An Eclipse, A Wildfire and the Stuff of Wonder

A Drop Bar Diaries dispatch from the end of August 2026, in which the sun and moon line up, the fields catch fire, my training arc quietly advances, and this fifty-five-year-old dances for two and a half hours thinking he’s nineteen again. Who needs sit down gigs?

On the 12th of August the eclipse happened. Ninety-four per cent totality in my Stourbridge garden, a strange few minutes of altered light, the birds going quiet for a couple of minutes and then remembering to sing again. I was contemplating sending the drone up in the air to capture the event but settled with using its ND filters to try and get a decent shot with the iPhone instead. There’s always an opportunity to capture an image.

Three specific things, the sun and the moon and my very particular bit of England, had to be lined up in exactly the right position at exactly the right moment for the effect to happen at all. Which is not, when you think about it, very different from what a training arc for a specific event asks you to line up - me, my bike and a target.

Anyway. What I did not know standing in the garden with my head tilted back, trying to hold several things in order to capture the image, as the light did its peculiar thing, was that this would turn out to be the calm start of a properly eventful few weeks.

The Stourbridge Wildfire

Twenty-four hours after the eclipse, the fields on the other side of Racecourse Lane went up in flames.

For those who don't know Stourbridge, Racecourse Lane is a road that dissects open fields and the golf course at the edge of the town. It's a road I've cycled down more times than I can count, most recently on the Tuesday two days before, on my usual Stourbridge loop. On the Thursday afternoon it became a national news event. Smoke over the town. Homes evacuated, including several friends. Fields burning at the summer's driest moment, burning embers being transported on the wind, landing on tinder dry grass. Most of the area’s fire engines and fire fighters descending to battle the flames.

The fire came within four hundred metres of my door. Not quite close enough for me to be evacuated, but close enough that I quietly packed a grab bag with my laptop and every hard drive containing the Pompeii footage, and stood in the garden, smoke billowing and obscuring the blue summer sky. Later I moved the bag to the car so that if there was no time to think, it would still leave with me.

Friends of friends lost their homes. When I was at Beautiful Days the following week I met a group of Stourbridge locals and the conversation immediately turned to the event which had become simultaneously sobering in its proximity to everyone’s homes, yet also surreal in that it happened at all. The town had rallied together and briefly had become the focus of headline news reports as the beyond shocked and heartbroken homeowners recounted their experiences.

Driving back from Devon after the festival, I took a route home along Worcester Lane, on the other side of the railway cutting that had helped funnel and accelerate the fire. From that road you could clearly see the shells of houses that had been destroyed. Buildings that had, for as long as I have been riding my bike, been hidden behind a line of mature trees. The trees are no longer there. The whole familiar visual geography of a road I have ridden along for years had been rearranged in a few terrifying hours.

Nothing about this belongs in a blog about cycling training. Except that when the training happens in a place, and the place changes, the training and the place have a relationship worth noting.

The Training Continued Anyway

The plan, and the training that lives inside it, does not particularly care about eclipses or wildfires. I know by now that it cares about consistency. So the training continued.

On the 18th of August I did the second of the new phase's sweet spot sessions. The previous one, a week earlier, had been two ten-minute blocks at 200 watts, with a cadence I had failed to hit and a heart rate that had run slightly hot. This one was two twelve-minute blocks at the same power. Same intensity, twenty per cent more duration. Cadence corrected to the target of eighty-four revolutions per minute. Heart rate, at exactly the same wattage as the previous week, came in almost two beats per minute lower. Recovery between the blocks was cleaner, faster, deeper.

Small numbers on their own. Genuinely useful and encouraging when compared to a week before.

The Sunday morning weigh-in after the eclipse read 107.6 kilograms. Not the fastest downward move of the summer, but the underlying five-week trend continued to hold at just under a kilo a week in the right direction. It would definitely be more pleasing if the numbers were in a sharper descending pattern, but throughout the last 12 months I’ve learnt that it’s the trend that counts, and as long as the numbers are going in the right direction, I’ll get there eventually.

