It was a couple of months now since a few of Yorkshire’s Finest dragged their bikes out of winter storage, oiled the chain, pumped up tyres, checked brakes (you did check your brakes?) and reacquainted themselves with Lycra and padded shorts. And now as we enter June the serious miles have begun. Now when I say “serious miles”, we are not talking “club”, 100 plus miles with 5000 feet of climb at average 20mph, (I have reluctantly given up on kilometres for this blog on the basis that most of the group are MPH fans and anyway Boris seems intent on restoring, pounds shillings and pence, so who am I to get in the way of a cynical political ploy), more 60 miles at 16 miles mph, with 2000 feet of climb, with ave MPH dropping rapidly with hills climbed. But nonetheless the distances are increasing slightly as the training legs and lungs improve, opening up more and more cafe stops as round trip distances are expanded. Talking of which (cafes that is), there are a couple of new reviews, so check them out in our cafe reviews section of the website. We did enjoy a rather good toasted tea loaf at Wetherby the other day!! Sadly, but not unexpectedly the core group has not yet been joined by those more casual YF cyclists, so our group numbers remain stubbornly at 6, occasionally 7 on a Saturday, (sounds like the shipping forecast, gusting to 8 with a strong north westerly) and at 4/5 on a Wednesday with the recent addition of retiree (we roundly don’t like that word, being the young fit athletes that we are) Jim, who has helped us up the Wednesday race pace a little. But with our Majorca trip, (flight chaos, passport farce, recession etc, notwithstanding) only some 16 weeks away, the remaining cyclists should really be getting out on their bikes. Of course it might be that they are secretly already racking up the miles on their lonesome, as many a good cyclist often does, in the early Yorkshire mornings, crunching through their gears getting fitter by the minute. But I suspect not. More likely a good deal of chat is going on, either out loud or more likely a bit of internal dialogue along the lines of “I’ll get out on the bike tomorrow” “at the weekend”, “starting next week”, “next month”, “when the weather improves” etc. Well once in Majorca no mercy will be shown to straddlers, (what am I talking about, of course we wait for everyone), but definitely less so when it comes to drinking up your pint of fizzy beer. So perhaps that is the answer, YF are practicing their drinking, that being their more natural territory and hoping that the cycling will look after itself, (which of course it will).