Rural Riding

“I’ve got one for ya”

And with that simple statement our ride was planned. What could be better than a ride suggested by a local, and even better, a route he’d ridden himself the week before.

“Do you know what it’s gonna be like?” inquired my travelling companion as we rolled through town.

“Nah, it’ll be fine”. I’d done well enough in high school geography to know that once you get over the dividing range and head west the landscape is pretty much flat all the way to Perth.

We were barely 10km out of town and not quite warm when we started up the first of several 2km long climbs at 6%. From the time we left behind the last quarter acre block, until we rolled back into town 90km later, there was not one bit of flat road.

But that wasn’t the problem on this ride.

Funny how people who ride only in their local area always complain that the roads they ride on are the worst. They tell you their roads are the roughest, have the most pot-holes, and lack a shoulder to ride on; sometimes I feel like offering them mine to cry on. Especially the people who have never ridden in the city – ‘oh I would never ride there; you’d have to be crazy to ride there’ – will without fail tell you that the roads you ride on in the city are so much better than the country. These people, often one and the same, are universally wrong.

From a cycling perspective the roads in the city, well in the distant suburbs at least, are as bad as anywhere. There is often no shoulder, meaning you must share the lane with cars and trucks, there are pot-holes large enough to swallow both rider and bike, and there are tree root ripples and corrugations and gravel sections.

So we had no problems with the dead roads.

There was wind!

What makes riding in the country harder, and ultimately more rewarding, is not the quality of the roads, or the carelessness of the drivers, or the terrain; no, it is the wind. The wide open spaces that attract us offer no protection, and the wind bends around the hills we admire and funnels down the little creek valleys that crease the land; its presence always felt.

The weather forecast and subsequent report for the day contained the word “calm”, which proved false, as neither the continual movement of air, nor my irritable demeanour because of it, could be described as calm.

A regular runner I know was fond of saying, as we both staggered up steep hills – ‘hills are our friend’; for the training effect of course. But the wind, the wind has no friends.