It finally happened. One very near miss. Such are the hazards of cycling outdoors.
And such are the reasons I started a blog specifically about cycling indoors.
I’ve had close calls before. People cutting me up in their cars, old ladies getting too close, a truck that left me no room coming off a roundabout…
But today I had three in one ride. The second of which was really scary.
Hoping to get out before the rain, I hadn’t left my street before it started spitting. Fortunately the spitting was the worst of it for the majority of this ride. However, once I had left my street, a white van decided he could make it before I’d get there and so had me slamming on to avoid hitting the rear end of his van.
That was the first incident, and to be fair, that sort of BS is fairly common. A shake of the head, and on I went.
Things went fine after this for the majority of the ride.
However, as I approached Preston from Longridge on my return, the weather worstened. I stopped once to wipe off my eyes and glasses. Then again shortly after to put on my coat (it’s bright orange, more on that in a second), and then again less than 100m later to put up the hood.
By now it was chucking it down and I’d put the speed on to try and get home faster than usual, in order not to get drenched.
As I was heading back, a large Audi Q7 car pulled out from a side street, didn’t even look my way, and how he missed me I will never know. That was so scary. So close. I was left shaking, and I think, so was he. As whilst he was behind me, he gave me a broad gap after that. Perhaps because of some of the choice words I’d thrown his way. I don’t know. No apology though.
It’s crazy, but I can see this on the HRM graph. My pulse jumped from 175 to 185bpm at this incident. You can see the spike on the graph above – just a bit before the line marker, around 47 minutes in.
As if that wasn’t enough, I had another incident on the final stretch where another fool pulled out of the side street and stopped completely blocking the cycle lane. Absolute arse holes.
Anyway, combine that with the heavy rain and frankly this was one to forget.
Shame.
