Given the bicycle had yet to be invented, it’s unlikely that Scots poet Robert Burns was thinking of place-to-place record rides when he wrote “The best laid schemes of mice and men”, but he may as well have been.
‘The most careful plans can go awry’ is the sentiment, and record rider Kim Barfoot-Brace experienced this aphorism in motion at the weekend when, apparently against all the odds, she set a new provisional mark for the women’s ‘Side to Side’. Her 16hr 38min 20sec took 13min 36sec off Marina Bloom’s 22-year-old previous best.
Run off under the auspices of the Road Records Association (RRA), the Side to Side takes riders across the ‘waist’ of Britain, from Pembroke in Wales to Great Yarmouth on the Norfolk coast – a distance, in theory, of 349 miles by road.
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Barfoot-Brace, an established time triallist with national age-group honours at both 100 and 12-hour distances, had been thinking about the Side to Side record, which runs close to her Bath home, for three years.
When Cycling Weekly caught up with the 45-year-old she was still recovering from the endeavour both mentally and physically. Her support crew, she said, had also suffered a “huge toll”. Considerable previous experience with 12-hour time trialling had not prepared any of them for the challenges they would face.
“As much as you can plan your route and you’ve got this detailed schedule that you do for the RRA, there are so many things that crop up that you don’t plan for,” she said. “Within a 12-hour race, you’re going round in a circuit. You’ve got your support crew. You’ve got loads of other people around. If things go wrong, you can get it fixed really quickly.”
(Image credit: Kim Barfoot-Brace)
On the record ride though, on-the-go fixes became a real mental test. “Not just for me, but my support crew as well, and my husband. He’s supported me so many times in the National 12, and he said this was next level. And I could tell that for the three of them, including the timekeeper, it had taken a huge toll,” said Barfoot-Brace.
The hurdles the team had to face began even before the attempt began, with a road closure early on the route that forced a diversion. But that was the easy part. More difficult to deal with was her bike computer going into meltdown after five hours after she took a wrong turn. The spare bike – with her husband’s spare computer – didn’t help either. It had the same problem.
“I basically had no navigation on my bike computer from Abergavenny,” she said. Neither did she have her power, or heart rate in front of her.
It meant she had to rely on the crew guiding her through the various cities along the way – Cheltenham, Oxford, Cambridge – as well as the other, unexpected, road closures they came across.
Having crossed into England and navigated Cheltenham with the crew’s help, she said, “I just felt so disheartened. I was like, ‘What is going on?’ I already felt tired then.”
Eventually her husband saved the day by editing the GPX file on his laptop so it worked, but more computer woes were still to come later, including an accidental switch to indoor mode that saw her bike computer lose all useful parameters, as well as indicate that she had fallen way down on schedule. It was the last straw, she said.
“Bear in mind that by this point, it was 10 hours in, something like that. So I just lost the plot,” says Barfoot-Brace. “I was really confused, and I stopped, and I was crying and crying. I got the crew to stop behind me. And I was like, ‘What am I doing? Am I completely wasting my time? I’m going backwards’.
“And they were like, ‘No, no, it’s still possible. It’s still possible’,” she says. “And while I wasted some time in that panic and talking to them about it, it was kind of good because I was like, ‘Right, like, I’ve had enough technology. I just, I’m not looking at anything.'”
There was one more complex and unexpected detour to come, plus, she says, “a bit of a panic attack” after losing the crew on a particularly scary junction of duel carriageways around Cambridge. (“Some of those roads are terrifying,” she says). But once through the eastern university city, Great Yarmouth was almost near enough for the aroma of fish and chips to carry on the wind.
“I just thought, right, I know where I’m going now, that’s it, head down. And I just absolutely nailed it the last few hours,” says Barfoot-Brace. “I had moments, like, oh god, my saddle sores, and then my feet, and whatever. But I was just so focused. I thought, I cannot not get this record.”
Despite all the difficult moments, there were good ones, too. There was support from family, from old teammates, and also fellow RRA record breakers Chris Murray, and Lee Williams, who holds the men’s Side to Side mark at 14hr 00min 40sec. “Every time I saw them I was in tears,” she says.
Barfoot-Brace describes the record ride as “against the odds”, and very different to the picture she had in her head beforehand of being “blown from one side of the country to the other” on a 23mph average. In the end she averaged just under 21.43mph (34.5kph) for a ride that included an extra seven-and-a-half miles thanks to all the deviations required.
Given it didn’t go half as smoothly as it could have done, you could forgive Barfoot-Brace for feeling as though there is unfinished business with the Side to Side. Indeed, she says, if she were to make another place-to-place attempt, it would probably be to repeat this one. She feels, she says, a lot of affinity with the course. For now though, after thinking about doing it for three years, she is happy just to have done it.
“I didn’t really think it would happen this year after some of the other things that popped up,” she says. “It feels really good actually – and I’m sure my family agree – that I’ve got it done, and I’m not going to talk about it anymore.”
