Alleycat Races - London

Fantastic race. Bagged 2nd / 14. A naughty 5 minutes behind 1st place and 11 minutes ahead of 3rd. Super hot day. Quads cramping towards the end. Didn't expect it to be such a long one! All the checkpoints were cat related. I didn't realise London had so many feline sculptures.

The start was very unique. We didn't get handed the manifest at the very beginning. We had to ride off and hunt for someone situated at a random location on the Marshes and then begin our race after receiving the list of checkpoints from them. This process took me a little over 10 minutes... eek!

Shout out to @nekohomedelivery for a great organised race!

Next race in Hastings on Saturday 16th July.

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Tomorrow ! ! ! ! ! !

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I managed to redeem myself and snag 1st place out of 7 racers - Gabriel coming 2nd, who won the Neko alleycat 2 weeks ago. Hotting up nicely for the 100km+ race on the 6th August.

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This race is coming up on Saturday 6th August. It's gonna be wild.

100km+ route, over multiple manifests.

37 racers confirmed so far - some coming internationally.

thegreatalleycatoflondon.co.uk

Let's go.

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Think I saw quite a few people riding the Great Alleycat of London down Oxford Street today?

You probably did as there were 91 entrants so plenty of people sending it around town. One of the checkpoints was Gee's Court just off Oxford Street.

Yours truly came out on top with a 107km route, 4:20 elapsed, 3:51 moving. Apparently a ~30 minute gap to 2nd place.

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Bet that ride up to Hampstead was a treat after 95km of inner London riding.

YEP! It was the final manifest, just that one single checkpoint from Hop Kingdom near Tower Bridge to Hampstead. My legs started cramping badly just past Chalk Farm as the climb kicked in - so I just dropped to the lowest sustainable speed and rode out of the saddle for a bit and gradually my legs came back around. So nice to get to the top and know the hard riding was pretty much over.

The @pigeonkillers_leeds Sundown alleycat race last weekend was wild.

15 checkpoints had to be hit with a full photo of your bike with the specific detailed location in-shot. There were a cluster around the city centre so the start of the race had a lot of us bumping into each other before heading out by myself into the surrounding area. The hills in Leeds were expected so I had geared-down to 50/18 for the race but they still felt like a massive grind at times - including a road marking that told me 'DEAD SLOW' as if I wasn't already doing less than 5mph.

Flying into what we thought was the finish we were then surprised with a second manifest of 5 more checkpoints deep inside dark parks. I was often questioning if I had got the wrong pins on my map because there were some vast distances between spots. Having to locate exact points within unlit parks also made riding fast very anxiety inducing - who knew if a railing or fence or set of stairs or invisible dogwalker was looming ahead.

I ended up with 3rd place out of 17 racers which I was super stoked with as an out-of-towner and making a few mistakes with navigation choices. At 64km / 40 miles distance and with 820m / 2,700ft of climbing it was definitely a shock to the system as I'm so used to pan flat London. It took me 3 hours and 15 minutes to complete which was a lot longer than I was expecting and it's remarkable I finished despite not eating or drinking anything during.

Excellent race, great people and I especially loved the psychological devastation of a second gnarly manifest.

1st place - @trackloscotia
2nd place - @fhuzsi
3rd place - Ya boi

STRAVA - https://www.strava.com/activities/7710962702

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Upcoming alleycat races:

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