Dustman Daves Demon Hilly

Subtitle: 7 hours of pain
Sub sub title: never again


I guess the title should have acted as a warning of what was to come, but hey, it seems that the 25 of us that set off maybe didn't think closely enough about that. We still weren't thinking all that much about it after the first 10 miles which were a little stiff but nothing too nasty.


Dustman Dave organised 4 rides all setting off from the same place, a small village just outside Taunton - the diddy doddle, 64k, the doddle, 110k, the double doddle, 200k and the demon hilly, 110k. A couple of hundred people were doing the other rides, 25 of us the demon hilly.


The first ten miles were a reasonably continual perpetual climb up and over the quantocks, crossing over some roads I cycled along for the lands end to john o'groats ride (http://www.chrisride.blogspot.com/) which brought back some nice memories.


The next 15 miles then went up and over exmoor ending up at Blue Anchor at the seaside. By this time we were starting to feel a little tired. 25 miles gone, 50 to go. The next 15 miles went back up and over exmoor and ended up at a nice pub for a bite to eat. Now we were all really tired, 45 miles down, 30 to go.


Nibbling a sandwich over lunch however a couple of things struck us:

i) Some of us commented that no-one on the ride seemed to have done it before. We found this a little odd, but didn't think too much about it.

ii) One of the riders had a "work done" altimeter (i.e. that records every metre climbed). It was registering total climbed meters of about 1,100m so far. We knew however that the rides total climb was 3,150m. So we had done well over half the ride and only 1/3 of the climbing. And we were pretty knackered. We all agreed that the altimeter must be dodgy, there was no way we could climb the remaining 2/3 of the distance in the remaining 1/3 of the ride, that just wasn't viable given how tired we were all feeling already.


OH MY FUCKING HELL we were wrong. The next 20 miles were just sheer pain, just 20 miles of huge climbs up a perpetual string of 1 in 3, 1 in 4 and 1 in 5 hills. On and on and on they went. I will happily confess to being a broken man on a few occasions. I did make it up the monster 1 in 3, albeit I will admit to using quite a nice zig-zag technique - as the road was wide and empty with no traffic so I just spent the whole time cycling across the road, turning, coming back across again, zig-zag all the way up - and that was painful enough. After 60 miles I was wiped out and even the bottle of full fat coke and BIG slice of coffee cake at the rest stop didn't help. Thankfully the last 10 miles were all downhill, a nice cruise back into the village, where we were met by a number of the 200k riders, who had thus done just under twice the distance (on the flat...) in the same time.


By this time we figured out why we hadn't met anyone else on the ride who had done it before. BECAUSE NO-ONE EVER COMES BACK TO DO IT AGAIN.


There are few rides I would never do again. I'd quite happily cycle up Ventoux again (http://www.nastyhills.blogspot.com/), although I'd probably check the weather forecast first but I will never do this again. At the end my body ached all over, my hands and feet were swollen, my ribs and lungs hurt from the exertion, my arms were knackered (from the climbs), my legs felt detached from my body and when I got home I found out I'd lost around 6 lb in weight. I also felt nausious for 3 days afterwards.


Dustman Dave said to me at the end:

i) You must have enjoyed it in a sort of sadistic sense. Nope

ii) Give it a few days, you'll feel great about having done it. Nope

iii) You'll be back next year, trust me. Nope.


Ride stats: Mileage: 70 Miles
Time: Just under 7 hours riding, 5 of which were painful beyond description.
Average riding speed 11.2 mph. Dismal.


I did however bag 4.25 "hill climbing points" - Audax have a scoring system that encourages riders to do hillier, tougher rides. Their scoring system is herewith - as you will see 3,150 metres of climbing for a 100k ish event is genuinely off the scale... http://www.aukweb.net/aaa/index.htm. Looking down the list, there are only 15 rides out of several thousand that offer more points than this. And nope, I'm not going to do any of those either.