Dunwich dynamo

It's only a week on sunday untill the Castle combe duathlon and while the other competitors are probably tapering down I am about to undertake the longest single day ride of my life! http://www.southwarkcyclists.org.uk/dunwichfaqs.htm When I say day I really mean night, as the ride starts from London at 9.00pm on Saturday night and ends 200km later at the seaside in Dunwich.

I'm really not sure how I will deal with the lack of sleep as sleeping is one of my favourite things, a normal night will see me snoozing for about 10 hours. On Saturday I will substitute sleep for cycling. My plan is to ride untill about 2am and then take as many pro plus caffine tablets as I can. Hopefully this will get me to the finish, then all I have to do is drive home...

While my drug of choice is to be caffine the Tour de France riders continually try to out do each other. First we had someone kicked out for good old testosterone, then Vino failed a blood test when someone elses blood was found to be in his body! And today the race leader has been kicked out for, along with other things, missing out of competition tests. Of these results I find the blood transfusion that Vino must have had to be the most disturbing. What sort of doctor has done this to him? Or is it something you can do to yourself, with the help of a "my first blood transfusion manual"? Either way Vino must be mad, and he's probably lucky to be alive. I feel sorry for the clean riders who happen to be on the same teams as the guilty ones, as they also have to leave the race. I understand if nobody watches the rest of the race but I will stick with it as I still love cycling.

Back to this weekends ride, my accomplice for the ride is going to be Kat, who also owns a penny farthing. The idea for having a go at the ride came from Kat, I think I was the only person she could think of who was daft enough to agree to it! I should point out that we are going to ride normal bikes, we might be mad but we aren't stupid! We did think about using the penny farthings, but when we did the maths and worked out that 200km = 120miles we quickly decided against it!

I'm actualy really looking forward to riding through the night, I've tried to sleep as much as possible this week and decided to rest rather than train so I haven't done any time trials or hard training for the 12 days leading upto it. I figure that I stand a better chance of enjoying the ride if I start it fresh and training in the last few days doesn't gain you too much fitness anyway.

The only other piece of news I have is that I now have a track bike. I have borrowed it of Mark, through the Worcs st Johns cycle club (cheers Mark!). So far all I have done is set the seat height, put some peddles on it and riden it down the road. As it's a fixed gear bike I think I will have to ride around on it for a while to get used to it before I take it to the track. Talking of the track, the photo at the start of this post is of Halesowen track after the recent floods, I think I'll give it a miss this week...