If you missed this year’s Dunwich
Dynamo, or feel that it’s a little too big and chaotic and (whisper it)
competitive, you might trying catching the next Friday Night Ride to the Coast.
This is a carefully organised event run by ‘The Fridays’, a club devoted to the singular cause of safely delivering you at a conversational pace from the Smoke to the sea. They do this every month from spring through autumn (with a few off topic rides thrown in), requiring only third party insurance, and an annual membership fee of £2.
The FNRttC, as it’s known to veterans, has been spreading the joy of night riding for almost 15 years, flying quietly under the radar of most cyclists dazzled by mass congregations such as the Dynamo and the Exmouth Exodus.
It was started by Simon Legg, who spent a decade escorting thousands to Brighton and Whitstable and other destinations with decent transport links. When he retired he entrusted what I’m going to hope the subeditor lets me call
his leggacy to a group of seasoned ride leaders who take turns as mother hen.
The distance ranges from 55-75 miles. Popular routes can attract over a hundred participants, all of whom weigh the leader down with responsibility. There are Tail End Charlies and human waymarkers, sometimes recruited on the spot, to ensure nobody is lost or left behind.
Rides begin at midnight, with a chat about safety and etiquette; jokes optional.
"Deserters will be shot at dawn."Mechanical problems along the way are met with expert assistance, though you’re advised to give your bike a thorough checkup beforehand, and particularly implored to “Lose everything that you don’t really, really need.”
It’s all a far cry from the not untypical Dunrunesque experience of hoping the blinking lights ahead of you are going the right way, which I guess outs me as someone who doesn’t use GPS. Let’s just say the £2 is good value.
It’s a great social mixer, cyclists seldom being at a loss for words, often with exclamation points attached when observing particularly fanciful interpretations of
The Highway Code. Fortunately there are also opportunities for solitude as you pull each other along on an invisible stretchy rope. Punctures are a communal affair. “Houston, we have a problem,” one of the minders will more or less transmit to the front, and so all will wait, grateful it wasn’t them. This time.
“Why ride at night?” you may be asking, if the idea is now leaving its first impact crater on your brain. It can seem daunting, particularly after a work day, and anyway, what is there to see? I almost imagine Fitzgerald discussing it with Hemingway: “The night is different to the day.” “Yes, it’s darker.”
"I bet I can write standing on my head longer than you can."We ride at night because it’s there, conveniently out of the way of the usual routine. Less traffic is a bonus, but magic moments are made of more than this.
There’s the moon, for a start: those times when it paints the road silver and the mist, well, mysterious, inviting you to dabble in poetry. When not moonstruck, the darkness itself is the draw, a coverlet silencing the day’s concerns, yet granting permission for thoughts to drift forever out into space – while remembering to yell “Car up!”, the traditional cyclist’s warning of traffic on the lanes. Or “Cow up!”, as the case may be; on a recent ride to Eastbourne, we passed an escapee, unperturbed by our caravan.
There are bats and badgers and other more traditional nocturnal creatures clocking in, which has the benefit of rousing you out of any stupor you may have been considering in the wee small hours.
Hills become easier. Shrouded in mystery, their summits mere conjecture, they lose at least a chevron, in my estimation.
Possibly the biggest draw is the intimacy of cycling with people all on the same mission, getting a buzz off of their energy, their tired happy faces in the morning’s light a mirror of your own. “Why are you doing this?” I’ve asked fellow riders, particularly when the weather gods haven’t been kind and perspiration is more than matched by precipitation.
Answers ranged from “I’m getting miles in to help with Paris-Brest-Paris” (a 1200km jolly), to “my friend talked me into it,”
to a chance for a pedal-powered sunrise. There were plenty of dreamy shrugs simply indicating “Why not?” A self-selecting group to be sure, but most don’t see it as an odd way to spend an evening, and seem glad to have found, in the FNRttC, a ready-made answer to a question they may not have even been aware they’d been asking themselves until now.
Ultimately these rides are a way of bucking the system, or at least the usual circadian rhythms: one small step for a freewheeling cog in the machine.
(actually started as this) 
