Paris Roubaix Challenge 2016

It's not very often at all that you can sit and type a blog post watching a pro cycling classic race and know that just the day before you rode the same route, the same cobbles, faced the same challenges and had the time of your life - I can say that it is definately a strange experience.

Lincoln Wheelers got a small group of enthusiastic members together and took a ferry across to ride the 'Hell Of The North' - the famous cobbles of the Paris Roubaix. Different distances were on offer and I chose the group that elected the medium route of 145km - that meant that my first ever taste of riding a stretch of cobbles would be the Arenberg Trench - and I can tell you that I was not looking forward to that !

Logistically, it was pretty easy - Hull/Zeebrugge ferry on the Thursday night, a nice ride to Koksijde on the Friday as a warm up. Hotel was the Ibis in Tocouring which was just a 4/5 mile ride to the Roubaix Velodrome for registration - not bad at all, and we had our Racing Sec who tied all that together to make it seem easy.

Our start time could be anything from 7-10am, so we chose to leave the hotel at about eightish and ride across town to the new Velodrome to start the event. We had numbers on our bikes and a timing chip attched to the back of it - as soon as we passed over the start timing mat our day of adventure would begin - 5000 riders taking on the days challenge.

For the first 30 miles, it was just like a regular sportive - busy roads, not closed, big groups (of which we found we were doing lots of work), really nice experience as we rode town to town and enjoyed the first feed stop. What was the fuss, this is not hard ???

..... and then at just over 30 miles, we turned into the Arenberg Trench and oh my f'in god that was a couple of kilometres of horrible, jagged, knobbly, blocky, muddy, lethal cobbles. I really struggled early on and had to have a little walk for a couple of minutes to get my head straight. Once back on the bike I stayed in the muddy trench to the left and negotiated it that way - eventually going on to ride the crown to the finish - tougher than any cross race that I'd ever completed. That was the worst of it I am happy to report - the 18 other cobbled sections were really tough and smacked your arms and wrists about like you wouldn't believe - but my philosophy was to attack the cobbles and ride as hard as possible, and not looking to defensively at the line I was taking and most importantly taking no late decisions with erratic line changes - this seemed to work a treat and gave me some good strava sections on the majority of the later cobbled sections.

Feed stations were ace, and I must have eaten my own body weight in waffles and jelly jam sweets. I was feeding for the bruising I was taking for sure.

After 145km the finish is in the old Velodrome in Roubaix which is the first time that I had ridden on a track, certainly something special to wrap up a brilliant day in the saddle.