A long time ago (2012) in a galaxy far away (the soon to be dearly departed bicycles.net.au forum), I started writing about my attempts to ride a bike fast.
With 14 years of life changes the title is now about as accurate as McDonald’s use of the term “restaurant”; there’s almost as much photography, farming, and family life as there is cycling.
That said, cycling is still the big priority especially this year. The original focus on road racing under the umbrella of the cartoon villains that are the UCI is totally gone (I’m hopeless in a bunch) and since 2018 the target is city to city records. These are overseen by the Road Record Association of Australia which I co-founded and currently head- which means long distance trips every so often as an official, one highlight being the finish of Lachlan Morton’s Around Australia record.
My number one target this year is the Warwick-Brisbane record. A touch over 100 miles with a current record of 6:16:33. I’ve been wanting to go after it since 2018 without success.
The first obstacle was getting a permit. Section 85 of the Qld road rules explicitly bans racing or record-setting (by vehicle or animal, so no alpaca racing) without police approval. Getting police approval meant getting Main Roads approval, and TMR Darling Downs said no. Why did they say no? Because they spoke to Warwick Police and they said no. Or to be more precise “no way on God’s green earth”.
Given it’s perfectly legal to ride those roads solo at any time, saying no to riding with a retired cop in a chase car in the wee hours of a Sunday morning is, let’s be charitable and say “short-sighted”. So with the help of my local independent MP I went over their heads to TMR head office and got a letter saying that I would be “travelling as a normal road user” and so no permit was needed.
By this stage QPS were so eager to avoid the flood of paperwork I was sending their way they leapt at the mention of “normal road user” and declared that RR85 “does not apply to individual riders” and therefore no permits were needed, please don’t contact us again.
But then I ran out of time to make an attempt that year, my son was born, and I spent all of the next year sick 
March 2023 was the next try, and I was in excellent shape, it would be in the bag. Except for getting Covid for the first time and being smacked down so hard it was 3 years before I was able to hit 160km again.
Well I’m finally back on the right track now with 5,200km so far this year. The attempt is penciled in for late October or early November, because I’ve ridden out of Warwick in winter before and I have no intention of repeating that horror 
The “warmup” scheduled for the first weekend of October is a 24 hour ride around my hometown of Kin Kin to raise money for the school P&C. The loop on the 3 main roads around the district still has a couple of kms of gravel so I’m building up a 2006 Jamis Coda as a gravel bike with 32mm tyres to suit. With a bit of luck I’ll have that ready for a test ride next weekend to firm up the target distance.
