Friday afternoon was a waiting game. Car packed, bike on the roof bars, and nothing left to do but wait for Cheryl to arrive with the rest of Sandy's weekend gear, the stuff he wasn't carrying on the bike. He's really taken to this bikepacking malarky.
Sandy had been dropped off in Thornhill around lunchtime and was cycling across to St John's Town of Dalry to meet me. Cheryl arrived a little before 3pm, I threw Sandy's gear and the remainder of my kit in the car, having left every device charging until the absolute last minute, and set off to catch up with him.
I got to Dalry about ten minutes after Sandy did. For the two of us, that's practically synchronised.
The Cleat Incident
There was a brief delay before we could get back on the road. Somewhere on the ride across to Dalry, one of the bolts holding Sandy's shoe cleat had come loose and disappeared entirely. A semi-panicked text arrived while I was still at home, so I'd already started hunting for a replacement before I even set off. Luckily I'd learned to keep spares on hand. With Sandy, you never know.
His shoe was, at that point, more or less welded to the pedal. A few minutes of persuasion got it free, spare cleat still stashed in the car for whenever he wanted to fit it, and we were finally on the road to Glentrool, our campsite for the weekend.
A New Tent
This trip also meant a first outing for a new tent. My old one was a one-man, and after a few trips with it I'd decided it was just too small and cramped for me. So I picked up a Durston X-Dome 1+, which is, as the name suggests, a slightly larger one-man tent. A bit more headroom and significantly more room inside to actually move around. There was a short spell of headscratching trying to work out where the groundsheet was supposed to attach, but once that clicked the tent went up without any more fuss, and I was pleased with how it looked. Good choice. Definitely an improvement on the old one.
The Plan Gets a Detour
The weekend was supposed to be about the gravel ride. But conversations between Sandy and myself never stay on topic for long, and someone always comes up with an idea to mess with the plan. This time it was me.
flowchart LR
A[We have a plan] --> B[We have a discussion]
B --> C[We amend the plan]
C --> B
C --> D[We take on the new plan]
Stranraer is a mere 40 minute drive away. Why not do the Agnew parkrun before setting off on the gravel route? There wasn't any suggestion of pushback from Sandy, in fact he sounded a little too keen, so the plan was amended.
Agnew Park, Four Laps
We set off around 8am on Saturday morning heading for Stranraer. The Parkrun Core Team at Agnew Park had been told on Friday that the west pier was closing for an engineering assessment, so the usual course got hurriedly rerouted into four loops instead of the usual three. Credit to them for pulling a working course together with barely a day's notice.
Four laps of just over 1km suited me fine. Nothing to grind through in one long haul, just a short, familiar loop, four times over, so I always knew exactly what was coming next. I settled early and nudged the pace up each lap, which isn't something I manage often. By the last lap I was properly working.
4.99km in 29:35, a pace of 5:56/km, which turned out to be my best parkrun time of the year, on a flat, improvised four-lap course. Average heart rate 145 bpm, peaking at 157. Cadence 165 spm, average power 265W.
| Km | Pace | What Was Happening |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 6:03 | Settling in on lap one of the makeshift course |
| 2 | 6:02 | Holding position, HR up to 143 |
| 3 | 5:59 | Third lap, starting to push, HR up to 148 |
| 4 | 5:49 | Pace coming up, HR past 150 |
| Last 989m | 5:41 | Final lap, closing it out, HR peaking at 157 |
A quick light breakfast afterwards, then back in the car for the drive to Glentrool to get ready for the actual reason we were there.
Into the Gravel
Sandy took time to fit the spare cleat, determined not to lose another bolt mid-ride. We rolled out around 12:30, still debating whether Stranraer had eaten enough of the day to justify a shorter loop. The road ride to the Visitor Centre was a pleasant warmup. Still debating, we turned onto the gravel.
I'm not especially experienced on gravel, so this was always going to be a challenge. It didn't take long to find out how much of one. What I'll dramatically call boulders started appearing. They weren't boulders. But to someone with limited gravel miles behind them, they certainly felt like it.
The first 20km or so was mostly uphill, which kept forward progress slow and turned staying upright into something requiring an unreasonable amount of concentration. Sandy reached the top of every climb well before me and had plenty to say about the views. I can't confirm or deny his assessment. Getting my breath back before setting off again was taking up all my attention.
If the surface had been any easier, I'd have called it a day and turned back there and then. But by that point, turning back looked harder than just finishing the loop, so on we went.
A decent stretch of the next 30km ran along single-track roads, a genuine relief after the gravel climbs. Then came the last 10km.
Where the Wheels Came Off
The final section wasn't as rocky as the first, but the gravel was significantly looser, and loose gravel brings its own problems. Back wheel spinning, front wheel bouncing, stones flying everywhere. I don't say this often, but I was glad to be climbing at points, since the bike behaved far better going up than it did coming down. The descents on that loose surface were genuinely scary.
Somewhere in there I "did a Sandy". My Garmin has a feature called ClimbPro, which tracks whatever climb you're on and tells you how much of it is left. This time it told me I had another 50m to go on this particular climb, then decided that meant ignoring the navigation and leaving me to choose between the uphill hairpin to the right or the downhill path to the left. I obviously chose the uphill, after all, I allegedly still had 50m to climb. 200m later, Garmin told me it needed to reroute me, meaning I'd climbed more than I needed to. I turned round and got back on the correct route. Sandy will be proud of me.
There was one stretch, front wheel skating around under me on the loose stuff, where I genuinely thought about stopping and calling for an airlift out of there. I didn't, obviously. I just took it slower, picked my line as best I could, and got through it.
64.10km with 1,084m of climbing, moving time 4:47:37 over an elapsed 5:45:03. Nearly an hour of that difference between moving and elapsed time was down to how often I had to stop and think about the surface, not how fit I was. Average heart rate 111 bpm, peaking at 145, oddly low for a day that felt like one long fight with the front wheel. The legs weren't the problem out there.
Curry Instead of Camping Food
We decided we'd earned a proper meal that night rather than another packet of dehydrated stove food, which is what I'd had the night before. Sandy had planned better, homemade pasta sauce and ravioli for both nights, except he ate the lot on the first night. I offered him one of my dehydrated meals as backup. He chose the restaurant option instead, which is how we ended up at a very good Indian in Newton Stewart. Quiet, but the food was exactly what two wrecked cyclists needed.
We both woke early on Sunday, and for once Sandy and I agreed on something straight away. We'd done everything we'd come to do, so there wasn't much point sitting around the campsite chatting about it. We just packed up and got on the road for a little after 9am.
Finishing Up
Great weekend. Thanks, Sandy. Next time, let's do gravel with a slightly lower difficulty rating.
Alan runs, cycles, and occasionally writes about both. Follow the full story at WaddingtonWrites.