Bicycle Race

Lensfield Road Crossing

In UK, it’s outlandish to believe that a town or city can be completely flat. Cambridge, in fact, is quite flat. But thanks to a hill in the north called Castle Hill such outlandish are precariously kept at bay. It’s a lone mole on the smooth skin that makes this part of the land, called the Fens. Cycling up that hill can be quite a challenge, especially at night, after booze and fine cuisine at a formal dinner. Down the hill on a sunny day can be a real joy.

So I did one day, swooping down Castle Street like an eagle swooping to catch its prey. My prey? Another cyclist a few metres ahead of me. I had to catch him before we reached the Bridge Street crossing.
It didn’t happen. The guy had too much momentum downhill. So I hoped the lights would turn green before I reached the line. But they didn’t, and I screeched to a halt. The flow was already broken.

A few tense moments passed as I tried to read the mind of the cyclist beside me. The signal turned green and we sped off down the hill, but he disappeared ahead of me, and up and over Magdalene Bridge, well before I had the chance to select a lower gear to climb its hump. He had better equipment, and was probably lighter than me.

But I kept going at a brisk pace through Bridge Street, lifted my right hand after a few minutes and made a fast right turn into Trinity Street. Then I slowed down, much to my dislike. Trinity Street is a pedestrian zone, so one must be careful of the careless pedestrians, especially those awed and enamoured groups of newcomers carrying heavy camera equipment on drooping shoulders. They seem to have no sense of direction.

Manoeuvring through such slow moving crowds can be a challenge requiring special skills. One must be able to cycle respectfully at their pace, yet be on the lookout for gaps to speed through. How early you can anticipate the gap will decide how quickly you are able to move forward.
Right at the end of Trinity Street I took a sharp left into St Mary’s Street, leaving the King’s College chapel on my right. Continuing to struggle through slow moving crowds, I was joined by more cyclists facing the same predicament. But a strange competitiveness overcomes human beings when they have wheels under them. The cyclists started to jostle and swerve to find gaps. They moved fast when they found a gap and, braked hard and swerved when faced with a crowd of people. A few moved onto the curb, and the disrespectful ones started to sound their bells. This is usual during the day time on St Mary’s Street at the market square.

Finally after much jostling and swerving, I reach the end, and took a sharp right into Sidney Street up until the end of the pedestrian zone, where it met St Andrew’s Street one of the two main thoroughfares of Cambridge (the other being Trumpington Street).

One of the beauties of St Andrew’s Street is the fact that you no longer have to deal with slow moving crowds. Now you have to deal with fast moving buses coming straight at you through a street that goes in only one direction (although the narrow cycling lane is in the opposite direction), is only a couple of metres in width, and the left hand side curb only a couple feet, so that if you do manage to get hit by a bus, you will most likely not fall to the ground, but be squatted like a fly onto the fifteenth century walls of Christ’s College. If you are able to negotiate this nerve-racking stretch, you will be free again to pick up speed until you reach the crossing of Downing Street.

At the crossing, I waited, again, now the weight of my laptop taking a toll on my back. A few more cyclists lined up, and one appeared out of thin air and speeded into the traffic out from Downing Street. It was a perfectly safe move though as he was going in the direction of traffic, and I often wondered why there were traffic lights there.

When it was ‘Go’ time, the race began all over again, and this time I shifted my gears like a formula 1 racing car, until my legs gave up and I nearly bumped into a bus. The Lensfield Road crossing gridlock had begun!
Lensfield road is probably the biggest crossing in Cambridge, and it is always busy. The road also gets quite wide, but just at the crossing. The traffic towards Lensfield Road is usually always slow, and there were a row of three buses and several cars that day, and there was almost no way of moving without having to use the pavement. But that is cheating in cyclist terms. You have to manoeuvre on the road, and for that you have to look for oncoming traffic from the right lane, and go for it. Then slot right back in once traffic started to flow again.

The Lensfield Road traffic lights are a cyclist’s wet dream. It’s wide and there is enough room for about ten cycles to line up for a start. Then there is the early starting light for cyclists which means cyclists get a free start to move ahead in clear road before the cars catch up. The atmosphere over the cyclists’ head at these lights any time of the day is quite electrifying, and if you have had a bad day at work, waiting for a few minutes here can make your day.

I had to take a left turn into Gonville Place, so there was no racing from Lensfield Road this time, and get off at the starting line for stage 3 of the 2014 Tour De France, which is still marked on the pavement in yellow. I walked the rest of the way into Mill Road.

Ah Mill Road! That is a cyclist hell. But I will leave that for another time.

Cambridge and cycling are synonymous. It’s a sacrilege to live in Cambridge and not own a cycle. There is a bicycle somewhere in every image or sculpting depicting Cambridge. Most cyclists here get more respect from vehicles than they deserve. Most people don’t want to drive around Cambridge, because you can reach most places quicker on a bike. The camaraderie of cyclists and the city’s historical narrow lanes is perfect playground for cheeky manoeuvres. As a result, it is almost impossible to not be tempted to participate in a flash bicycle race.