The Race of Truth: A Michael Baxter Thriller

By R.A. Shaw

Amateur cyclist Michael Baxter has been trying to beat the hour in a 25 mile time trial for more years than he can remember. His personal best stands at 1:01:01, all he needs is 62 seconds to be under the hour, but however much he tries he can't manage it, until one day when an opportunity presents itself which allows him to break the hour and sets him off on a journey that he wishes he had never started.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Apr 12, 2011
• ISBN: 9781447655954

Book preview

The Race of Truth: A Michael Baxter Thriller

The Race of Truth

a novel

by

R.A.Shaw

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.

Copyright © 2009 Richard Shaw

The right of Richard Shaw to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, taping and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-4476-5595-4

Chapter 1

Turning up early for an event was usually a waste of time but on this particular day it was to offer me an opportunity that I wish I hadn't taken.

I cycle to the events and always leave far too early for fear of arriving late. When I arrive I usually chat to the organisers because they’re the only people there at that time. On this particular Sunday it was John Pollard, our timekeeper, who I spotted first, standing by his gleaming Morris Minor Traveller. I went to talk to him.

'Morning John.'

'You going to beat the hour today?’ he asked. 'Must be about time you did.’

A flare of acid hit my stomach. Why do I do this? Why can't I just turn up and ride like the others seem to do. Winning isn't everything.

Time trialling is a solo discipline, a hundred and twenty riders leave the start at one minute intervals and are timed over the finish line. The winner is decided in the club house when all the times are revealed; out on the road there is nobody to battle against except the clock and your mind. Club events which are normally held on a weekday evening are on a ten mile course, but the inter-club open events, like the one I am at now, are held on a Sunday morning from early spring to mid autumn and are generally run on a twenty five mile course.

I'd been trying to get under the hour for twenty five miles for about five years now. I just couldn't get the last minute off. My personal best or PB was currently one hour one minute and one second - 1:01:01. Just getting a second off would help so that my friend Jason would stop referring to me as Nelson.

'Only if the wind blows me out and back', I said.

John didn’t reply he had nothing further to say, he wasn't capable of small talk. You couldn't ask him about last night's TV or who had won the football yesterday, the only way of getting a conversation out of him was to talk about rider’s performances and PBs, he knew them all.

'Have we got a full field of starters today?' I wasn't very interested it was just something that I knew would illicit an answer.

'No. There are 3 non-starters already. Mallory, Pickett, and Smith.’

'Never mind less for you to time coming in.’

He just grunted at that. I got the impression he was disappointed. He would have been much happier if he had an extra hundred riders to time not a few less.

'Who's the starter this morning', another question I wasn't very interested in, but what else could you ask?

'A new bloke Andrew erm...' Wow he didn't know. That was a first. He obviously wasn't an ex-rider otherwise he would have known his name and his PB.

I left him pondering over the name and went to see who else had arrived; as I glanced back he was absent mindedly rubbing a non-existent speck of dirt from the roof of his car.

There was nobody else I knew to talk to so I sat on a wall at the side of the car park and checked the start sheet once again, it still said I was starting sixteenth.

11.Kate PainterIsothirst C.C.6:41

12.Brian PickettTop Gear C.C.6:42

13.David ClarkeFresh Face C.C.6:43

14.Neil SneddonSouth East C.C.6:44

15.Paul HickeyTT C.C.6:45

16.Michael BaxterTop Gear C.C.6:46

I walked over to the club house past the other early arrivals to get my number. Despite having been doing this for years I still didn't recognise most of them. A rider in a red and blue jersey was propping a three spoke wheel gently against his car bumper as he removed a carbon frame. Another rider was struggling to attach his number to the back of his shirt while still wearing it; he should have looked over his shoulder because another rider had his green and yellow jersey stretched out on the roof of his car while he attached his number. Graham somebody a rider from the Fresh Face C.C. was just setting off for his warm up as I neared the club house. He pushed his feet into his clipless pedals, click, click and nodded as he left. 'Morning,' I said cheerily.

The club house was a local sports centre. A single storey at the front with a flat roof housed the reception, the changing rooms and the toilets. The rest of the building was a large sports hall with a double height apex roof high enough to play badminton. I walked past the changing rooms as Lee Strong, one of our club members, emerged from the toilets with his toilet roll in hand. He suffered from pre-race nerves more than most of us and was always seen before the race with his trusty toilet roll. At least here at an open event there was a toilet and he didn't have to go searching for a secluded tree like he did on club nights. I entered the sports hall and found the numbers laid out in neat piles of ten on a wooden trestle table just inside the door. Across the hall in the far corner was a kitchen with a counter where they served teas and biscuits after the race, a couple of riders wives were busy arranging plates and writing a large price list with a thick black pen. In the other corner the club secretary was pinning up a large printed version of the start sheet on a flip chart. This would be used later to record our times as we finished.

