Three idiots go cycling

Training? What? It seems there are as many theories about training for a multi-day adventure as there are cyclists. So naturally we have adopted three different regimes.  The club went to Mallorca in late April so that gave us all a baseline, though it should be noted that Steve climbed further and cycled longer than either Andrew or Pete. Steve, at just 58, is already the youngest and fittest of us, so why he put in so much effort just so he could spend more time waiting at the top of hills for the other two is a mystery. Pete chose the default (he claimed sensible) option that enabled more time in the hotel bar each day. You could say he wasn't trying as hard as he should but he claimed to be nursing an injury at the time. Andrew? Well that's a difficult one. Andrew had spent six weeks on one of his big holidays, returning late March. Since then he'd cycled many hundreds of miles in order to catch up. In spite of being a bit on the hill-climber side, i.e. skinny, he'd...

Some background The MOB is a drinking club with a cycling problem. A group of old friends who have been cycling together for over three decades. We’re not affiliated to anything, other than our local pub and our long suffering families. Pretty much all of us are retired. Our informal motto is ‘Nothing can go wrong’. This should probably be followed by ‘…and so can everything else!’ But it’s aspirational, which is useful at our time of life. Some time last autumn (2024) a couple of us had returned from a 70 mile ride and were de-briefing (having a few beers in the pub - come to think of it, we ‘de-brief’ quite a lot). Andrew declared that he fancied cycling Lands End to John O’Groats. It could have all ended with that full stop, except that Pete said it had been on his bucket list for 20 years. ‘Right! We’re doing it’ replied Andrew. Now all we had to do was see if any of the others were interested. To be fair, many were interested but only to the extent that giving ‘useful’ advice to t...