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News

March 2025 Club News Bulletin

Hello Exeter Wheelers members,

When is a shop not shut ? When’s it’s a Shutt shop – the deadline for ordering EWCC clothing from Shutt has been extended until Friday 7th of March. It’s very good kit at reasonable prices – £55 for a short sleeved EWCC top, or £67.50 for long sleeved. You can order it here.

And when is a deadline not dead ? When it’s the EWCC Club Awards & Social Night – the venue has said it is ok for us to accept ‘late entries’ for the remaining three places available Andrew Feather, four times National Hill Climb Champion, and an ex-EWCC rider, will be there to present the various awards, and there will be a Q&A session with him afterwards. It should be a good night, a chance to meet/spend time with fellow club members, and all for only a tenner inc hot sit down meal ! Full details, and payment link for grabbing one of the three remaining places is at https://www.exeterwheelers.co.uk/awards-social-night-is-8th-march/

When February begins it seems like winter will never pass, but come the end of the month we start to see the first glad signs of spring, and the evenings getting steadily lighter.  March has started with frosty mornings followed by some warmth in the sun later in the day. The sunshine and dry roads of late have encouraged a good turn-out for club rides. Don’t forget you can see all our planned club rides at https://www.exeterwheelers.co.uk/rides/ . New Wheelers’ member David Binding has been enjoying the Saturday Socials, and being a member of our club – he tells us “My wife, Rita, and I moved from Horsham, West Sussex, to the lovely village of Exton in October last year to be closer to the grandchildren, who live in Exmouth. I was a member of Horsham Cycle  Club where we cycled in the Surrey/Sussex North and South Downs and on moving I looked to join a friendly cycle club in Devon. The Exeter Wheelers base from Exeter Count Hall seemed ideal as a central point for a variety of rides. I did take the opportunity of riding with the Exeter Wheelers Social Group on a couple of Saturday mornings, and I was then keen to join the club as they proved to be a great bunch of like-minded friendly cyclists that rode at a comfortable pace that I could keep up with – they didn’t have to wait for me too often even on your steep Devon hills! Having moved to the hilly but lovely Devon countryside, I am looking forward joining in with as many of the Exeter Wheelers activities as possible.”

During the month of February other new members who have joined the club are Trudy Clist, Nathan Field, Kane Herbert and Xingsan Kan – a warm welcome to all of you. Our membership secretary Rob Masterson also says thanks to all existing members who have paid their annual club subs this month.

The next Saturday Social is the ‘Mid-Devon Lanes (home via Shobrook) with usual 9am start at County Hall in Topsham Road.  Café visit afterwards !

If you are looking to ride longer miles than Saturday Socials then there are our Sunday club runs, or our next club Audax event is the ‘Mad March: Budeful Day’ 200km event, on the 23rd of March. If you’re wanting a lesser Audax ride we also have the 100km ‘Mad March: Up and Blackdown’ Audax on the same day, with the same starting point of Cranbrook. Full details can be found by clicking on the link. Organiser for both is Sarah Britton, who will be at the club do next weekend and no doubt will be pleased to answer any questions you may have on the subject etc.

On the competitive front, with spring just about upon us there will be the usual ‘Hilly Time Trials’ taking place up and down the land, and we are pleased to be once again holding our long-running annual Four Firs event, 15 miles of up hill and down dale in East Devon in mid-April. In contrast to  standard flatter courses, hillier terrains limit or sometimes completely negate the advantage of time trial machines over  road bikes, and indeed it was a road bike that won last year, ridden by Eliot Colyer of Exeter University CC. Mike Rose is the Wheeler’s race organiser and you can enter it at https://www.cyclingtimetrials.org.uk/events/30136-exeter-whs-cc-sporting-17

Other clubs in the area running ‘Hillies’ include Mid-Devon CC, and Tavistock Wheelers, the latter’s 25 mile hilly on the north-west edge of Dartmoor always being particularly popular. No doubt Tavy Whs. members will doing their club proud as usual with their excellent post-race spread of food, bless them. Sadly, the North Devon Velo Hilly 22 miler has been cancelled – possibly the demon A377 roadworks the showstopper there.

Already active on their TT bikes have been club member’s James Greenaway and Aaron Lawrence, who rode the Castle Combe circuit-based TT in mid-Feb.

Aaron said afterwards “As a season opener, I took on the chance to open the taps at a very fresh and breezy Castle Combe Winter 10 TT hosted by DB Max and Pronto Bikes. Whilst the dreamy smooth surface of the race track was a delight to ride, the wind proved a real challenge for pacing! Overall, happy with the position and power for this stage of the season clocking a 25:05 with a fellow Exeter Wheeler nudging faster! (I’ll let James give the bonus pointers). Happy with this for the opener and looking forward to finding some form on the TT bike this season!”

