pride comes before a fall

it's been a wet weekend - the first properly wet one for ages. Sunday's planned ride with friends had to be cancelled so I moped around the house and made lunch. Happily, it dried up a bit afterwards so I decided to go for a quick spin on the 'winter bike'.

The winter bike is a Forme Longcliffe 5.0 - a very basic road bike from Rutland Cycling. It was a toss-up between this and Halford's Carrera TDF, but the Forme won me over and since I've swapped the standard 12/25 Sunrace cassette for a Shimano HG50 11-28t it seems to keep pace quite well.
It's not a bike I'm going to fall in love with, but for the money (£329), it serves a purpose.

Anyway, back to Sunday's ride. The route I had in mind is around 17.5 miles, mainly on country lanes with a few short hills thrown in for interest. Although the roads were still quite damp, I felt quite confident keeping a steady pace. The sensible thing to do would have been to slow down, but I had a Strava segment to complete and wasn't going to let a bit of damp put me off.

Around 10km into the ride I crossed a main road, after which the lane narrows, the hills get more twisty and the surface deteriorates quite badly. Clearly, given the conditions I should have been going slower, and I really should have been cutting the corner. But shit happens, and as I hurtled around a particularly twisty corner I came face-to-grill with a Range Rover heading straight for me. I pulled on the brakes  and tried to swerve around on my side. The brakes worked but I lost steering control and wobble-skidded onto the floor. Thankfully, the Range Rover driver managed to swerve into his side of the road and narrowly missed me.
After checking I was okay, he drove off, leaving nothing broken but my pride. The bike was fundamentally okay, but one of the rear brake blocks was loose, and I realised the front wheel was out of kilter and would need re-truing. Physically, I had landed on my left side so my elbow and thigh stung a fair bit, but otherwise okay, so I gingerly made my way home at a more appropriate pace.

At this point, I'm very pleased I bought the bike for winter (rather than risking damaging the carbon summer bike) but I'm going to give some thought to improving it's wheels and brakes. I think I'm going to:

• Replace the 23mm Kenda tyres with good quality 25mm 4 season ones that can be run at a lower psi (100 instead of 120)
• Upgrade the brakes from the solid rubber blocks to something like these