Cotswolds Off Road Ride April 2018

From the left: Rob, Will, Me, Josh, Ian, Chris, Ashley and Jason (Andy was taking the picture.)

Today I went for the hardest ride I have ever ridden. It was just 67km in the end. We were going for over 100km following the route of 'The Hell of the North Cotswolds,' an off-road  sportive which took place last week. In that 67km we climbed 1448m. To put it in context, we went for a road ride in Northants last week, which we considered to be quite hilly, it was 92km and 1028m.

Nine of us met in the carpark at Snowshill and set off in good spirits on a foggy morning with high chances of rain. Andy Brown and Ian Bird had put our route together, to be fair this was like a typical Andy Brown hillfest times a million. Also in our group was Ashley, Josh, Will, Chris, Rob and Jason.

Unfortunately the heavy rain of April so far meant that we had a lot of soft ground to contend with at times. In between those times though, this was simply cycling heaven! Stunning countryside, lung busting climbs and thrilling descents!

At times we had to get off and push. Some of our hardy bunch were able to push on through on slopes like the one above. I wish my legs were that good...there are many pictures of me pushing like this.

In between the tracks and trails we also had a some good tarmac action. This made for faster rolling well until the next uphill bit came along!

Comedy moment of the day. People were lifting their bikes over this gate before one of our more pragmatic team members did the obvious thing and opened it!

As per usual on the ride there was a fair bit of fiddling. No punctures at all!

After a cafe stop in Winchcombe we went up the toughest hill I've ever ridden. On Strava it's shown as a category 4 slope and is called the 'Harvey Street Climb.' My legs screamed give up, it was a close run thing. My pain was kindly captured in the picture above by the Mountain Goat that is Andy Brown, he'd been there ages by the time I arrived. We went up even bigger hills later on but I have to confess I couldn't ride them and ended up pushing again!

The climbs were incredibly tough but there was two benefits. The first was the view and the second was those magnificent descents. In this picture I thought we'd gone as high as we were going to get...wrong! This is Prescott Woods which is very near the Prescott Hill Speed Climb https://www.prescott-hillclimb.com/info/usefulinformationforspectators those cars are cheats!

This is in fact about as high as we got. It's Cleeve Hill overlooking Cheltenham. By this stage I was completely shattered and the weather had started to get worse.

Once we'd navigated off of Cleeve Hill the heavens opened and it got really nasty. We'd already ridden for over five hours and weren't even halfway! So an executive decision was taken to get back to tarmac and then take a shorter route back to the carpark.

Shorter still involved a lot of ups and downs and the odd bit of re-inflation!

What's a ride without a ridiculous selfie?

Okay so I'm tired and seriously lacking in creative writing motivation. Just one more picture of the views so you can see what the whole point was. It would have been nice to see this on a clear day but it is beautiful regardless. The video below also captures the early stages of our ride before the virb battery ran out. I'd left the GPS tracking on which is a schoolboy error!

A massive thanks to everyone I rode with today. We had great camaraderie and as per usual a fair bit of banter. I hope we can go back later in the year and have a crack at the full route in better conditions. 

Happy Pedalling