James was 24th of the 91 riders, on 24mins 29 secs, and Aaron just over half a minute slower for 31st place.

On the 11th of May we hold our prestigious Tom Hawkins Memorial Road Race, a highly-regarded event that draws in a top quality field of riders from near and far. It’s a 2/3/4 race, featuring 110km of racing, with the course taking in a mix of technical Devon lanes, fast downhills and a long climb out of Somerset on the A38. In previous years this race has seen a bit of everything; small breaks, groups up and down the roads and even bunch sprints.

Such an event, however, is demanding for the club in terms of the number of volunteers required. We are desperately looking for a couple of ‘First Responder’-trained First Aiders. We can offer an ex-gratia payment of £50 each to any two of you out there who may been trained to this level, in addition to a couple of basic static First Aiders (ex-gratia payment £25). If you are able to help, or know someone who may be able to help, then please please get in touch a.s.a.p. via the ‘contact’ info at bottom left of any www.exeterwheelers.co.uk web page. In addition we are needing car drivers for the race convoy – you need to be a BC member to do this, you’ll be able to claim petrol allowance at 23p per mile. We are also needing to find well as other helpers for other less specific roles. We can’t run races and remain a vibrant club without your help. Help ! Pleeeeeeease !!!

Don’t forget also that Exeter Wheelers races such as the forthcoming Four Firs and the Tom Hawkins are FREE ENTRY for EWCC members (though you will need to get yourself a BC race licence to enter the Tom Hawkins).

The CX season now seems a distant memory, though EWCC Escot CX organiser Jon Hare and club secretary Pete Bishop did manage to squeeze one of the last CX events of the UK season into their diaries at the start of February, taking part in the London and SE League CX at Preston Park in Brighton, Sussex, in their respective 40+ and 60+ categories. They enjoyed themselves and whilst not finishing anywhere near podium places did the club proud on a town centre’ish park style event.

As a complete contrast to CX our Club Sec. Pete is planning to ride the National 24 Hour Time Trial Championships at the end of July. He’s hoping that other EWCC riders might join him in this endeavour – it’d be great if we could muster up an EWCC  team (three riders). Pete says “Totally amazing event, once ridden never forgotten, I’ve ridden five times, finished four times. Last time I rode, 2023, I had to abandon – I can’t go out on that note! Each time you do finish you think ‘never again’ but a week later you’re thinking . . . . ‘next time what I am going to do is . . . etc etc ‘ The feeling you get when you arrive on the finishing circuit is awesome, and the camaraderie amongst riders and support teams fantastic.”. If you want to get a flavour of the event check out this race report from last year’s event. Get in touch with Pete at .

Next club committee meeting is 7.30pm at The Cuckoo Bar in Paris Street, Monday eve 9th of March, all club members are welcome to attend.

Safe riding one and all, and if anyone has any newsy items for the next (April) Newsletter then do get in touch.

 

News, Results

February 2025 Club News Bulletin

Dear Fellow Club Member,

you are receiving this email because you are a member of the Exeter Wheelers and you’ve ok’d being contacted by the club. If you’d prefer not to be contacted then get in touch and asked to be removed from the email list.

If you haven’t yet paid your subs for 2025 then please do so by the end of this month of February – you can do so by clicking here. If you fail to pay your subs by 23:59 on the 28th February then you’ll no longer be a member of the club, and you don’t want that !

News for February:

Awards Night ! This will be on Saturday evening the 8th of March, starting at 7pm, at The Cowick Barton Cowick Lane, Exeter, EX2 9HF. We have secured the services of four times National Hill Climb Champion Andrew Feather, (who is ‘one of our own’ i.e. a previous member of the club), to hand out the prizes and to say a few words. There will be a Q&A session with Andrew later in the evening, so think of some questions! It’ll be serve-yourself meal, where there will be four options, two of which will be meat-based, one fishy, and a vegan option. The cost to members will be £10 adults and £5 for young’uns (under 16). Full details, including how to book your ticket, in due course. There is a maximum capacity of 48 at the venue, so it will be a case of first-come first-served. We will let you know when booking opens by putting info up via the News Section on the website, on our Facebook page and also via our Whatsapp Groups.

