Touring by bike: life on the road

The Goose factor

Riding long distances as a threesome can be done in two ways: every man for himself, like hounds chasing a rabbit, or working as a team, revolving in a chain, like migrating geese. In the former method, each person rides as fast and far as they are able, regardless of the others. Inevitably, at least for the male of the species, because it is demoralising to be always at the back and exhilarating to be out in front, this results in competition. Competition takes up energy, either because you are chasing others, or because you are striving to stay ahead. When you have been ahead for half an hour or longer and someone breezes past you with a determined scowl on their face, you feel it. It demoralises, or motivates, but it takes up energy, either way.

When you work as a team, you have to ride on the back wheel of the person in front. Right on the back wheel, carefully watching and moderating the few centimetres you put between your spinning front tyre and his spinning back one. This puts you at a threefold risk: from expectorated mucus, methane releases and from sudden changes of speed or direction which might result in a crash. Nevertheless, if you accept these risks, you can benefit from a reduction in wind resistance of up to 25%. And that much benefit means you can drop a gear, pedal more lightly or even, sometimes, freewheel for long distances while the person in front of you pedals furiously just to force a channel through the air. The benefit is hard to believe until you actually experience it. Its success depends on higher values of turn-taking and co-operation. You have to show sensitivity to another's fatigue; when you hear them starting to suffer, you pull out and take it on. When you begin to toil, you hope that the one behind will do the same for you. It is the basis of civilisation.

We tried to be more like geese than hounds but, more often than not, we were strung out along the highway, pedalling at our own rhythm, lost in our own thoughts and deriving no direct benefit from each other. Fortunately, though, over 1000 miles, we probably each spent equal measures of time out front, in the middle and at the back. We were blessed with the same overall pace which, coupled with a desire to stay together and the fact that one had the kitchen, one the food and one the bedding, kept us joined together, how ever far apart we actually were at any one time.

Motivation

Getting up the energy to start cycling is not always easy; finding the energy to keep cycling can be a challenge. Seven times tour de France winner Lance Armstrong uses a technique of questionable civility but undeniable effect. He carefully picks a fight with another rider, preferably an Italian, before each race. If the feud can be made public and elements of it televised, so much the better. The consequent rage that develops between the two riders would seem to many to be an undesirable distraction to good performance. However, for Armstrong, it is the fuel that makes him a winner. Rage is to the cyclist what fuel injection is to a car; instant energy.

I did not discover the full force of rage fuel until after the catastrophic incident in the internet cafe in Limoges (see elsewhere). After an hour of text entry had disappeared to be replaced by a one-line accusatory message from my ISP, blaming me for its technical failing, I was furious. Seething. Pissed Off. Angry. "Right, I said to the others. "We're leaving." And we left town, by a riverside road upon which I built up a momentum that kept me going for 20 kilometres, legs going like pistons, brain fired up with the composition of my letter of complaint to the Managing Director of the software company, that soon became a meeting, that soon became a public showdown, a televised debate, a verbal fight. Whilst this scene played out behind my eyes, my legs pounded at the pedals, white noise filled my ears and we were in Aixe sur Vienne in no time. I led all the way. No need for mother goose to take over. All the others had to do was to keep close behind me, drop a gear and close their ears to the muttering incantations of fury from the man in front. Anger is fuel, when you are on a bike. Seethe and go!

Communication Breakdown

Many of our friends and supporters expressed their disappointment that the site did not update itself as promised during the first stage of the trip in the summer of 2004. This is why:

The plan was to use a Palm handheld computer and a mobile phone to send emails daily from wherever we were to an account in St Andrews. These would be uploaded onto these pages giving a day by day progress report on the trip. The technology was tested from a tent in the Highlands of Scotland, a pub near Perth and a kitchen table in Ceres an lo! it was found to be good.

When we woke up on the morning of 20th June somewhere in the North Sea, the mobile phone said "Welcome to Iceland" (really, it did!) and the email account said "Connection Failed". The following day, after consulting the internet somewhere in Belgium, we learned that our ISP (no names, but here's a clue: it used to be advertised by hippies) would not accept mobile email sent from outside the UK. So much for mobile connectivity, the EU, the world wide web etc.. The crowning irony is that our ISP is a French company.

Plan B was to use internet cafes. However, after one small success, we had a spectacular failure in Limoges in which an hour's worth of painstaking text entry (and remember French keyboards are not laid out in the same way as UK ones) was suddenly vapourised by a "exceptional user error" or some such bogey. At this point we gave up. But the experience was not entirely fruitless: see the entry later on energy sources for long distance cyclists.

Plan C was to carry on writing up our diaries and post them onto the site when we got back and that is what we did.

By 2005, it was possible to update the pages remotely from internet cafes, which we endeavoured to do wherever we found a terminal.