Chairman’s Newsletter – March 2021

Posted on March 19th, 2021

Hello everyone

This is a particularly important and exciting Newsletter as we have some big news to share:

RIDES PROGRAMME RE-START
The most important piece of news is that Cycling UK nationally has confirmed that group rides of up to six people can restart in England on 29 March. It is just possible that the ‘organised sports exemption’ might give us even more leeway on numbers, but we are not relying on or planning for that. Therefore, we are planning to open up our rides programme from the first week of April (Easter week) to include our usual Tuesday evening, Thursday morning and weekend rides, all with a limit of six people per ride. Thanks to some excellent work by Jon Townsin, Steph Haddrell and David Smith, we have now uploaded the core rides programme to the club website and this is now live for rides through to September. The next step is to ask our Ride Leaders to sign up for these rides, and we are putting a Ride Leader Meeting in place for the evening of Monday 29th March to kick-start this. More detail to follow separately on that for those involved. All rides will need to be pre-booked with the Ride Leader and details of the timing for this are given for each ride on the website.

CALL FOR NEW RIDE LEADERS
This restart is obviously dependent on having Ride Leaders willing and able to take on leading the rides. As mentioned, we are in the process of communicating with the existing list of Ride Leaders, but new volunteers are always welcome. I have been approached by a couple of people during lockdown expressing interest in leading, and we will be holding an evening training call shortly. If anyone else is interested in getting involved in this way, please contact me ASAP.

CLUB AGM – MONDAY 19th APRIL
As you may remember, we have re-arranged the club year so that it now runs from April to March. Therefore our AGM this year will be on 19th April and we will take the opportunity to look back on the strangest year in the club’s history. The fact that this transition year runs from October 2019 to March 2021 is of course by no means the strangest aspect of it! As usual, this will also be the time for us to elect a new Committee for the club. I am glad to say that most of the existing Committee members are happy to stand again, with the only changes proposed being Steph Haddrell taking over from Jon Townsin as Rides Secretary and Karen Townsin stepping down from the Committee. However, we always welcome new Committee members so if you would like to stand to join us, please contact me. I want to also highlight the excellent and efficient work done behind the scenes by David Smith as our Webmaster. We do need to find someone else to take on this task, so if you feel you have relevant skills in this area, again please contact me. More details to follow nearer the time.

The meeting will be at 7.30 on the evening of 19th April, virtual and on Zoom. To keep things safe we have set up pre-registration, so if you would like to attend then please pre-register at this link ASAP: https://tinyurl.com/vkyw84kb

This is all extremely positive and it does feel very exciting to be looking forward to group riding again. I am also aware that this may feel daunting fo some as well. We plan to ease back in gently, but I hope it won’t be long before our rides feel normal again. Of course, if the government is able to continue to meet the milestones in its roadmap out of lockdown then we can enjoy even more freedom as we head into summer – anyone remember pub nights?!

Best regards
John

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