Oh yeah, York Cyclo Sportif, a casual participation event where teams casually ride around for 108km in the wind, rain and through the hills, a pretend TTT, if you will.

Well a pretend TTT needs a pretend Team, and the best predend team is the SPR Pretenders.   We started with only 6  riders, as two people pulled out, however as Dave had ridden about 70km in the pouring rain, on fairly tough terrain to get to york, we probably had more like 5 & 1/2.  Obviously in the spirit of the team, Dave predended to be fresh, and we told everyone who asked that the other two memebers were just in the toilet.  But, lining up at the start was Myself (Iain, the non-ambiturner), Ryan fynn, Chris Ainsey, Jason ‘the cobra’, and Dave ‘cars are for chumps’.

Our team was number 40, off after 19 minutes and staight away we got into a good rhythm with everyone doing their bit on the front and then pulling off so the pace stayed steady and well above 40km/h.  Because I’m so smart I hadn’t really warmed up before, so the first 20 or so km’s were not particularly pleasent.  At around 25 km everyone was really getting into the pretender spirit, and Dave pretended to be really tired after his ride down and pulled off…Hilarious!

Turning left and towards the hills we lost the shelter of the trees, the rain began and the belgian points began to accumulate (perhaps Dutch points as well due to the blustery conditions).  At this point we had already passed quite a few teams.  One team tried to hop on the back of our train, so I told them to “SHOO!!” and they did.  Coming to the bottom of the climb there were alot of teams clearly struggling, with stragglers, grinders, zig-zaggers and walkers a-plenty.  Basically it was pretty easy to see here who had been doing their sunday hills ride, and who had just pretended to be training…remember people, if you over do it with your pretending, you will get fat and slow.

As we rolled into town for our seccond lap, the rain seemed to have stopped but there was still plenty of wind.  Settling into our seccond lap, pretend suffering was clearly turning into actual suffering, but the team was still working really well together.  We were the first team on the road when Jason got a flat, although we managed to change it fairly quickly, we had lost some time.  Of course we pretended to be worried abour Broad catching us…by getting straight back into a good rythm and working hard.

The final 30km through the hills were really tough as it was pretty much impossible to get out of the wind.  The team kept it tight and continued to work well to the finish.  We were first across the line so fingers crossed we clocked the fastest time…if we don’t i’ll just tell everyone we did, because thats what pretenders do.

Cheers to the team for an awesome day on the bike.  I hope that none of you read this blog and just pretend that you did.