The bikes

Dgym on recumbent tourer, two panniers full of goodies - food, water, waterproofs, warm clothes. Me on my upright tourer, similarly laden but also with brand new handlebar bag, fitted at the local bike shop earlier that day. Very poorly it turns out, it had a tendency to slip downwards and as we arrived at the start, it turned out it had been rubbing on my front wheel, which had worn a hole in the front pocket and muddied up the stuff inside it, and also worn a small groove in my mobile phone. Oh well. We managed to tighten that up and it caused no further bother.

In fact, it grew on me as the ride went on and I was able to access my munchy stuff while "on the go". One hill in particular was made more bearable by the presence of salami, cheese & lettuce sandwich in left hand whilst spinning away.

Starting out

Set out at about 8:30pm from Hackney, out of London and through Epping Forest. Roads not so great - very trafficky coming out of London, and then a long fast narrow road that went on for miles, with a narrow cycle lane at the edge, which was very bumpy. Would've ridden further out in the road (smoother) if there hadn't been much traffic, but there was. Didn't have the greatest of confidence in my legs at this point - they were periodically turning to jelly for no apparent reason. Kept having to ask dgym to slow down.

At first, we were stopping every ten miles for munchy breaks. Oat cookies, diluted fruit juice, bananas, choc chip Tracker bars, and a couple of sandwiches. At 50 miles we decided to wait until the halfway food point at 60 miles - at 60 miles, we discovered the food point was actually at 68 miles. Village hall in a place called Monks Eleigh - huge queue for food, which turned out to be a queue for tea and coffee as all the food had run out. But at least we had munchy stuff, and were able to refill on water, go to the loo and have a sit down.

After the food stop

It was just getting light as we left the village hall, which made things much easier - i.e. actually being able to read the route sheets we'd been given, which turned out to be quite useful. Daylight also reduced that feeling of "Holy shit, I should be in bed by now".

Roads were lovely and quiet for the next few hours. Some very flat areas, some hillier regions, but no Ditchling Beacons. In general, hillier than I was expecting for that part of the country.

My legs had got into the swing of things at about 30-40 miles, but I think about 80-90 they entered a new phase of "oh bloody hell, not another hill - let's get this bastard out of the way" and absolutely caned it up there. Dgym had slowed down considerably by this point, so I'd let him spin up the hills in his own time, while I slowed down or waited at the top.

Arrival

Arrived in Dunwich at about 9:30am, with dgym making his entrance by skidding to a spectacular halt on the gravelly beach carpark :) The damage? Both of us had painful knees. My hands/wrists were numb, and was stiff across the arms, shoulders and upper back. Dgym was suffering from chafing in some sensitive areas. We also got bloody cold very quickly - the weather was cloudy, windy and miserable. We got breakfast at the beach cafe, which was a pretty miserable plateful after 120 miles. There are better breakfasts to be had. Found some shelter and snoozed on the beach until the coaches arrived.

Getting back

Took a bloody long time. We didn't leave the beach until about 2pm. Couple of hours later we were outside Smithfield market waiting for the furniture vans of bikes to show up. When dgym started craving milkshakes it was fortunate we were right next to my place of work so I happened to know a very good 24hr milkshake place over the road (Tinseltown, St John's street) So we wandered off to slurp on milkshakes for half an hour.

Bikes showed up eventually, we got ourselves home about 8pm, bathed and went straight to bed.

Today

Woke up with a killer headache, which was corrected by caffeine intake upon arrival at work. Most surprisingly, I am able to move. My knees feel OK and I'm not yelping "Ow! Ow! Ow!" when I use the stairs. The wrist pain has eased, and my hands are functional. I'm bloody tired though. I also have the munchies. For lunch, I shall be wreaking carnage upon the conveyor belts of Yo! Sushi.

Unrelated stuff

• The offer is good, will accept, so long as there is no dodgy shit in the contract.
• "We shot an innocent man. Sorry, but it might happen again." WTF? The holding down and shooting five times in the head sounded OTT even when they said he was a suspect. Plain clothes cops, FFS. Excuse me, I must now go and spend some time shaking my head in disbelief.