Great Perth Bike Ride

The Great Perth Bike Ride is mass participation timed ride around the Swan River approximately 53km in length.

A rare photo of us cycling

Looking for a bike shop

Finding a cafe

"Yes we're ok, we've mended the bike"

It couldn't last

How many Farm-boys does it take to mend a puncture?

The walk of shame

As luck would have it all three trandemnauts were in town for this event, so we purchased some cheap orange T shirts and got ourselves down to Langley Park for the mass start.

This would be the toughest test encountered so far for our homemade bike. Our goals for the day were threefold; finishing the ride, not killing anyone (ourselves included) and cycling up the hill in the Mosman Park.

An easy early morning cruise to the Narrows to meet up with the rest of Team Scrapheap Challenge gave us an early shake down. We also had a good vantage to point to gaze in awe at the lycra-clad-shaven-legged-overpriced-carbon riders starting the second of their two laps.

At Langley Park we made our way to our start grid, somewhere near the back of the massed cyclists. As we cycled along the queue we attracted many complementary remarks, smiles, laughter and oh so hilarious comments. This continued all day with the most common being “the bloke at the back isn’t pedaling”. Often they were correct.

When it was our turn to set off it was pleasing to find that our air horn was just as loud as the starter’s. A nice flat easy spin along Riverside Drive to got the legs warmed up. We were very much amongst the fun runners but we were overtaking a few and generally keeping up with the pace. Highlight of the day was the rather fetching blond who insisted on taking a photo of us. Now that doesn’t happen to me everyday.

A couple of smaller category climbs got the heart rate up for the big col everyone was talking about. This turned out to be a steady gradient of all of about 70 metres height gain. We needed our bottom gear (not very low) and had to strain but we made it to the top comfortably which is more than can be said for many others on more suitable machines.

It turned out that the descents were of much more concern. What we thought was a small buckle in the back wheel was being transmitted through the long frame into a disconcerting wobble, especially at high speeds. Just short of Fremantle the real problem revealed itself to be a bulging sidewall in the rear tyre, which promptly exploded.

Whilst we decided what to do we refueled with an excellent mid race fried breakfast at the nearby café. The bike shops in Fremantle were not opening until 11 or not at all and the ride mechanics were miles away and didn’t have any tyres.

In the end we patched the split tyre with JB’s patented Pedigree Chum packet gaiter, popped in our spare inner tube and pumped it as best we could. John thoroughly tested the bike out by demonstrating that it could be pedaled one-up using any of the three sets of pedals.

By now the race was coming to an end and we were racing the clear up of cones. This meant that the roads were no longer closed to traffic so we took the far more scenic cycle path along the river.

Not far past Point Walter an all too familiar explosion was heard from the rear wheel. The split in the tyre had grown to un-repairable proportions. John commandeered Ben’s bike and set of in search of a bike shop as we started pushing.

We met up with John again at Applecross Bay. Obviously he hadn’t found an open bike shop but he had found a very tatty old mountain bike tyre in a skip. Our next challenge was to patch one of the two badly damaged inner tubes. The first had the smaller of the holes but was discharging some very suspicious gunk which prevented a patch from sticking. Eventually a huge patch was found to cover the larger hole in tube 2.

After several false starts and an encounter with a dead turtle with an extraordinarily long neck we were moving again only to run over a nail and puncture the front tyre. This was a fairly straight forward repair.

By the time we crossed the Narrows bridge it was well past lunchtime and the race finish area was packed up. We turned left and headed up the along the river and up the hill back to Nedlands.

We were having to take extra care with gear selection and coordinating when to pedal and freewheel as stretch in the front chain and possibly some damage to the chainring in the two position was causing the front ghostring to fly out periodically. Less than a kilometre from home this happened again. This time we ran over the errant spiked disc puncturing the rear tyre again and buckling the ring.

Bowed but not beaten, we pushed the bike the final few metres home.