Faccombe, I'm going home!

Last weekend, I had the pleasure of doing the second leg of the Test Valley Tour. It's one of those things that kind of sneaks up on you though. In fact, while I knew it was coming up, I didn't have any idea what the date was until I got an email warning about registration two weeks before the ride. Needless to say, there was no time for any real training. Although maybe that was a good thing. The email actually explicitly mentioned that this one was going to be 'hillier' than the last one. Now I've got to say, I remember the last ride and it wasn't exactly flat.

So I got up at some stupid hour on a Sunday morning and rolled down to Rob's house. Adrian picked us both up there, and we drove about 45 minutes north to an area outside of Andover. After a little bit of prep-work, we set off in the cold. The prediction had been that there would be rain all day, so when it appeared that it was just going to be overcast, it was great. And in the end there were about 5 minutes of spitting rain towards the end of the ride, but in general the ride was dry.

Now, the route itself was killer. This was the longest distance (112.4km), longest time (4:23), and most climbing (1199.6m) I've ever done on a bike. In addition to that the group of us were going to focus on keeping with Adrian's training schedule. This meant that on anything other than a serious climb, he couldn't go out of heart ranges 1 and 2 (of a possible 5). Now, I'd been on a ride with him the weekend before and I knew that that wasn't going to be all that slow.




You can see from the profile, there were some serious hills on this ride. There were a number of climbs over 16% grade and you had to use all your strength just to keep your cranks turning over. I just can't imagine how the Sportive riders used their race chain-rings on hills like that.

There wasn't really any drama on the ride, other than about half way through I got a puncture on my front wheel. 5 minutes to put a new tube and and off we went. Thankfully Rob and Adrian stopped with me otherwise, I'm not sure how I would have made it to the end.

I'd have to say that one of the best parts of the ride happened around 95km. You go through a town called 'Faccombe' (it's pronounced without the 'b'...) and there's a split. Go left and you can do another 50km for the Sportive ride, or you can go right and finish the 100km Challenge ride. Needless to say we took the right fork and called it a day.

I managed to stay with Adrian until 109.8km. But right there at the end there was a dreadful little climb. I just didn't have anything left in my legs and Adrian dropped me and I rolled into the finish about 3 minutes later than him. The good news was that it wasn't nearly as bad as Rob who dropped at about 50km and did the back half on his own. He did manage to do it only 20 minutes or so slower than the two of us, so that was great work as well.


This is the last competitive ride of the season for me and I can tell you that I'm glad. I've been riding essentially 6 days a week ever week since I moved here in January. I've ridden nearly 5000km and boy are my legs tired. I'm just hoping to have a car soon and maybe take it a little easier than I have been.