My Only Unsuccessful Cycling Trip

Before I start I hear you saying, (Yes, I can hear you, but that’s not the subject I want to talk about today.) “How do you even define an unsuccessful cycling trip? If you grew as a person during the trip, wasn’t that a successful trip? If you made some friends alone the way….” I’m defining an unsuccessful trip as a trip where I needed motorized transport to get home. This isn’t to say it wasn’t a fun trip (until things went wrong). This isn’t to say it wasn’t a memorable trip (and by golly was it memorable). But it does fit my definition of an unsuccessful cycle, largely because I prioritized “not raining” over “too fucking hot”. One last thing before I begin, you may notice an absence of the photographs that my cycling blogs are usually full of, that’s because I lost them. I’m always so careful with my photographs, backing them up at least once, sometimes two or three times, but I have no idea what happened to these ones, and they’re gone. So let’s begin.

I had decided I wanted to really challenge myself by doing a cycle of at least fifty miles, having never done a cycle of that length before. So I looked at some interesting places to go on Google Maps, and I found a trip that really tickled my adventure bone. (I considered forgetting I ever thought up that phrase, because it sounds creepy, but it’s creepy yes, but also funny, so yeah, it’s in the blog, nothing can be done now.) There was a route that took me to the Nagle Mountains, up to Glanworth Castle, and then onto Labbacallee Wedge Tomb, what I believed to be the oldest thing I would ever cycle to. And what was interesting about this is that the cycle was almost, but not quite, a “non repeating cycle” where instead of going back the way I came to get home, I went back on a completely different route. And most importantly of all for what I was trying to accomplish, it was just over fifty miles long. So I said “Sign me up!” Or that’s what I would have said if it was necessary to sign up, but it wasn’t.

So the only thing left was to pick a day to do the trip, and by golly is that where the problems started. It was in July, and checking the weather forecast for the next day, I said “It won’t be raining tomorrow, it looks like there’ll be a furious lack of rain, in fact if you were to announce “It is raining” people would laugh at you and your reputation would be destroyed.” But I was so focused on the lack of rain, I wasn’t focused on the other super relevant detail. There was going to be a heatwave. Ironically, the trip wouldn’t have gone wrong if it was raining. Rain tends to be a much more manageable issue than a heatwave. So, completely oblivious to the fact that it would be too hot to cycle, I set my alarm clock to 6:00 am the next day and went to bed.

I got up the next day and saw that there was a lot of fog to the north. But I was determined to do this cycle and the fog wasn’t going to stop me. So I packed my bag and set off.

Within a short time the fog cleared, and all that was left was beautiful sunshine. I cycled to the Nagle mountains, and went to the top of Knocknaskagh mountain. I was now in one of my favourite places in the world. I’ve a blogpost on the Nagle mountains here:

The Twentieth Cycle to the Nagle Mountains

I could have stayed there all day, but there was no time for dilly dallying, I had a fifty mile cycle to do! So I returned to my bike, and continued my journey to Glanworth.

Glanworth could be described as a jackpot for anyone who’s interested in history, so much packed into such a small village. It’s got Glanworth bridge, the narrowest and oldest public bridge in Europe, built in the 15^th century. In the 13^th century a Norman fort was built there, now known as Glanworth castle. And also contained in the village is an abbey built in 1475. I happily walked around the village, looking at all of these interesting historical buildings and structures, oblivious to the fact that my energy was slowly but surely being drained. I think it may have been around Glanworth that I started getting sunburn on my arms, and that may have been where the problem started. Once you have sunburn, the body diverts the energy you need for cycling into dealing with the sunburn. An important lesson would be learned. Avoid sunburn at all costs! Use plenty of suncream, or better yet keep your arms covered. But I wasn’t aware of the battle my body was losing yet, so I hopped on the bike and headed towards Labbaccallee Wedge Tomb.

The wedge tomb was the highlight of the trip. I had been to Glanworth once before, and to the Nagle mountains many times before, but this was my first trip to Labbacallee. It is a tomb estimated to be between 4,000 and 5,000 years old. Things that are this ancient fascinate me. Think of the estimate, 4,000 to 5,000 years old. And think of the time between now and when humanity first walked on the moon, or when the Titanic sank, or when humanity invented powered flight. I was born in 1985, these things seem so impossibly long ago to me, and yet, they are such tiny fragments of time that they can’t even be factored into an estimate of how old the wedge tomb is. So this was another interesting precedent for my cycling, cycling to the oldest object I had ever cycled to. In truth, I had probably cycled out to cairns many times that were older, but we’ll say this was my cycle to the oldest thing that had a Wikipedia article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labbacallee_wedge_tomb

My arms were red from the sun at this stage, but I still felt energized. I took off to Fermoy. What I didn’t realize is that there were steps I could have taken in Fermoy to save the trip, but this was the longest cycle I had ever done, and in a heatwave too, and I simply didn’t know enough about managing fatigue.

As I cycled into Fermoy, that’s when I knew something was wrong. My energy levels had just collapsed in on themselves. I couldn’t bear the thought of cycling two more miles, let alone the twenty I would need to get home. I felt so physically uncomfortable that I just wanted to get home so I could rest, get the trip done, so I could relax. And that was the mistake. I should have taken a long rest in Fermoy while sheltering from the sun, gone to a restaurant and stayed there for a while, even wandering around a supermarket might have done the trick, any period of rest of half an hour or more, while indoors, might have sorted it, but instead, I took a mere fifteen minutes rest, in the hot sun no less, and then decided to keep going.

And I was so weak that I was peddling for a very short amount of time, and then coasting for as long as I could. Nothing wrong with coasting, but I was needing to coast, despite cycling at walking speed. I don’t think that’s an exaggeration, I think someone walking at an easy pace would have been moving faster than me. Somehow in this fatigued, sunburnt state, I crossed the ten mile mark in terms of distance remaining, surely I could persevere and finish the trip? No, for two reasons. Firstly, I got sick on the side of the road. Could I have walked slowly at this point and still have a “non motorized trip” of over fifty miles? Probably, if the remainder of the trip was flat, but the last hill of the trip was absolutely brutal, not the steepest, but the hill was about two miles long. It was over, I rang for help and got a lift home.

And that’s the end of the story. But assuming you’ve read all of my blogposts, which I am presumptuously assuming you have, you know the sentence I just wrote is a lie. Was there any possibility of me letting this defeat stand? Think about this, I lost all of my photos from the trip, so where did the photo of Labbacallee at the top come from? I’ll tell you where it came from, being able to tolerate defeat as well as a lobster tolerates success in other lobsters (look it up, though maybe it’s a myth.) So the next year, I made another attempt at this same trip, and that’s what my next cycling blogpost will be about.