MUD MUD glorious MUD
Organized by Dark and White this was a trailquest with a difference. 22 check points widely positioned across Derbyshire and the peak district giving a 80Km sportive style race/ride.
For this ride I teamed up with PedalPursuits affiliate Pat Higgins, an experienced trailquester and all round fast rider. His map reading skills proved invaluable to our success. Over such a long distance with some stiff climbs riding in a pair helped keep our focus plus serve as a nice occasional distraction. We managed to cover the first 40Km in a little over 2hours 10minutes, this brought us out at the foot of Mam Tor. By this point we had also managed to cover over half of the routes climbing, but the nature of the route changed with the last 40Km involving much longer and sustained climbs. The weather wasnt too bad… To be fair we were pretty lucky. It did rain but it wasn’t too cold, feeling remained throughout the ride in my fingers and toes! Though the worst bit was easily getting over Mam Tor, that was grim! Puddles soon became totally unavoidable when bridleways became flowing muddy streams, the sun occasionally broke through and this helped keep the core warm.
Great opportunity to cover such a big distance in the peak, and to ride some new tracks.
In the end the Garmin recorded just over 1800m of climbing over 80.7Km in a time of 4hr42 which ended up being the best part of 25 minutes faster than the next rider. A definite feel good result. If the weather had stayed dry we were sure the time would have been much closer to the 4 hour mark.
Thanks dark and white for all the effort put into another quality event.
Right so can we start calling it summer yet?
One Comment to Dark and White Peak District Mountain Bike Marathon/Enduro 22/04/2012