was sitting. I don’t know if the humour was a little too dry for my Canadian sensibilities, but one scene managed to push me into giggling territory. Again, I turned around to gauge my hosts’ reactions, which I interpreted as, “Of all the deaths, you think the one where the cyclist gets murdered was the funniest?”
Yes. Yes, I did.
At any rate, I was glad the real Ed did not leap off a viaduct. During my fitful periods of alertness, Ed and Hannah seized any opportunity to give me a taste of English culture before we headed off to Slovenia.
They took me to a pub in Catford that was originally a Georgian farmhouse built in 1736. In England, “pub” is short for “public house”, a place where people can meet for a jam session or to play board games. Essentially, it serves as a space for folks to socialize in the way they fancy.
In Victoria, Canada, a pub is where people gather to buy overpriced beer, and in the case of one pub, play beach volleyball on the roof. Generally, it is frowned upon to treat pubs as a rehearsal space, or for building the medieval landscape of southern France.
To meet the training demands of my Garmin Forerunner, I laced up my running shoes thrice while in London. I did two runs in Catford (I just accidentally typed this out as “Catfood”), and one in Bromley, around the under-construction Crystal Palace Park where the anatomically incorrect dinosaurs hang out on man-made islands.
These guys had just been freshly restored to their original Victorian colours.
It was on one of the Catford runs where I saw my first red fox in the wild.
It was only yesterday when I learned that there are foxes in BC, just not in coastal areas where I’ve always lived. I was not counting on encountering new wildlife in England.
My bike was used to get to Downe a day too early for the duck race:
Just as well, the racing ducks wouldn’t have qualified as wildlife as they were of the rubber variety.
Before this trip, Ed spent months feeding me advice and tips on how to get my bike ready for the tour, and he kept me updated on the modifications he was making to his bike. His best suggestion—and pretty much the only one I followed—was to throw on a smaller chainring. Before we ended up in Downe, he put my legs to the test on some of the climbs around Biggin Hill.
“How’d you find that?” he asked after one of the steeper climbs. I told him it wasn’t a problem, and he rolled his eyes in exasperation. Of all the challenges that awaited us in Slovenia, the hill climbs were the least of my worries. It was my faltering circadian rhythm that was giving me the most trouble.
The first few challenges arose the moment my plane landed in London, beginning with figuring out how to dispose of my bike box and packing materials. While Ed and Hannah were en route to Heathrow, I spent half an hour pacing between the baggage carousels, waiting for my bike box to appear among the many bikes, most of which had been packed up in dedicated carrying cases. I wondered why the airport authority hadn’t provided us cycle tourists with a bike assembly area or a place to dispose of our packing material.
The bike unfriendliness of Heathrow became more apparent as I navigated my way out of the airport terminal. Every pair of bollards I had to pass through had to be approached at an angle. My bike hadn’t even left its box, and already I was pissing off people with it.
Eventually I made it out of the building and finally encountered two people who were happy to see me. We made do with the unboxing in an enclosure by the elevators to the parkade. Once my bike was assembled well enough to be fastened to the rack at the back of their car, Hannah pointed to my box and went–and I’m paraphrasing–“What are we going to do with the box? We can’t just leave it there! People are going to think there’s a bomb inside!”
Ed found Hannah’s panic amusing enough to suggest that I write about it. Yet, a few days later, while playing tour guide, he pointed to the transparent trash bags hanging from metal hoops throughout the city and explained that this was designed to deter terrorists from chucking bombs into trash bins. Hannah’s paranoia hadn’t been unjustified after all.
