Cycling clubs with midweek rides

hells

Hello

I am not sure if this is the right place to post this so apologies.

I am a 24 year old woman who has owned a road bike for 10 months and ridden 'seriously' i.e more than commuting for about 5 months. I have also tried my hand or should that be legs at racing although I have been thrown unprepared into the deep end by being entered into the womens national team series by the army. I am not doing very well but hey I am a 4th cat and these are my first races and I am trying to compete with professional cyclists! I am looking to join a club for several reasons, one is to get more experience riding in a group. For the team time trial at the bedford stage event we had to learn how to do a chain gang as we rode to the TT start point, amazingly we were not last place! Another is to hopefully make some new friends who share a love for the same hobby I am not from London and my work hours make it extremely hard to meet people.

I have a slight problem finding a suitable club as I am a trainee paramedic in the LAS and I work 8/10 weekends. Pretty much all clubs only seem to ride on weekends. I most often have wednesday and thursday off and on wednesday I have Ta in the evening.

So is there anyone on here who know of a London based club that have daytime wed/thurs rides or evening thursday rides? I live in Hackney but will ride upto 15ish miles to meet points. I have done about 2 saturday rides with Dulwich Paragon and enjoyed it very much.

mosfet

Subscribe to the DPNC google group:

http://groups.google.co.uk/group/dpnc

And regularly check the LFGSS Rides and Races forum:

http://www.lfgss.com/forum5.html


Dulwich has scheduled Wednesday chaingangs that usually aren't too long if you're worried about the extra 30 miles round trip from Hackney.

The Dulwich DPNC guys and girls regularly post on the google group when they're doing one-off mid-week rides, and if you head off on your own you can post on there and possibly get a few people to come out with you.

The LFGSS forum is packed full of people from East London and a particularly large proportion of their users are female; many of them are very strong road riders. It might be worth re-posting your message on there, you're certain to get some better advice or even people willing to organise something with you.

jibberjim

hells wrote:

For the team time trial at the bedford stage event we had to learn how to do a chain gang as we rode to the TT start point, amazingly we were not last place!

Even more impressive when you consider the team you beat had Claire Galloway in it, who whilst not actually a pro, was one of the strongest in the race.

weekday rides suffer from the problem of lack of numbers, you could do the surrey league handicaps on a thursday evening but they're some distance from east london, which are a great way of getting used to the speed the pro's in the Team series will be driving it (and it looks like this year the team series events will be pretty much the same standard as the national series events)

Or there's the thursday evening women's races at Hog Hill start up next week, so you could do those for experience. Not sure what the turn out is likely to be and it's not a club, but it will give you racing and pack experience.

ridelikeapro

Probably a bit too far for you, but anyway: http://www.gregarios.co.uk/cycling-clubs/Thursday-cycle-ride.html

The Gregarios usually ride from Bushey Heath, Herts, but their Thursday ride starts in Sarratt.