Dive Aid Blog

The joy that is training for the "end-to-end" run continues. Today we had our first taste of the British summer - rain and bucket loads of it.

I didn't notice it at first. Daryl, aka South Park's Cartman, was berating me on the grounds that the articles I write for Dive Aid are one-sided. Of course they are you hapless gimp! Now, if you find any way of putting stuff on this website you're welcome to redress the balance.

In all truth my ire wasn't directed at slimboy fat Daryl today at all. Several of our road and pavement sharers were unappreciative of our efforts and give him his due Daryl was today "the Englishman who climbed a mountain and came down a hill" or however that goes.

Not that he didn't deserve a bit of piss-taking. My dad had to pull tight the gear cable that Daryl snapped on the spare bike in order for me to fasten it. The poor old boy with his arthritic hands, it was like wire cutting through cheese (or it would have been if he hadn't wrapped the cable round a wooden block). Shame on Daryl!

So we set out in the rain and Mother Nature chose the first 30 minutes of the ride to sling everything wet at us that she had in her arsenal. It was a deluge. I'd put on my lairy tights and fluorescent top in anticipation of just such an occurrence and Daryl hadn't.

We only had an hour to train as Daryl had to take his new puppy to the vets for its shots - brilliant excuse. We headed up Whipsnade hill, which I thought we could do with a following wind. I was wrong. It is very steep and I suffered heart palpitations as I waited at the top for Daryl. Walking his bike up the hill in the pouring rain, I realised I'd rarely, if ever, seen a more pathetic creature. Cars drove past us, splashing us without a care as now the road was covered and the camber had produced a mini-torrent that ran fast downhill, taking debris with it.

We made it up to the top of the Downs, the other way this time, without further incident and Daryl acquitted himself very well on the climb. By the time we reached Totternhoe and Eaton Bray, however, we could barely recognise the roads as the ones we'd cycled only 45 minutes before. Giant puddles stretching right across them obscured potholes, but luckily our bikes discovered each and every one of them.

Then, as we cycled through the largest puddle by far, a git in a silver Clio (on his mobile phone no less) floored his accelerator and tanked it, throwing a wave of water at each of us that any surfer would have been proud to ride. Wanker. Sodden became saturated and to add insult to injury a pedestrian in Eaton Bray made no attempt to cover up her laughter at my tights. Less than a mile from the house Daryl took the lead again in what has now become his customary not-sprint finish.

We got home. Poured rainwater out of our shoes and discussed what we'd like to do to the driver of the silver Clio. Then Daryl got me to inspect his dirty pants.