Can I ride a 200km 12 months in a row? #6: The Brompton one. And then the other one.

It’s September now, so you might be wondering if I managed to get my Randonneur-round-the-year 200km ride done in August. And the answer is: yes. Just. At the second attempt.

In a fit of hubris I originally decided to do the August ride on the Brompton G-Line I’m testing (look out for that soon). And to double down on that hubris I thought it’d be a great idea if I plotted a route that started with a train ride and included lots of off-roady gravel bits, because the G-Line is supposedly good at that kind of thing. Iwein came along too, on his drop-bar fat bike, which is less suitable for mixed-mode travel. What a pair of clowns we looked. Although it was nearly 100km before anyone went with the obvious “little and large” gag.

Fair play to the G-Line: it is pretty good off-road. Save for the sandy bits, where the small wheels bite a lot harder than, say, for example, a four-inch Schwalbe fat bike tyre, and rob you of lots of speed. And of course, riding on gravel just isn’t as quick as riding on tarmac, even if it’s good gravel. And riding a Brompton isn’t as quick as riding your road bike, even if it’s a good Brompton.

All of which is to say: the first 70km took us four hours. This wasn’t helped by the first bit being the Hythe Ferry, when unbeknownst to us (because we didn’t check) the Hythe Ferry had opted to take the summer off. Cue an unwelcome detour on unfriendly main roads. And it wasn’t helped by all the New Forest sand, nor the fact that neither of us was feeling in peak condition. So when we were tucking into our co-op meal deals on a bench in Upton it was already looking like a LONG day.

Worse was to come. Gravel in the very loosest sense: about half a mile of medium-sized rocks. Some big climbs. And then the iconic ascent of Gold Hill in Shaftesbury, which is ruinously steep and lumpily cobbled; I’d have walked it had there not been someone live-facetiming it at the bottom. I had to pedal so hard my kidneys hurt at the top. We were 130km in, and over nine hours down. There was lots of off-roady stuff to come, including Great Ridge, which probably would have been fun on the Brompton, and the Imber range path, which probably wouldn’t. So I sacked it off, rode to Warminster, got the train back to Bath and licked my wounds. It was, in retrospect, a stupid plan.

That basically left two weekends of August for the ride, of which I was already committed on one, so on 30 August I rolled out of Bath with glutton-for-punishment Iwein, and Dan, fresh from a full week of tapering on the beach in Croatia, to try again. This time, on the flattest, most tarmacky 200km loop I could envisage from my house. This time, on the fastest bike in the shed, the very dependable Lauf Úthald. Along the cycle path to Bristol on the way out, Dan’s Bryton GPS said his next categorised climb was coming up in 189km: the hill back to my house.

A 200km ride is hardly ever easy though. This time the tiny window of opportunity meant taking whatever the weather gods had planned firmly on the chin. And on this particular Saturday that was a dry start with a nice tailwind, followed by a very, very, very long slog down to Westbury into a block headwind that blew increasing amounts of water into our faces the further south we went. Plus I had a bit of a hangover, for which I’ve got no-one but myself to blame. I wasn’t fully human until Nailsworth, about 80km in. After that though I started feeling better, unlike Dan who towed us at an infernal pace to Malmesbury before his legs started malfunctioning; cue cramp stops in various Wiltshire laybys and the pace going out of the ride a bit.

We made it though: just over 11 hours for the 206km which is still reasonably quick for me, and I’m still in the game and halfway to my cloth badge. I might try and find a calendar event for the next couple and hide behind some folks.

206km | 2,100m | 11h12m