South Downs way, end-to-end, TBC

My South Downs Way in a Day ride report

“Where’s my family gone?!” laughed the cheery antipodean woman as she pulled up her bike next to mine as we waited for a gap in the traffic. She was carrying two panniers and towing trailer with a tent and sleeping bags on it.

Laboriously she clattered he bike in to the curb, and reluctantly the front wheel popped over it, the rear just managing, the trailer…refusing, requiring a dismount and bit of graft.

Her family, a camping family of three kids and the dad, who had just passed me and found the dedicated crossing point over the A283, were carrying similar loads. And they were heading to the Youth Hostel at the top of Truleigh Hill, one of a couple of stopping points on the South Downs Way.

Their ride had been as long but probably a bit easier than hours - they had ridden the Downs Link from Guildford, the flat route on an old railway path that @Velocio had taken us on years back on an off road excursion to Brighton.

“Nice Lefty” Dad had passed my way. “Great, when it works”, I mumbled - the standard sun-burnt, heat exhausted, dehydrated, hungry reply.

About twenty minutes later, as I indulged myself in a bit of self-congratulation on the achievement of getting a ten kilo carbon race bike over the top of Truleigh hill, which would be better named as Truleigh Wall, I wondered how on earth camping family would get to the top and whether antipodean mum would be as chipper.

I looked back, but couldn’t see them. They were hidden behind the steep gradient.

By this point we’d just broken the back of this thing. Or so we thought. The start was inauspicious; @LHL was late, and was worried about doing it on my own. Once on the train, a gentleman insisted on ‘helping’ us stow our bikes on South West’s finest. I gave him my best ‘up at 5am daggers’ look. No good deed goes unpunished. My stomach was churning for a reason I couldn’t fathom.

Once at Winchester things improved - coffee, porridge then some pretty good riding across sun drenched fields. Not a cloud in the sky, we could see for miles. Quick detour around the “Boom Town’ Festival (for clueless c*nts I assume) and a mandatory food stop whilst we waited for cows to pass.

As we progressed I started to sense that the climbs were getting steeper and longer, and as the day got hotter I found myself dangling further and further behind @LHL ’s rear wheel. The kilometre count ticked over so slowly I thought my Garmin was broken.

Even a descent more akin to a ski slope didn’t seem to rack up much distance; another wall reared up in front of us we dropped, like in those films where a huge wave rears up in front of the protagonists who don’t realise what they are looking at until its too late.

My longest off road ride this year was probably about thirty five miles. This would be a tonne. With climbing on a similar scale to the alpine Etape, the ride @doctor_cake and I limped around last year, that left me incapacitated - hypoglycaemia - at the finish. I did finish, though.

I hadn’t ridden a road tonne this year.

I left my legs on Truleigh hill. After that, not even the 32 / 44t combo granted relief. I limped to Devils Dyke where Garmin recorded thirty degrees heat and @LHL enquired about my plans.

Pain is temporary, regret is eternal. Useful words I once read. If I didn’t finish this thing now, I never would. I’d simply not try, again.

Fortunately, I hadn’t got the memo that the final thirty five miles from the Dyke is the most brutal.

Brutal but on a day like today, incredible to look at. Camper vans were parked up, holiday makers spending the night on the top, pretending they were in the Alps. A couple sat on a bench staring out across the expanse of open country which by this point was bathed in golden light. Mercifully it had started to cool.

By this point, what I had thought was an oversupply of food was now dwindling. Reduced to energy gels we pressed on, the light dwindling with the food. More climbs came and went, Newhaven dangling off the front that we never quite seemed to reach only to pass on a long descent that was, curiously, surfaced. Free Kilometres!

The light gone, the final climbs arrived, Eastborne still invisible. “This last one has a false flat” @LHL offered. Dignity abandoned, I whimpered and pushed up, and as if to hammer in the final nail, a silent lyrca whippet passed us on what looked like a burly hybrid bike. I bet he hadn’t ridden from Winchester.

Or maybe he had. There are some ‘people’ - because deep down I suspect they are something else - that do the SDW there and back. In a day. Nails.

When you reach the end of the SDW at Eastborne there is no fanfare. There’s a just a road, probably an unnamed A road, that takes you to the centre of down, all down hill, and directly to the train station. I won’t trouble you with the trials and tribulations of our journey home, but put it this way: At Lewes, I was close to offering many dorrah to a minicab driver to drive us home.

He probably would have refused though. On those trains where bikes and their owners are relegated to the toilet carriage it’s usually you inching away from the loo, but on this occasion, on an agonisingly slow train from Brighton to West Hampstead, I’m sure the loo was trying to get away from me and my bike. Sheep poo Hums, and as I discovered, sets like stone.

Not something you want to associate with a small, but hard fought for victory, but having left my legs on Truleigh hill who am I to complain?