Enjoy!

There's no way I'm getting a qualifying ride in in the next 5 weeks either, so you'll just have to join me in 2018.

I assume that's been split into legs somehow? Looks very cool.

Just to be clear, a qualifying ride does not guarantee you a place, you just go into the pot with the others that have done suitable rides. If there are 80 riders after the 60 places the ones who've done the most, biggest, hardest qualifying rides will get the nod! You need to confident that you ca...

An interesting one. I'm not convinced it would be much harder than say, something like the YD300 on a standard mountain bike though (although I've just noticed that you're 95km over the minimum distance!). I don't spend a lot of time on my road bike, but the difference in how easy the miles and elev...

Crappy quick pics...

Excellent.

Tis a veritable Bearbones roadtrip.

Persuaded my buddy, looking forward to it.

Funnily enough, Lake District was the first time we rode together too.

We did get the times for the last three years, but yeah, it's not looking likely at this stage.

What did you get up to in the tussocks?!?

Will make a change from the bearbones, "drag myself into a hedge in a bivi" standard I've been used to of late.

Ahah... I may have persuaded my friend to join me up there on his first bikepacking trip. Will mean I have to carry a ton of gear so that he's properly comfortable, but I'm cool with that.

It's strange, I can never really remember more than flashes of the rides. Certainly not enough to write them up.

Good to read though. Definitely jogs the memory.

Copy of What Mountain Bike... has an article on bikepacking (not read it yet) and I noticed that it also specifically mentions the WRT.

Good read. Cheers. :)

Ha, my brain is barely functioning at the best of times, let alone 15 hours into a ride. I'd rather just throw my bike over anything vaguely complicated looking.

I really wish I'd tried the leek and potato. It is a fave of mine.

The baked potato was lovely though.

Not saying Strava is "right", but it's obviously going to be consistent when it's being wrong. :)

I've done the same rides multiple times and been within a couple of percent on elevation on Strava, but no-where even close on the GPS barometer.

I was actually quite disappointed with the gate quotient given my recent Braunton 150 and YD300 rides. Step it up BB200!

I tend to just use the Strava elevation numbers. The barometer on my Edge 1000 is all over the place, and I'd rather some degree of consistency on my numbers (even though they tend to be WAY lower on Strava).

I actually have to talk myself out of going after people.

These days on the bigger rides it's all about just hitting the right heart rate for me, that way I pretty much know I'm where I need to be.

Bastard hard is fine, just not all of it at once please.

/sense of humour failure

Good read. For what it's worth, getting to the finish and not being able to say you could have gone harder is very difficult for such a long event, unless you want to risk finishing slower than you otherwise could have. Often for me "could have gone harder" is a better option than "co...

Bearbonesnorm wrote:

But looks like a good route

Only 185km of it.

I'd say technically about 193km... there were a couple of non sub standard bits hiding in the sub standard bits.