Autumn Gravel Riding, UK Style

Open up any cycling magazine or cycling website over the past few years and it’ll feature gravel riding.  Photos of gravel roads undulating through forests before leading to a gravel hairpin before a stretch of gravel especially open to expansive skies, before taking a small gravel off-shoot to a lake previously untouched by human breath, let alone a gravel tyre.

This lake, not on maps nor even seen by any of the 2787 active satellites above Earth this very second, will provide the perfect backdrop to boil a whistling kettle and stroke your beard whilst watching rare birds circle above some unicorns frolicking in the water (I googled the number of satellites, obviously).

These writers did not approach me or the expanding band of UK cyclists about our realities of going off-road, and as it’s autumn, off-road when the days are short and the tracks never dry.  If they had, it would be this…

Ride along a road, a normal road.  Internally remark to yourself about how ‘draggy’ gravel tyres are at 50psi compared to your road bike.  Make a mental note to see how much slower it is on Strava.  Arrive at a gate.  It’ll have dropped on its hinges, requiring you to not to only open it, but also lift it up – all whilst trying to get yourself and your bike through it.

You enter a field.  You’ve started at 50psi but the first foray off-road will have you reducing that in order to try and get some grip in the mud, or for a special occasion, cowpats. A few months earlier the mud was rock hard in the shape of wheel-stopping & eyeball rattling horse hoof prints but now the same field has replaced that with energy-sapping, slidey mud which is already collecting on parts of the bike.

As you approach the next gate, said cows will have congregated to block your exit. This is where they always stand you see, making it especially muddy & cowpatty. You can’t tell which is which as you tentatively cajole the cows aside, a balancing act of bravado vs bike vs bovine. Of course, this gate will have not just a catch to open but some stringy rope to unhook & rehook, plus it’ll swing wildly in the wind to smack the rear derailleur of your bike. It’s always windy nowadays.

It was summer when I met this lot, hence no mud. There were cowpats, obviously.

When you do happen across a gravel road, you can be certain it’ll be brilliant but also short lived. The ball-bearing affect on your steering means full concentration in parts and your previous years riding only road will have you nervously hanging on and the bike lurches from rock to gravel to, yep, more mud.

Coming out on a country lane, once familiar speed will return before barrelling off down a side turn and in to a recently ploughed field. The path across won’t have been restored by the farmer, but if you’re lucky, the farmer will have enabled you to travel the field edge (making it 3x longer) or you can choose to push your bike across the new ridges and furrows. You’ll do this only to learn the mud really likes your once orange but now brown Sidi shoes, attaching itself to the cleats and soles at such a rate you leave the field 2″ higher than when you entered, and half a stone heavier. Lovely mud. In the same field 3 months ago, there was a festival of stinging nettles which left you rubbing on Germaline for 2 days so the mud is an improvement.