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Good effort. Unfortunately, you picked about the worst time of year to do a ride like that as the ground is usually pretty sodden towards the end of February after a winter's worth of rain, and the spring surge, which sees a lot of the moisture taken out of the ground by trees and plants, hasn't begun yet.
andyp
youramericanlover
giofox
I had a plan for the past weekend, which started from a combination of two routes I found on RWGPS and merged into this monster
.
This was meant as a two days ride, with a stop planned in Amberley, at the 120km mark.
Oh how wrong we were. I genuinely underestimated the difficulty of the first 100km of this route, to get to the South Downs Way, it was stated as MTB/CX, but it was more on the MTB technical side than a gravelly CX one.
We struggled in mud, jumped gates and fences, hiked the bikes and even had to walk some of the descents since too technical/muddy for 40mm tires, not to mention the constant headwind. The 120km mark soon seemed too far fetched, so did the newly set 100km one. We found ourselves in the woods in the dark fixing punctures under the rain, and decided to just reach the following village. We camped just outside Lurgashall, with 82km done.
We woke up at 5.30 on Sunday and decided to continue following the route, conscious we would hardly complete the whole thing before night. The route to get to the South Downs Way was still very hard with several hikes in the mud (made worse by the rain overnight) and even once we reached it, it still proved to be very hard.
We got to Amberley at 11am. We decided to cut the route short here and go from here to Slinfold and catch the Downs Link (and the original route) back to Richmond. This proved to be a good choice, we made up some ground and felt good about finishing it. However the time lost due to 3 punctures (6 in total over the weekend) slowed us down and we decided to cut it short and finish in Guilford, bike washed and train back to Waterloo.
What we actual rode out of the original plan
Few times I've felt so tired after riding (even compared with longer rides).
The route is outstanding, beautiful and completely immersed in nature, we were constantly amazed and will definitely do it again in better weather. Right now everything aches, but I can't stop smiling.