Club kit – Whilst the clothing supplied by Nopinz has all been well and good, it has been evident that a more affordable set of options would be appreciated by many members. With this in mind we’ve been in contact over the last few months with another kit supplier to have alongside Nopinz, and we are now ready to roll with this – the supplier is Shutt Velo Custom and here’s our club shop there: https://shuttcustom.com/collections/exeter-wheelers-cycling-club which should be live now. The shop is open until the end of February. Please note that the minimum order of any one item is 5 units – so it’ll be a good idea to communicate with other members to make sure that that limit is reached etc; Exeter Wheelers Facebook or the club Whatsapp group would be a good way to get in touch with others. You can have the items delivered to yourselves, which will presumably be at a cost, or you can collect them from Membership Secretary Rob Masterson in Exmouth, or better still collect them at a club Committee Meeting. Any questions get in touch via the info at Exeterwheelers.co.uk email address at the bottom left of any EWCC webpage.

At the last EWCC committee Meeting, following some determined and passionate agit-prop from Rides Officer and Escot CX race organiser Jon Hare it was agreed that all paid-up members of Exeter Wheelers can have free entry to races that the club itself organises. Full details are in the News Section on the website together with details of those races.

The next committee meeting is Monday the 10th of February, 7.30pm at The Cuckoo Bar in Sidwell Street. Come and say hello !

The stormy weather has been interfering with everyone’s riding, but hardy souls have still been out on various Wheelers’ club rides, with Craig and Owen Lawson leading the charge is some lengthy Sunday Club Runs – an ideal way to get those ‘base miles’ in.

Lutzy’s café down at the Piazza Terracina continues to serve the needs of the Saturday Social riders, and in the café they’ve even gotten to know individual EWCC riders’ names and chosen coffee types, and occasionally put cakes aside to ensure we don’t go hungry, bless them. The weather for today Saturday 1st of February is looking better for those heading out on this morning’s ride to Payhembury via Ottery St Mary. Next Saturday it’s a little hillier, via Mamhead, Haldon and the Teign Valley.

Participants needed; The club has recently received an email from a Luke Reynolds, who is conducting research at the Exeter Medical School, investigating the “Acute Effect of Remote Ischaemic Preconditioning on a Work-to-Work Cycling Test”, which some of you might be interested in becoming involved in, if only to find out your VO uptake levels – if you take part in his research then over the course of a few visits you’ll need to complete a series of tough ‘ramp’ tests (riding to exhaustion), and have fingertip blood tests taken. The plus side is that not only wlll you be contributing to medical knowledge but also “you will receive an accurate physiological report detailing your VO2max, thresholds, and individual training zones”. No pain no gain ! You can contact Luke at . You will need to be over-18 and ‘recreationally active’. You can look up Remote Ischaemic Preconditioning for yourselves . . . .

The calendar of the club’s racing events for 2025 is pretty much there, aside from the dates of our Evening Tens and the Escot CX event(s). We’re running four Open Time Trials and full details can be found here on the Cycling Time Trials website. As many of you will know, he CTT have recently moved to a new and upgraded website, and things are not quite settled with it yet, so be patient if it doesn’t yet quite work as you are accustomed.  Mike Rose and Pete Bishop are meeting up with representatives of Sid Valley CC, CS Dynamo and Cranbrook CC early in February to divvy up the running of the Evening Tens amongst those clubs. On the Road Race front the prestigious Tom Hawkins Memorial Road Race will be on Sunday the 11th of May, with a new organiser in place following Joe Godwin’s stepping down from the role after having run it for longer than he’d care to remember. We thank Joe for all his hard work over the years. We’re also running a couple of Tuesday evenings of Westpoint Circuit Races, to take place on10th of June and 22nd of July. Race Organisers for these will be Gideon Aroussi and Jon Hare. These two events will be part of a SW series of circuit races (‘Crits’) with the others being run by other Devon cycling clubs down at the Torbay Velopark.

We can only provide races for  riders, and do all the other things that a cycling club does, with the help and involvement of ourselves yourselves the members, so please please please  consider volunteering to help when the various calls go out – the cycling community is a friendly one, and helping at events is a great way to support the sport you love and to meet other people who share the passion.

