Here’s to a delightful afternoon in the Chiltern Hills, I thought. A charming little bimble taking in the area’s quaint contours, I’d spin my legs at a leisurely touring pace while having a nice chinwag. I was in the safe hands of the perfect riding companion for such an outing, I thought: Linda Dewhurst, a 66-year-old grandmother who, whatever her athletic background, surely wasn’t going to cause me any problems. After all, I was 20 years younger than her and my Functional Threshold Power (FTP, the power a rider can sustain for an hour) was the best it’d ever been, at nearly 370 watts. What could possibly go wrong? Quite a lot, as it turned out.
Dewhurst is no ordinary mid-60s grandmother, having taken silver in her age group at the 2024 Gravel Worlds in Flanders as well as a gold at the 2023 UCI Gran Fondo AG Worlds in Glasgow among a host of impressive National time trial achievements. En route to the Chilterns [southern England], I was undoubtedly naive in my expectations.
