Monday 23 June – Sunday 29 June. T-minus 6 weeks to Ride London.
Total Team Sheep Miles: 1913; Total raised for Friendship Works: £523

After our adventures in the US last week (part 1, part 2), the first half of this week was lost to travelling and jet lag. Somehow Audrey managed an early morning fast spin class on Thursday while I was barely conscious after only 2 hours sleep, we then did a fast Richmond Park ride on Friday and Sunday saw our first attempt at a 70 mile ride through the beautiful Peak District.

Friday: Richmond Park race pace practice

Our medium length mid-week rides are now practicing riding at our intended race pace (~13-14mph). With the difficulty of finding places to cycle without lots of stopping, these will be at Richmond Park more often than not. This time, we did two full-length laps, averaging 13.0mph. The full lap of the park includes a third more climbing per mile than the Ride London route (average 58ft/mile vs 43.5ft/mile), so for the same effort we would expect to go slightly faster than this on the day. Pretty happy with this pace, given how tired we were.

Sunday: 70 miles in the Peak District

We’re trying to get more hills into our rides, and as we were in Sheffield for the weekend the Peak District seemed an obvious supplier of such. Audrey identified a series of trails on former rail lines which looked like they fit the bill perfectly. Our intention was to ride the trails and, along the way, form a plan to combine sections to reach 70 miles once we knew what they were like in terms of elevation and surfacing.

The High Peak Trail and Tissington Trail together form a large wishbone shape, and have over 30 miles of wide, mostly decently surfaced cycleable paths.

The High Peak Trail begins (from the eastern end) with an almost comical 1:8 gradient; a steepness that no train could ascend under its own power, and at the top are the remnants of the winch system which hauled trains up this ludicrous slope. We we skipped half of this climb by starting from the Black Rocks car park instead of the start of the trail – hills we may need but two miles of 1:8 at the start of a 70 mile ride didn’t seem like a great idea!

From the top of this climb west, the trail has a gentle up-hill gradient throughout most of its length. It’s wide and, in the most part, reasonably well surfaced for cycling with a selection of different gravel-like surfaces. It has an annoying number of gates in its lower half, which break up the flow, and it crosses a couple of minor roads; the upper half has fewer interruptions. There are cafés and toilets located at Middleton Top and Parsley Hay along this trail.

The Tissington Trail, heading south from the intersection with the High Peak Trail, is gently downhill for over 12 miles, entirely uninterrupted – no gates, no roads to cross, just endless cycling heaven. The surfacing is better than the High Peak – still mostly variations on gravel path but more consistent and wider too. Our joy at finding such a long stretch of uninterrupted cycle route in this country was enough to overcome the slight apprehension of having to cycle up hill the whole way back after we’d gone down!

Once we’d ridden the length of the High Peak and all the way down Tissington (around 33 miles), we had all the lengths we needed to do the maths: to get to 70 we’d need to go from the bottom of Tissington right back to the top of High Peak (in effect an uninterrupted 16 mile climb), back down to the branch with Tissington and down ~2.5 miles of that again, before finally going back up to the High Peak and following it back south to the car. As I’m sure you’re all confused, here’s a fantastic diagram:

I’m sure that’s much clearer now.

Audrey had enterprisingly prepared us some jam sandwiches from the hotel buffet breakfast, and as we started the climb back up the Tissington Trail these provided a great boost. We’d also kept ourselves topped up throughout the day with jelly babies, Haribo, Frusli bars and a cake break at the café at Parsley Hay. No running out of fuel for us this time!

It all went reasonably well, although by the final few miles back to the car we were, as you’d expect, tiring fairly badly. Our first 70 mile ride in the bag, all that remained was strapping the bikes to the back of the car and a three hour drive back to London, via a massive pile of food from McDonald’s!

The boring stats:

• Weekly distance: 99 miles (Mark), 99 miles (Audrey).
• Average moving speed (long ride): 12.0mph
• Moving time (long ride): 5h50m
• Total punctures to date – Mark: 0, Audrey: 2
• Total zero-speed falling-over-due-to-cleat-issues – Mark: 9, Audrey: n/a (still clever enough not to get involved in such stupid devices).
• Total training miles to date (including cycling to work) – Mark: 1041 miles, Audrey: 872 miles + 4 hours spinning.