I've been riding bikes ever since I needed transport to university, and have only ever gradually increased my time in the saddle. In my early 20's I cut my teeth in time trialing, and found the longer events more suitable for me. After a lull in the action to raise a family, I got back into time trialing, had a go at road racing and cyclo-cross, and during 2016 and 2017 started to ride a few longer leisure rides. It wasn't until 2018 though that I rode my first audax, having been introduced to this world by an Iceni Velo clubmate. I rode 26 200km+ rides that year (including a couple over 300km), but only two were actually audaxes.
For the next few years I continued to ride lots of longer rides, usually solo and either at leisure or at pace on my TT bike. Almost all of these were around 200km, although one was almost 500km (a dawn 'til dusk challenge). A big motivator for these longer rides was my discovery of the Eddington Number, a fiendish combination of distance and quantity. Read more about it here!.
Finally, in 2022, I decided to go long on audaxes. My Iceni Velo clubmate and audax expert (Mike) had convinced me to enter the 1500km London-Edinburgh-London event in August, so I started entering a small number of calendar events and riding lots of other DIY events. For the 2021/22 season I'm on target to rack up 100 points, including the successful LEL outing.
So in summary, I'm fairly new to the audax scene, but have decent experience and am really looking forward to many more years of these long-distance challenges.
If you'd like to follow me on my adventures, please check back regularly at swinny.net or follow me on Strava!. The events I'm interested in are listed in my Audax events page.
All Audax: long-distance cycling events | All events
Coming soon...
01 April 2023 (Saturday): 300k 3Down London - New Forest