The Great Coromandel Dream Ride

-- Saturday, 13 February, 2010. Put it in your diary

Departure details to follow.

In years past Hotel du Vin, now a Dilworth School extension, was a fine first stop.

But we can do much better than school cafeteria food.

Any suggestions for a dignified morning tea stop?

And lunch stop?

Boxing Day ride

-- 6:00 a.m. grand depart, Royal Oak roundabout

Brett W will take us to a secret training location in the Waitakere Ranges.

He says if gun point nudity worked for the Springboks then it can work for us, too.

Early departure mooted

-- 5:45 a.m. grand departure offers dignified riding option

Someone once said: One man's meat is another man's flaccidity. But it wasn’t anybody in our club who said it.

However, the significance of this idiomatic proverb extends to the cycling calendar, with certain events appealing to different club members. Some like it hilly and hot while others’ loins are engorged with blood at the thought of more horizontal riding.

To accommodate individual goals within the club riding programme, as well as certain members’ bourgeois tendencies, the club has introduced an early week ride departure time – 5:45 a.m. – for members who wish to ride in a more leisurely bunch.

Should any of these riders muster a second wind – not the John McG kind – then they can latch on to the faster moving 5:50 a.m. bunch as it goes by.

Monday, as always, is a slow day. So the staggered depart applies only to Wednesdays and Fridays.

Drawing courage from peanuts

-- Just one, mind

Like Rapha says, the history of cycle racing abounds with stories of endurance, will power and sheer courage on an epic scale. The capacity of bike riders to drive themselves relentlessly day after day through the pain barrier and way beyond makes them a breed apart. They redefine heroism in sport. The suffering is gratuitous, the mileage they cover Herculean, and both make a crucible in which a unique character is forged: an apparently cheerful indifference to the pain inflicted by bike and road, suffused with the transcendent desire to conquer both.

It is these ideals that compel Lunnsters from their warm beds and on to their bikes 5:15 a.m every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Is there a better start to the day than a quiet celebration of joyous suffering, at 30 kmh, with fellow brethren?

Sometimes, the feeling runs so deep Lunnsters are inspired to find words of their own.

John McG today was moved thus: No man in the world has more courage than the man who can stop after eating one peanut.

Doug T says anaphylactic shock comes on pretty fast, so one will do it.

From small beginnings

-- Brick phones to blogs

Ten years ago – when founding Lunn Ave Bicycle Club (LABC) members Brett W and Murray G first took to Auckland roads in rugby shorts and mountain bikes – there were no blogs. At least not in East Auckland.

So, as keen as Brett and Murray were to promote their achievements they had to stick to the then winning formula of talking loudly into their brick cell phones over a long Cobb & Co lunch.

How times have changed.

Of course, phones are much smaller now. And Cobb & Co no longer befits men of lycra and swish carbon road bikes.

So, on the 10th anniversary of LABC's formation, it seems only right to embrace the bold new world of social networking to promote the wonders of the bicycle, club victories, member foibles, and shocking revelations.

Happy birthday to us.