Anyway, none of this is exciting. All of it is what a well-managed middle-of-training-block period is meant to look like. Boring, invisible, cumulative work.

Beautiful Days

Which brings us to the hands-down best weekend of the year.

Beautiful Days has become a genuine annual institution, run by the Levellers in the grounds of a Devon stately home, with a specific vibe that is impossible to describe to anyone who has not been. Five days of camping, music, Darren and Matt’s breakfast cook-offs, Cosmic Dross, and seventeen thousand other people and their offspring all doing the same thing. Our little gang have have been going for the last ten years. It is my favourite bit of the summer calendar.

I have also, historically, treated it as a five-day exemption from anything resembling sensible living. You have to. Escot Park is a bubble … every year we camp in the same spot, the festival is set up the same way each year and, creatures of habit that we are, we tend to do the exact same things year. It begins with the traditional Thursday night ‘pub’ crawl from the Bimble to the Hope Tavern via the Copse Bar and Dirty Davey’s. The music begins, like clockwork, at 2pm on the Friday with the Leveller’s acoustic set in the Big Top and ends on Sunday night with the full main stage Leveller’s set via The Bar Steward Sons of Val Doonican Sunday Service at a very challenging 11am on the last day.

Thursday, the first big-party day, as noted, went as it always does although it was just me and Darren. Matt and Phil would be arriving the next day. Beers, a couple of cocktails, an excellent time, a slightly foggier Friday morning. But instead of that setting the pattern for the weekend, it did the opposite. From Friday onwards I was mostly on water, with a couple of beers per day instead of a stack of them, plus the occasional lemonade and an awesome chocolate brownie milkshake that turned out to be one of the great discoveries of the festival.

And here is the interesting bit. It was not hard. I was not sitting in a tent grimly resisting temptation while the others had all the fun. I was having a better time, with a clearer head, than I would have been guzzling cans just because everyone else was.

Amazingly it didn’t take any willpower. It’s become a habit that has quietly rewired itself over the summer, and it showed up at exactly the moment it needed to. Which was, on reflection, very much the point.

Bouncing to The Wonder Stuff

The other thing that happened at Beautiful Days is worth recording separately, because it is arguably the most surprising and welcome fitness result of the entire summer.

On Sunday night I danced. Specifically, an hour of full-on moshing to The Wonder Stuff, followed immediately by ninety minutes of dancing to the Levellers. Two and a half hours of continuous high-intensity intermittent aerobic exercise, in a field, at fifty-five, with a middle-aged smile on my face throughout.

Two years ago, twenty minutes of trying to keep up with the Ned’s Atomic Dustbin mosh pit at Stourbridge Town Hall seriously wrung me out. I needed to extract myself from that situation, rehydrate (with a pint), and mentally acknowledge my age. This year I had the aerobic capacity to bounce for two and a half hours and wake up on Monday feeling slightly stiff in the calves rather than deeply unwell.

This is not a small thing. This is a substantial, measurable, life-quality gain that Sa Batalla and Lincoln and the whole cycling project did not specifically train for but delivered anyway. The aerobic engine you build for a bike does not know it is only supposed to work on the bike. It just works.

The specific moment that resonated was during "Don't Let Me Down (Gently)," which anyone who was into The Wonder Stuff in the late eighties will remember as one of the great almost-anthems. During the verse that runs "it would be great to die together on the first day of the year, cos then we'd be quite legendary, could you volunteer," I noticed that two nineteen-year-olds had appeared in the crowd next to me. Word perfect. Bouncing along with the rest of us as though they had grown up on the album, which I assume they had, courtesy of parents making some commendable life-choices for their family.

