I’m in training. In August we’re doing an organised 45-mile off-road ride to Charlbury and back.

I thought it would be a chummy affair, the kind of ride where I scoff so many high-energy snacks that I can’t face a square meal for days afterwards and where Kevin’s bikeshop mechanical know-how is mercilessly exploited by me and Simon.

One ride, out of the blue, Kevin appears on a different bike. His awesome full-suspension Orange Five is still almost box-fresh and yet here he is teetering atop a brand new Kona Kula, a hardtail (ie, no rear suspension). The Kona is made from a brutal material called scandium that he tells me was invented by the Russians for armour-piercing missile heads – tougher and less bendy even than titanium.

Why, I wonder, would Kevin choose to batter his backside raw with that mean hard-plastic saddle on that nail-hard Kona hardtail when he has at home a fully-bouncy Orange Five?

A few innocent conversations later Kevin lets down his guard and admits the taut, racy Kona is to get him to Charlbury and back in the top 20 out of a field of 500+ on the August ride. In other words, it’s a race, every man for himself, and my hopes of that chummy 45-mile off-road ride are dashed.

Kevin and Simon are both younger and much faster than me, and now Kevin is riding a secret weapon. Gasp. I haven’t got a spare grand for a Kona Kula, hence the training programme.

It’s 7 am on the first day of training and I head out of town along Cowley Road and turn left at the big roundabout, headed for my training camp hidden away in Shotover Country Park. I am daydreaming about my yellow jersey on the Charlbury ride when suddenly, I find myself cycling along the Eastern Bypass.

I had assumed I could reach the cycle path from the same place that cars enter the ring road itself.

Wrong. From the roundabout, there’s no exit on to the cycle path. I ride up the ramp and find myself sharing one mile of ring road with bad tempers, spilt diesel and early-morning white van drivers who aren’t exactly sympathetic to my innocent error.

What is it about drivers with “Driven Carefully?” stickers that turns them into subnormal louts? Now I know how the hedgehogs feel.

The mile or two of ring road cycle track between the BMW works and Headington is good for sports cycling: wide and smooth. Its main advantage being you don’t have to give way or stop continually at lights. The discomfiting thing is the speed and proximity of the trucks and cars. The wall of foliage on one side and the cacophony of vehicles on the other make this route less appealing than it could be.

I eye enviously the concrete barrier which separates the lanes of the bypass. On a bike, you really wish they had put that barrier between the cycle path and the road, not between the lanes of traffic.

For all its smells and ills, the cycle speedway alongside the ring road is turning into something of a regular training ground for this Charlbury racer. Don’t tell Kevin or Simon though, I want to lull them into a false sense of security, before tearing away Mark Cavendish-style on our jolly jaunt into the Cotswolds.