The weather was dreadful at the start and then got worse! I was very apprehensive about dealing with the rain, wind and hills! I also had a problem with brakes – bike had been serviced a week before and now they were sticking. Just an added challenge when going up hill. We stopeed a couple of times to try and sort them and managed to make the breaks manageable.
For a while out of the start we were cycling west to east and with a wing from the south the gusts had a good go at taking the wheels out from under the bike. With a lot of puddles at the sides of the roads we spent a fair amount of time weaving around them. As the road turned south we found ourselves cycling up steeper and steeper hills straight into the wind and we struggled on for as long as we could. Eventually I could cycle no further as I was making no headway into the wind. We had also been advised to turn around a number of times and eventually were told that the event had been cancelled.
The cycle back – downhill with the wind behind us – might have been a doddle but the puddles had grown across the roads and with the wind blowing them into waves along the road things were still exciting especially with the debris of sticks and stones that needed to be avoided. At one point we were cycling through over the pedal water for a good 100m!
A couple of taster images from other participants:
I am a learning technology advisor at the University of Strathclyde where i deal with day to day support issues for the use of our Moodle based VLE as well as advising more widely on online learning in general.