Tell us about your weekend ride

30k windy and mostly climbing ride from Bounds Green to Potters Bar decent scenery and quite peaceful on the country roads

Hideous intervals on Saturday celebrated with dinner out and hungover SS ride on Sunday. Woke early this morning, BBC weather app stated the rain would hold off so did 2hr base ride during which I got utterly soaked and was nearly killed by a kamikaze tipper lorry that luckily decided that forcing the oncoming car into the verge was preferable to crushing me. This is a refreshing change that I put down to the awesome lumenz pumped out by my new Lupine Rotlicht.

Sinking ridiculous beers with a mate until 4am Saturday morning. Eventually got 1hr of crawling done on the turbo Sat night then out again. Very blerg 5hrs riding the start of a 200k audax route in the Chilterns. Time to knock the booze on the head... until I get to Astoria.

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.

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.

^^ epic. Well done.

Wow. Well done. Also you are mad.

So this explains our midweek fiasco as well.

Fiasco? I had a great day out.

Apologies, my midweek fiasco which you witnessed. Most of my best fun happens in the middle of a fiasco.

Yeah, I cannot but agree with that, but also, we both had girlfriends away for the weekend, it's hard to pass on those rare opportunities..

Or stupid.. Or both ;)

I forgot to add, I was on the Straggler (42cm bars, Nano 40C tires), my friend was on a Kona Unit SS.. That made the whole a lot trickier one way or the other.

there was no ride. this bike messengering thing has gotten out of hand, I do 200k a week but never ride for fun on weekends anymore. maybe when spring starts proper.

I didn't know you were a courier. Where are you working?

yes since 2014, did shift #538 for Raas koeriers this morning

What's Tilburg got you shuffling around?

You know I found a FREE local cargo bike hire place. I totally could've carted those beers over the border :)

mail from post office to various companies and vice versa, drugs (in neighboring town) from pharmacy to patients, and ever more boxes of stuff. sometimes quite a challenge to fit it all - last week this huge electrically assisted trike arrived, you want me to check how many cases of beer it will fit? ;-)

Typical lowlander, cheatin' on your leccy bike! :P

What's the range of the electric? I'd not enjoy pushing another 10-20kg around if it only got me halfway to (fuckbrexit) The Continent.

Oh wow, the picture hadn't loaded. That's like a bike VAN!

Sounds like a proper weekend.

My weekend was like this:

Few hours of riding in a group and a camp fire, before I continued by myself. This is Finland so it's normal that in the picture people just seem stand there with no one saying anything. Well maybe some swearing.

Stayed the night in this kota, those are kind of like the bothies. There's also a small lake close by. I'll have to go there again when it's not frozen. The small forest roads had about 25cm of snow, so had to push/drag the bike for a couple of hours...

On Sunday it was more or less snowing the whole day but not too much, the roads were rather decent.

The whole ride was about 240km. In summer this would have been rather fast riding, but now it's far from it. It's a pretty different hobby this time of year, and it would probably be more efficient training for summer if I was riding indoors on a trainer but it's good to get out.

looks like magic. what tires do you ride in that?? looks like some people with real skinny wheels and a load of weight on the front

Wow! Great ride, and monstrous effort in doing that stretch alone in those conditions!

Only did 30-odd miles (with hills) training ride on Friday at 18mph average, + a further 10 to run errands. Hands were pretty cold. Same route again late this morning, had to stop halfway because my hands were so painfully numb. Miserable 15 minute break halfway today to try get my fingers back. 18mph moving average again but feels like cheating with a break in the middle.

Need to get up to the 100 mile days soon.

Raynaud's = black digits. Not fun.

Thanks.

@platypus Now I ride studded 559x47mm Schwalbe Winters. Mostly any cx or mtb tyre at least 35mm wide is fine if the roads are ploughed and there's not much ice. But right now there often is ice and the surface is rough so wider is better.

cool...wish i could ride in conditions like that!