Ignoring everybody in the room I approached the table to get my number. There was a start sheet on the table, I picked it up to check again that my start number was indeed sixteen and noticed that Brian Pickett, one of the non-starters, was due to start four minutes before me. I'd wondered in the past if it would be possible to start with somebody else's number and finish on your own number therefore getting a few free minutes on the ride. I'd surmised that you would only get away with it if the starter didn't recognise you, and it would only last until the starter arrived back in the club house and marked the non-starters on the board, but with an early start your 'fast' time would be seen on the board for at least an hour. Should I do it? I'd see my name with a sub one hour time against it, but I wouldn't be able to show my face again once they knew I'd cheated. Would I miss it? Certainly not the pre-race nerves. But what about everything else?

I scratched the right hand side of my neck as I looked over my left shoulder to see who was watching and then picked up numbers twelve and sixteen. I held the numbers close to my body and looked over my other shoulder while rolling them together into a tube. Holding the roll confidently in my right hand I left the club house. 'Morning,' somebody said but I didn't see who as I hurried back to my bike.

Back at my bike I took off my shirts to attach the numbers. I attached one number to each of my shirts using the wall as my car roof and then put my short sleeved shirt on, numbered sixteen, and covered it with my long sleeved shirt, numbered twelve, and set off to warm up.

I don't like warming up even though I often experience the benefit of it at our evening races. The twelve miles from home to the start of our ten mile course is just about the right distance to time an arrival just before the start and when I have an early number so I can start almost immediately my times are always better. But on a Sunday morning when I was still half asleep, it was difficult to time the ride so that I arrived just in time for my start without causing too much stress.

I was always worried about riding too far away from the start as I warmed up and then missing my start time, so I rode around the block a few times staying near to the start. A few minutes before my scheduled start time I joined the line of riders waiting to go.

It was almost my turn to start, I pulled the bike up alongside Andrew the starter and his assistant, a skinny man with broad shoulders. I climbed onto my bike and attached my feet to the pedals while the thin man held the back of my saddle to keep me upright.

'You Brian,' Andrew asked.

'Yep,' I said without making eye contact.

I reset my cycling computer, grabbed the hoods of my brake levers and waited for my signal.

'Ten,' Andrew said as he watched his stopwatch. 'Five, four, three, two, one, go'. His assistant gave me a shove and I was on my way.

Time trialling is an unforgiving discipline, that is why the French call it 'The Race of Truth', it's you and the bike, nobody else. I always find the first few miles the worst, I'm still thinking about why I'm here when I could be at home in bed, and I'm still warming up because I haven't prepared well enough. Then everything seems to settle down and it becomes a bit more comfortable and relaxed until you approach the end when it starts to get hard again as you become fatigued.

Ten minutes into the ride I caught Kate, it was always distracting catching up with her, instead of blasting past her there was an urge to linger and watch her lycra clad behind rolling side to side on the sharp saddle as her thighs pounded her feet down onto the pedals. I pulled in behind her for a quick rest which was strictly not allowed, and then powered past as fast as I could with my head down between my outstretched arms which were gripping tightly onto the tri-bars. I didn't want her to recognise me because I was still wearing the wrong number.

I rode comfortably for the next twenty minutes and steadily made my way to the furthest point on the course where the turn was. Trying carefully not to fall off I peeled off my long sleeved winter shirt and tossed it into the side of the road. I made a mental note of exactly where I was so that I could come and retrieve it later. I needed to remove the false number before the turn because there was often a checker ensuring that you made it to the furthest part of the course. I got back into my rhythm after the turn and headed towards the finish.

I came around the corner and could finally see the finish line, a small white chalk line precisely positioned next to a drain in the road. Beside the line was John, he was sat on a deck chair with a clipboard on his knee and a stop watch in his left hand. As I put in a last effort to reach the line he stared straight ahead and held the stop watch up in front of his focused face. His arm moved down as he pressed the lap button at precisely the moment my front wheel hit the line.

I sat up in the saddle and relaxed my shoulders and free-wheeled as I took some deep breaths to regain my strength for the slow ride back to the club house.