The South-West Cyclo-Cross League Awards Ceremony took place last Sunday 26th of January, in the St James Centre here in Exeter, and it was a well-attended event. EWCC’s Tim Carpenter is having a year off from his habitual Vet 50+ League Champion status, finishing runner-up, to the benefit of this year’s category winner James Bovey of Mid-Devon CC. Speaking with Tim afterwards, he said that this year he “never really got going, never felt great” due to the effects of a very nasty pre-season bout of the dreaded Covid, and was “amazed to even come 2nd in the league”. No doubt we’ll see better from Tim next season. We did, however, have 3 riders in the top 6 of the V50+, with Gideon Aroussi in 5th and Richard Taylor in 6th to add to Tim’s 2nd spot. Gideon won two of the 50+ races, including Exeter Wheelers CC’s Escot round. Nick Helsing was also there in the V50’s, but he’ll be moving up to the 60+ next season, to race alongside the super-super-vet old timers who really ought to just go and play lawn bowls or something. Jon Hare was out best-placed 40+ rider in the final league tables, finishing in 7th spot, one place ahead of Adam Sainsbury. 17 club members took part in the SWCX League, the youngest being Filipe Pacheco in the Under-10s and the oldest was your club secretary in the V60+.

Our Audax events don’t get under way quite yet, but for those of you of the long-distance persuasion there are a couple of Bristol-based events later in February, and you’ll be able to find out more via the Audax UK web pages

We welcome new members David Binding, Phillip Harris, Kyle McCormick and Luke Osborne to our ranks.

Luke is a relative newcomer to Devon: “My wife and I moved into the area last year as she has secured a research PhD with Nike at Exeter University aimed specifically at middle distance performance in women, which has been an amazing opportunity and will lead to some very exciting (albeit confidential at this stage) projects, so watch this space!”

He is a rider of considerable standing in Time Trials, having finished 8th in the National Irish Time Trial Championships in 2023 on a demanding 21 mile course, an event won by Bora-Hansgrohe rider Ryan Mullen, with EF Education’s Ben Healy in second place.

Of his 2024 racing Luke said: “Last year I was placed 16th in the national 50 with 1:46:08, happy with that as it was my first crack at the distance, although the persistent rain got into my shifters so I had to dismount twice to manually reseat the chain in the last 5 miles, so there’s a bit of free time there. Also placed 2nd in the SW 25 champs with a 51 low, found the pacing challenging for 25, certainly need more practice there.”

Of this year 2025 he added “This year I’d like another crack at the national 50 as I believe it’s in South Wales and the 10 as it’s in the South-West. Life has got in the way a bit this year somewhat, so I am on the back foot fitness wise but sure, cycling isn’t everything ! 😅”

 

Meanwhile, as one speedy rider joins us, another departs . . . Tristan Kelsall-Spurr has moved on to Okehampton CC, specifically because he wants to ride with his three best cycling mates there (who are speedy fellows to be sure) and to have the opportunity to race with those friends in 4-man senior team.  Tristan spoke of his time with the Wheelers fondly, as follows: “Having made the switch from running to cycling during lockdown, I joined Exeter Wheelers in September 2022, where my first act as a member, and also my first ever bike race, was the club’s Open Hill Climb, where I was fast enough to win the Exeter Wheelers CC member’s Trophy. That got me hooked on bike racing. Thanks to all the support and advice of fellow Exeter Wheelers, last year I then progressed to road racing, cyclo-cross and road bike TTs. I have really enjoyed my time at Exeter Wheelers and made many good friends. It’s been fun riding and racing with you all! It’s a great club. I’m not disappearing – I will still see many of you out about, when training, or at races. Best of luck to all of you in your training and racing this year! “

Tristan (right) plus Jon Hare and Aaron Lawrence at the December 2024 UECC CX at Exminster.

That’s all folks, and if any of you have anything you want to send in for inclusion in the March newsletter then email . Contributions, personal stories and angles all welcome.

Safe cycling one and all.

 

 

News

EWCC & town centre racing at the Dawlish Grand Prix

An exciting opportunity has been presented to our club in that we have been asked if we would like to run some town-centre warm-up events ahead of the 6th and final round of the prestigious Lloyds National Circuit Series which will take place in the form of the Dawlish Grand Prix on the evening of Friday 25th of July.

The race circuit is 1km long in an anti-clockwise fashion, with start & finish on The Strand, and we can use it from midday until 6pm to put on whatever races or rides we like (within reason).

The race circuit will be completely barriered off, and there will be traffic diversions in place. After us, the E123 women’s race will start at 7pm, the men’s at 8pm, both c. 50 mins long. Both will have fields of c. 60 top riders.

Stay tuned for more info on this exciting news ! We are going to be needing your help and ideas !

The circuit area will be closed to traffic from midnight on the night of Thursday 24th  to midnight at end of Friday 25th .

There will be local diversions in place for light traffic, and main road (A380/A38) diversions for e.g. lorries.

There will be extra bus and train services to Dawlish for the day of the event.