Ride with: West Suffolk Wheelers
We join a triathlon-friendly club who take the coffee ride literally
Bury St Edmunds can lay claim to be one the homes of international cycle racing. The Suffolk town is about to erect a statue to James Moore who, after being born there in 1849, is widely credited with winning the first ever formal bike race, aged 20.
As if in his memory, the town’s club, West Suffolk Wheelers, has maintained a competitive edge since its creation in 1922. There is, though, little competitive about this Saturday’s club run. Barely above freezing, we take it easy as one of West Suffolk’s many groups rolls through the countryside, briefly dipping into Essex on a network of lanes laid over the gently undulating countryside like a tarmac spider’s web.
And when one of our number suffers a puncture just a few miles in, we all stop either to help or chat.
“We have six weekly rides, one on a Wednesday, three on a Saturday and two on a Sunday,” explains club secretary Michael Lawson. We’re with the Cappuccino group, the standard ride which also takes place on a Sunday, as does the fearsome Espresso. The Latte and Latte Plus are slower rides on a Saturday.
“Wednesday is called Wednesday for Wheelers, that’s the tea and scones brigade,” smiles Lawson.
“There’s also a Saturday morning training ride which is 50 miles with no stops,” Malcolm Mcfarlane chips in. “The concept is that it is all over by 10 o’clock and you can have your day, but the reality is that when you get home you are good for nothing!”
Mcfarlane is one of the club’s triathletes, though it wasn’t always that way.
“I joined the club as a cyclist and then a few people mentioned they were short of runners for the cross country team,” he explains. “Then I remembered I used to be a club swimmer and before I knew it I was doing triathlon stuff. Now I am one of the triathlon coordinators.”
The club has fully embraced triathlon since adding it to their portfolio in 2010, but it does not dominate, with fewer than half the members taking part.
“There are a lot of crossovers,” says Giles Prime, a pure cyclist. “There are cyclists that do running and vice versa, there are a lot more multi-sport members than there are triathletes.”
Even in the grip of winter Suffolk is a great place to ride, so there is no surprise the club runs many local events.
“If you lump in all the club runs there are hundreds,” explains Lawson. “We have the Suffolk Punch reliability in February with three routes. There’s about 3,500 feet of climbing in the 75-miler so it’s not easy. March is the open time trial, then we have the Ixworth Crits.”
The jewel in the crown of the club’s events, each May Day Bank Holiday the club take over the village of Ixworth, hosting a series of criteriums, which over the years have attracted some of the UK’S biggest names in the discipline.
There are triathlon, mtb and grass track races, an Italian training camp and members also help with the local circuit race series at an old RAF base. The active club house hosts everything from weekly roller nights to British Cycling courses.
As we head back to Bury St Edmunds the pace lifts, prompting attacks, racing for the town sign. The race won, we pass the proposed site of James Moore’s statue and it is easy to imagine it wearing a smile of pride for his home town club.