Three hundred kilometres of gravel, and one good decision

The plan was simple enough to fit in one sentence: leave at four in the afternoon, ride through the night, be at the coast for breakfast.

Plans that fit in one sentence are the ones that go wrong slowly.

The first eight hours were easy

They always are. Småland in early September is forest road after forest road, hard-packed and fast, the light coming in low and orange through the pines until about eight. I averaged something absurd for the first hundred kilometres and felt, briefly, like a much better cyclist than I am.

Then it got dark, and the surface changed, and the average came back down to meet me.

3am, somewhere north of Nybro

This is the part I actually think about.

Around three in the morning I hit a section of loose, deep gravel — the kind that’s been freshly laid and not yet packed down — that went on for what my computer later said was eleven kilometres. At 2 km/h of effort for 12 km/h of progress. Cold. Nothing to look at but the two metres of track in the beam.

And I had a genuinely good option: turn south, hit the main road, and take forty tarmac kilometres to the coast instead. Faster. Warmer. Sensible.

I didn’t, and I still can’t fully defend the decision. But there’s a difference between a ride you finished and a ride you finished the way you meant to, and at three in the morning that difference is the only thing keeping the pedals turning.

Breakfast

I got to the water at 13:20, nine hours later than planned, having stopped twice at petrol stations for coffee and once at the side of the road for twenty minutes of sleep I’d describe as unconscious rather than restful.

Twenty-one hours. Three hundred and four kilometres.

The sea was completely flat and there was a man fishing who nodded at me like arriving by bicycle at that hour was an entirely normal thing to do. I ate two sandwiches and fell asleep on a bench.

Best ride of the year.