Road to Abbeville or: How I learned to stop worrying and learned to love the Metric system

As I left Tom behind yesterday (conveniently before all the hills by the way, just saying! 😀), and once I'd stopped worrying about if I'd done the right thing by entrusting him to a French taxi driver, my mind turned back to 2009 to try to recollect the ride that lay out before me. I remember hills, lots of hills. I remember Rich cruising up then in his granny gear and then filming generally Neal and Spencer (I was WAY behind pushing the bike up). I remember a hilly forest and I remembered the climb out of Desvres when I thought I'd knackered my (at the time) dodgy knee. The gentle downhill slope through a valley and then stopping for some food finally in a small town where Rich got mollested in his Lycra by an inebriated old man.

I also recalled the joy of deciding to start taking the D roads and not having to keep stopping to check the paper maps. I recall thinking Neal may have ended up taking the motorway to Abbeville by accident after he zipped off, of not being able to reach him on his mobile for what felt like ages.

But most of all it was on the road to Abbeville where I learned to love the kilometre! Seeing the km melt away as we chased the sunlight to our hotel, it was ace. It was at this point that I started measuring my rides in Kilometres and I realised that we in the UK really should just dive in to the metric system with both feet rather than faffing between imperial and metric.

This time round, whilst my overal speed was higher when I left Tom behind, doing those sorts of distances solo is never as much fun as when you are with someone else. You get an understanding why these solo breakaway riders in the grand tours so rarely make it before the peloton or chasing group catch them up.

Without any places that were either open or accepted cards yesterday, I struggled when I hit the 80km mark (35km to go) I hit a wall and started to really struggle. With 15km to go, I had nothing left I was barely spinning the pedals. I had drank the last dregs from my bottles, and was creeping along at about 16kmh.

The Carrefour Conect that appeared like a mirage then was a minor miracle. I stopped for some of the ripest and tastiest strawberries, a couple of bananas and a couple of chocolate chip brioche. I topped up one of my bottles and I headed on. The figurative expression of having nothing left in the tank is very apt. After the stop and "refuelling" I could cycle again, sure my backside muscles were sore (and still are) and my quads were tight, but I was flying again and the km dropped away a lot quicker than the previous 15. I flew through Abbeville and up the hill to the hotel.

Tom wasn't feeling any better, so I took a 40 minute shower, got changed and went and called Hannah. I went and got Tom some mess which helped him tremendously. We went out to the Buffalo Grill as we did back in 2009 and stuffed ourselves with cheap greasy food and slumped into our beds exhausted.