Day 3 - Hell of the North

No, not Paris Roubaix but Fort William to Glasgow.

It promised to be a tough day with the longest milage of the route at 120 miles and 3,000 metres of climbing. However, it proved to be a whole lot more challenging due firstly to the weather then to a slight detour.

In Simon's USA Coast to Coast blog, he described a glorious day's cyling as 'Champaign Cycling', today was more like '2 litre bottle of White Lightning Cycling'. However, it ended up being very enjoyable all the same.

We all awoke to rain at 5:30, set off in the rain at 7:00 and cycled the first 50 miles in yet more rain. At about 15 miles, there was a crash in the group Claire and I were riding in that ended up with 2 riders suffering broken ankles. It wasn't a good sight but the guys are now out of hospital and on the way home.

After we restarted, we continues in a group led by our new friend of the day, Stuart from Bangor, Northern Ireland - unsuprisingly, not Lowrey but the very cool guy below.

After 50 miles in the rain

Then we went over Glen Coe followed by a further 2 peaks over 1,000 feet which sorted the men from the boys with me definitely in the boy's camp. However, with a mixture of pacing myself and a few Go Gels, made it to the 1st stop of the day where Claire was looking very cold and was given attention from the Race Director, latex gloves for her hands, plastic bags for her feet and a space blanket for her body in a successful attemp to warm her up after 50 miles in the rain.

The stop did us some good and Claire was soon smiling...

Smile and the world smiles with you

Luckily, that was the end of the rain and we were in a group led by a couple of the race marshalls which helped us up our pace and get to 90 miles in no time. Unfortunately, by that time, the marshalls had gone, we had escaped our group and missed a turning. This led us to a 20 mile detour with a guy called Mike, much of which were caused by the villan of the day, Race Control, who sent us in the wrong direction twice with their telephone directions to get us back on course. However, the officals on the course were fantastic (Race Director Andy again) and got us back on track.

Remarkable, I felt pretty good for the last 20 miles and we ended the day doing 140 miles and over 3,000 metres of climbing at a very respectable, given the circumstances 14 mph.

And, we were mentioned in despatches in the post ride briefing for doing the longest day's riding in the events history.

Tomorrow, we leave Scotland and head to Carlise, apparently, in the sunshine...