The club house was full of people as I entered. Most of them were standing around the board with the times on, and a few were queuing at the tea counter. I dropped my number on the table where I had collected it from a couple of hours earlier and went to have my cup of tea and sugary cake. As I crossed the hall Chip Evans approached. He was a new rider to our club he'd joined only two weeks ago, and seemed very keen to get to know everybody. He was still wearing his cycling shorts but had replaced his cycling shoes with a pair of brown leather shoes and grey socks. A black puffer jacket covered his cycling shirt and the tops of his legs. It wasn’t a very flattering outfit. As he passed he patted me on the back and said 'Well done Michael, you've done it at last,' we'd discussed my inability to break the hour mark in our introductory chat a few weeks ago. My heart raced, with a nod to Chip I ignored the teas and hurried toward the results board and strained my neck to look over the crowd. There it was –

16. Michael Baxter   Top Gear C.C.  6:467:43:1257:12

I'd done it. I was elated until I remembered that I'd cheated. The excitement was gone in a flash, and now that I knew what it felt like to see a sub one hour time against my name I wanted to know what it would feel like if it was real, but I couldn't do that now, they would all know that I was a cheat when John arrived to compare notes with the starter.

My nerve had gone now, I couldn't stay here and accept congratulations from people I had known for years when it wasn't deserved. I decided to go before anybody else approached me.

'Hi Michael.' It was Kate. Unlike the men who rushed to the finish board in their sweaty cycling gear, Kate had taken time to get changed. She was wearing a pair of tight three quarter length jeans and an equally tight black t-shirt. I tried my best not to stare, I’d been a secret admirer of Kate’s for quite some time now but I’d never plucked up the courage to talk to her, and now here she was approaching me when I least expected it. 'Oh, hi,’ I said.

'What were you on today? How did you catch me for 5 minutes so quick?'

Oh no! She had recognised me as I passed. This wasn't part of my plan. Of all the people in the club Kate was the last person I wanted to think of me as a cheat. Before I could find an answer the door burst open and an exhausted rider, clearly in shock ran in.

Chapter 2

The rider stopped inside the door, bent over and put his hands on his knees and attempted to get some breath back and regain some composure. 'Quick ... somebody ... ring ...' he gulped, 'ring for an ambulance.'

The official looking lady in glasses who had been writing our finish times on the board stepped forward through the crowd of bemused riders. She had a pen in one hand and her mobile in the other. She dialled the phone first and then asked the rider what she was to tell them.

'It's John,' said the rider who had finally got his breath back to attempt a full sentence. 'he's been hit by a van.'

As he said this a tall, thin athletic rider with a shaved head dashed towards the door. As he sped across the hall he bent low and swept up a first aid bag which was lying in wait by the door, he did this with an elegant flowing motion which wasted no time. He was out the door with the first aid bag over his shoulder before I'd even had a chance to comprehend what was going on.

As he left there was a moment’s silence as everybody looked toward the lady with the mobile phone and waited to see what was going to happen.

They must have answered on the other end because she said 'Ambulance please'.

She gave the operator at the emergency services the details of where we were and told them that a rider had been knocked off his bike. She was so focused on getting the ambulance service on their way that she hadn't realised that it was John our timekeeper who had been keeping her up to date with the finish times that had been hit. She closed her mobile phone and looked up at the crowd of inquisitive faces, 'they're coming,' she said.

She took a deep breath before it hit her. Her eyes opened wide and her face flushed, she turned to the rider who had initiated the commotion, 'Did you say John? No,' she screamed and ran out of the door.

The door banged closed behind her and everybody turned to look at each other before a few of them followed her out the door to see what was going on.

'Come on,' Kate said. 'let’s go see what's happening.'

'No. They don't want us all gawking and getting in the way.’ But she wasn't listening, she grabbed my hand and pulled me towards the door. Her skin felt soft and cool against mine. I gave in and went with her completely forgetting that I was in the process of making a quick exit.

A group of people were stood on the edge of the road looking down into the ditch that ran along the side of the dual carriageway where the finish line was. A couple of marshals in high visibility vests were standing in the inside lane of the road ensuring that there wasn't another accident. Cars were driving past slowly to see what was going on and the marshals were trying to move them along. They didn't want the road becoming blocked and preventing access for the ambulance.

There was somebody sat further up the road. Kate and I walked past the group of onlookers towards the lone man. She had let go of my hand but I was still following her like a child follows their mother.

We walked past a tangled array of dull silver metal tubes with a colourful striped piece of material strung through it. It looked like a piece of modern art. I turned back to look at it again as I put the striped material into place. It was the deck chair that John had been sitting on as he