A long way to ride for a cloth badge

Last May I completed the Bryan Chapman Memorial 600km audax at the second time of asking, and then I had five whole months to just find a 400km ride to join to finally complete a Super Randonneur series: 200km, 300km, 400km and 600km rides in a single audax year. And then every 400km ride on the calendar clashed with something else, and then the end of the audax year was looming. So it was time to knuckle down and do it DIY style.

If you’re not familiar with audax then basically: you have to ride a certain distance in a certain time. Generally you have to average about 15km/h; you can stop as much as you like but the clock is always running. Calendar events have organisers and cake stops and plenty of riders to hide behind. But you can also do a DIY event, where you submit your route and then ride it. This used to be reasonably complicated: hitting specific places and getting evidence you’d been there, normally with a receipt. Nowadays it’s simple enough: create a route, submit a GPX file, ride the route, submit the GPX of that. So long as they’re basically the same and you’ve done it in time, you’re all good.

My route was a loop up round Gloucester, to Chipping Norton and my friend Jon’s house who’d promised to feed me pasta half way round. Then it was back into Bristol, down to Sedgemoor services on the M5 (via the back entrance, obviously) in the middle of the night and back up Cheddar gorge and home. A route that Komoot suggested would be nice ridden over 3-6 days. My dependable spreadsheet, adjusted to take into account that there’d be no-one to draft, suggested it was 19 hours of riding and about 25 overall. More than half of which would be in the dark.

The weather forecast for the day was good, right up until about two days out when the jetstream decided it wasn’t happy where it was and went off for a wander. So the 5am start was in drizzle, on very wet roads from some pretty heavy rain overnight. By the time I’d had a cheese and ham toastie at Severn View services and headed onto the bridge to Wales, it was light and clearing up, and by the time I’d worked over the lumps and bumps of the Forest of Dean, re-lubed my chain and chugged along the flat to Tewkesbury, it was a nice enough day. A gilet-but-no-gloves kind of a day. 

Last time I stopped at Jon’s was on a DIY 600km and I was fully broken after a punishing slog over the Gospel Pass and through the Cotswolds. This time I was a bit more selective with the route and the climbs, which meant nearly half way round I was feeling pretty fresh. But, like the last time, the leg after Chipping Norton – this time to Tetbury – was a definite low point. On paper it was an easy leg – only 400m of climbing over 75km – but I hadn’t factored in some things. Firstly, the wind picked up and it was, of course, a block headwind for the whole three-and-a-bit hours.

Secondly, squally showers made it quite unpleasant at times. And, thirdly, that was the end of the light: by the time I was buying a meal deal at the Coop it was fully dark, and it was going to remain dark for the next 10 hours. In my head I knew this would be the case, but the reality was harder to deal with. I knew that if I sacked it off at that point I could be back in bed in two hours and it was tempting to head for home: I’d been riding for officially ages, and I was still hours and hours and hours from the finish, with the longest leg down to the M5 services ahead of me. The doldrums were mitigated a bit by the fact that I was never going to be much more than 2 hours from home for the remainder of the ride anyway, so I might as well press on: if things really did go south I could crawl home from wherever I packed it in. 

Things got better after Tetbury. The skies cleared, the wind died and it was a nice evening. I was on pretty lanes, with no traffic: just me and the night. I saw a badger, and a fox, and an owl, and lots of bats. I found myself quite by chance riding a bit of my 200km ride – the incomparably cake-filled Barry’s Bristol Butt Buster – in reverse, which was a nice boost on what were mostly unfamiliar roads for me. Then there was Bristol, and the climb to Clifton Suspension Bridge, and from there bits of the original Exmouth Exodus route, from when it used to start on the Clifton Downs.

Still a long way to Sedgemoor, though, and my progress was, well, pedestrian at times. The M5 services promised a 24hr McDonalds, which of course was closed. Sorry, not “closed”, just “not taking orders right now”, which apparently isn’t the same thing. I didn’t really want chips anyway by then, I just wanted a lie down, and the Roadchef people had helpfully supplied a lovely comfy sofa by the door. Probably that wasn’t what they had in mind for it, but at 3am no-one seemed to care all that much.

I was sure I’d get back from there. I made good time along the main roads in the middle of the night as far as Cheddar, and then it was home turf: lumpy, but all lumps that I knew well and could cope with. The gorge never normally feels hard, but that night it did. After that it was just a case of counting down the four climbs until my comfy bed. In the end I made it back with 10 minutes to spare on my spreadsheet ETA of 6am, having been moving for pretty much exactly the 19 hours I’d expected I’d have to turn the pedals. So that’s the SR series ticked off; we’ll call it a minimum-viable-product SR series because the only four Audaxes I’ve actually done this year are the four I needed for my badge. Here’s my badge…

…and I join over 300 other qualifying riders in 2024, including the other, better David Atkinson of Audax, whose haul of 130.5 points eclipses my paltry 15 by nearly an order of magnitude. Still, I wanted to do the thing, and now I’ve done the thing, so yay me. In 2025 I’m going to try and start a Randonneur Round the Year series, where you have to complete a 200km ride in 12 consecutive calendar months. I’ve already entered a few. I expect I’ll fall short, but it’s nice to have a goal and that seems like an achievable one. Let’s see, eh?

Big up the Lauf Úthald

I've ridden a Lauf Úthald for all four of the SR rides; a posh red one that I reviewed on the site for the 200km, and this rather snazzy Borealis one in the lower spec for the other three. I called it a "Fast, comfortable and well-specced road bike with a relaxed and assured ride" when I reviewed it, and nothing that's happened since has given me pause to revise that opinion. As a bike for ticking off miles efficiently, it really is hard to beat. It's a bike that does a few things differently – the geometry is a bit unusual, and the lack of fully internal routing goes against the current grain – and I found it the perfect companion for some long hours in the saddle. 

Try an audax: https://www.audax.uk/