It’s a Paris-Brest-Paris year (it happens every four years) and we suspect that most long distance cyclists aspire to do it at least once in their lifetime. A 1200km ride from just outside Paris (Rambouillet) to Brest and back in under 90 hours is the challenge and there are thousands of French locals out cheering riders on and many offering free water and coffee from their garden gates. It is a truly special event and the oldest surviving bike race in the world. Most of us won’t be actually racing it, but it is a race against the clock to complete it.

But before that, every rider must complete a Super Randonneur Series of qualifying events, a 200km ride, a 300km ride, a 400km ridec and a 600km ride. Most of our riders who are planning to ride PBP have just completed their 400km event at Liam Fitzpatrick’s excellent London-Wales-London event on 29th April. We are expecting to have around six or seven West London Cycling riders at PBP.

Although the points awarded from London-Wales-London are yet to be added in, West London Cycling are currently placed 9th in the UK National Audax Championship, a great testimony to the miles put in by our Audax Chapter.

Here’s a list of each rider who has scored points for West London Cycling so far this year. We have to give a massive shout out to Clifford French who has clocked up a massive 38 points and has been doing several concurrent Randonneur Round The Year awards. The RRTY is an award that requires at least one 200km ride for 12 consecutive months (you can start at any month of the year which suits you). Well done Clifford. And Steve Britt has been out and about doing Perms and DIYs we note, great stuff Steve.

A number of new riders scored their first ever Audax points by doing the recent West London Cycling Night Ride as a DIY and we have another coming up soon (13th May) plus anyone doing our righton Beano’s ‘there and back’ version can also do that as a DIY.