overlap

Yesterday I did forty seven miles of cycling with yet another bunch of strangers off the internet, of whom I'd met precisely none before. There were a couple more than two dozen of us at the start, although we lost a few on the way round an extended circuit starting and ending a little way away from the centre of Brum. As you'd expect, where there's that many people riding around together who are not in the habit of riding with each other, communication is a major issue and potential problem. The group split up a number of times - in my haste I took someone else off down the wrong hill where we had the fun of setting off the speed camera at 40mph - and the more serious offroad bits turned out to be plenty of fun, and except in one case no real harm was done. Riding on what is essentially a road bike with almost everyone else on decent spec mountain bikes turned out to be great fun - on the roads and where the canal towpath surface is decent enough to make a good turn of speed, it's a hell of a lot easier on my skinny tyres, and even racing the others uphill on loose surfaces is easier than some of them were expecting. And while I have a fairly robust sense of adventure on a bike, I knew better than to chance it on the sort of feature where someone else came a cropper and his bike ride turned into an ambulance ride to get a broken collarbone dealt with. Splendid stuff also to have a decent day's weather, to be reminded of the heritage of Brum from the days when this was a manufacturing nation, and to revisit a section of canal that I have previously passed on a canal boat, albeit twenty-something years ago. A lot has changed in the meantime!