Easter Flèche - The Wetting of '25

The non-audaxers: the emptiness of their lives is shocking. They move through a world of soft

edges and predictable comforts. Their weekends are a vacuum of un-tested limits, a realm

where the only burning sensation comes from a few efforts in the Wicklow Hills, in fair weather,

with companions for support and Val to mend their punctures. They ride to eat cake, not eat

cake to ride. They exist outside the peculiar fraternity of the long road, untouched by the quiet

madness of chasing kilometers through the bruised hours of the night. They speak of

headwinds as an inconvenience, not a fundamental truth of existence. Their world lacks the

exquisite torment of sodden chamois chafing against tired skin, the hallucinatory whispers that

begin around 2am, the profound, almost spiritual understanding that dawns in the small hours

when the only company is the rhythmic whir of your own machine and the relentless drumming

of rain. They will never know the particular satisfaction of finishing a ride so broken that even

standing upright feels like a victory. They will never understand the grim poetry of 400

kilometers in the rain.

(ahem) ¹

The Easter Fleche is a strange event. By tradition from pre-eternity, it must start 10am on Good

Friday, and end 24 hours hence. Participants ride in teams of 3-5; each team creates their own

route, and all must converge at a single destination, like arrows (fleche) hitting their target. No

long stops allowed: you must ride continually. Teams ride, succeed and fail together.

This year your correspondent was invited to join a team of distinguished "anciens". Usually a

400 is a solitary affair: a good occasion for extended conversations with all the people in your

head, a chance to settle the unresolved issues that accrue between events. Technology has

robbed us of the therapeutic benefits of Just Being Bored - a long, long ride alone will fix you

up. Still, this 400 with a team promised to be good social craic.

As the day approached:

We were in an unfortunate Nash Equilibrium: everyone wanted to bail, but no one wanted to

bail first and cause the whole team to fail, and so no one bailed.

Entropy: the driving phenomenon of all. Any order, any separation between "stuff here" and

"stuff not there", will eventually succumb to the inexorable statistical mechanics that is the

wearing down of the universe, when everything becomes randomly mixed with everything else,

when no distinction remains between light and dark, hot and cold, or between dry and wet.

We all have the best gloves and shoe covers and Guaranteed To Keep You Dry™ merchandise

money can buy. Within 3 hours it will all fail, all succumb to the entropy god that does not abide

a region of dry in the middle of wet. The best we can hope for is to keep the core of the body

warm enough to stave off hypothermia, via the exothermic breakdown of stored lipids and

exogenous carbohydrates. Wool and neoprene unite in a desperate alliance against the

encroaching cold.

The bike is packed, the gear laid out, the carbs loaded. Enjoy the sensation of dry warmth - for

it will be missed. Almost want to light up the pipe and burst into a rendition of "Far Over The

Misty Mountains Cold..." But there is no sympathy from Mrs Q, no understanding of the dread

that looms. Non-audaxer.

10am Good Friday. We roll. Nothing much happens, it's just a normal ride - the pace held back

by trepidation. Our first pit-stop is 3 hours hence in Kinnegad - wring out the gloves and pour

out the shoes. Why bother? Perhaps we need to reload the gloves & shoes with rain from every

county we pass. And so we carry on.

Around midnight, somewhere in Ireland. Going up some hill, the gizmo beeps "Climb

Complete!" and we summit into a full-on storm, wind in the face, rain horizontal. PoD is running

rim brakes so has to take it daintily. I pretend I'm in a Rapha commercial and open it up, the

Lupine headlight perfectly lighting the road (and nothing else), trusting my bones to 32mm of

rubber and 140mm of rotor.

The night stretch is always logistically tricky. Where do we resupply water? Maps have been

scoured and interwebs trawled - not too many options open in darkest rural Ireland. Somewhere

around 3am we pass by a shop that looks open. The Hard Men want to ride on, but I unilaterally

pull in, unable to resist the draw of hot water and caffeine, in any form please. With a harrumph

they turn around and come inside, patiently waiting for my soft resolve to harden up.

A key part of the Fleche is planning your route, for each team choses their own. We figured to

forego any scenery, as we wouldn't be seeing much of it anyway. But riddle me this: when is a

flat road and tailwind NOT welcome on a ride? When you're desperate to get warm and wish

you had something to push against, whether earth or air, anything to pump the bellows and

generate some heat. I was reduced to breaking away and doing threshold intervals, then

waiting for the group, trying to keep HR > 150; any lower and I'd start shivering.

Riding through the night, seeing the creeping pink of the pre-dawn sky getting brighter and

brighter, then being struck by the first rays of the sun and Born Again! Dear Reader, there is no

experience in this realm quite like it. All the hours of sweat and dark are well worth it, for this

precious, single moment of ecstasy. Today there was none of that - the grey night just got

incrementally less grey. The screen on the gizmo switched from white-on-black to black-on-

white, and that's how we knew it was day. Yawn.

And then we are approaching the Greater Longford Metropolitan Area - the target (for whatever

reason) of our Fleche. Six teams had embarked, two had the good sense to stop, the rest

converge. The destination is some random parking lot: empty this morning, and why wouldn't it

be? We pull in, unclip, hit <END RIDE/>, exchange nods, and, well, that's it.

The rain stops.

¹ (With apologies to Tim Krabbe's "The Rider", perhaps the greatest book on cycling ever

written.)

Kashif Qayyum and Kevin Lynch were on a team with Paul O'Donoghue (Sorrento), Niall Diamond (Audax Ireland) and Caroline Murphy (Leitrim)