The lyric on the page is not particularly cheerful. Mortality. Fading friendships. Being kicked to the floor. Miles Hunt’s specific gift as a songwriter is that he knows how to wrap the darkest words in the brightest possible music, so that a few thousand people singing "it would be great to die together" in unison in a field ended up being an act of celebration rather than a meditation on death. Especially at fifty-five, when the "life is finite" reading of the words is closer than it was at eighteen when I first heard the song.

A couple of generations in a field, singing the same song, with the same intensity. That is one of the many, many great things live music does. More pointedly, the nineteen-year-olds were bouncing around without phones in their hands. Old school. It was also, on any reasonable definition, a proper cardiovascular workout and I logged the festival as a training exercise. Who knew?!

A Cold, Then Norfolk

I got home from Beautiful Days on Monday. On Wednesday I got the inevitable post-festival lurgy: sneezing, gravelly throat, generally slightly less than optimal. On Thursday I was meant to be doing a sweet spot session in the morning. I did not do the sweet spot session. I did nothing at all. The AI coach, having explained the "above-the-neck / below-the-neck" rule to me some months earlier, gently confirmed that the correct move at the start of an illness is always to rest one full day and let the immune system get on with its job.

Friday I drove myself, Mum and Jake to Norfolk with the bike, for the last of the summer's family trips. Saturday morning, still slightly snuffly but otherwise fine, I did a two-hour ride around the flat Norfolk lanes. This is the specific gift of Norfolk to a Stourbridge-based cyclist: flat land. Endless, gently drifting, occasionally slightly uphill land, but essentially flat. Which means you can hold a sustained aerobic pace without hills constantly pushing your heart rate around.

The ride came out at fifteen miles per hour moving average, and a heart rate average of 133 beats per minute. That is the lowest heart rate average for any outdoor ride I have done all summer, and the pace was the fastest of them too. The engine I have been building for October showed up cleanly on the road, at genuinely modest effort.

The one comedy note. I built the Norfolk route in Strava without specifying paved surfaces only, so at twenty kilometres in my Garmin cheerfully tried to route me across a farmer's field. I made a judgement call and stayed on the tarmac. The Garmin then attempted to re-route me back to the same field via a different farm track twenty minutes later, at which point I realised I had been sold a dummy, and had to do a U-turn to find the actual road. Never trust a cycle computer to pick your route in a country it does not fully understand.

Where We Are Now

So here we are, at the end of August 2026, on the eve of what is now genuinely a clean September training window. Twenty-something days at home with only one small trip disrupting them, ending with an eight-day cycling working holiday in the Yorkshire Dales with Alan and Claire. Then Mallorca.

The eclipse metaphor from the top of this blog has, I hope, done some work by now. Three things had to align on the twelfth of August for the sky to change colour. 

Three things now have to align in the first couple of weeks of October for the sky to look right on Sa Batalla. The training, the weight, the body's readiness. Layered on top of those, several more things that also have to be broadly right for the effect to happen at all: the weather that morning, the state of the kit, the sleep the night before, the fuelling on the day, the head between the ears.

Most days those things are almost in position but not quite. Every so often, if the work has been done and the luck is running, they line up. And then something interesting happens.

I am not promising myself anything about Sa Batalla. What I can say, and what August has quietly confirmed, is that the elements of the plan are visibly moving into position. The engine is getting stronger. The weight is coming down. The head is calm. The body did two and a half hours of continuous exercise in a field and asked for more. On a flat road in Norfolk, at a comfortable heart rate, I held a properly respectable pace over a proper distance.

Which is not a guarantee of anything. But it is, on any reasonable reading of the data, a body that is closer to alignment than it has been for a long time.

Next

The next Drop Bar Diaries will cover September, the Yorkshire Dales week, the flight to Palma, and either Sa Batalla or, more accurately, the whole ten days of what happens when a cycling holiday with old friends coincides with the peak of a nine-month training arc. Whatever happens will either be worth writing about or, in the tradition of the best endurance sport stories, will be worth writing about anyway.

See you on the climb.