Great day out. You couldn't ask for a better day weather wise and the route was just fantastic. Started a little late, as realised my GPS* only had the last stage route programmed in as I set off with the bunch. This necessitated a quick dive back to control to pick up a copy of the route sheet. This meant I was off the back immediately...
Took it nice and easy for the first leg whilst the day warmed up a bit. Bounced the first control and set off on the relatively benign second leg to Shrivenam. This was the highlight of the day to me as I climbed gently through the Valley of the Horses after Lambourn, paced by a 'relatively' slow moving Bikey Mikey (he later explained he was taking it easy on account of his Cambrian 3A exploits earlier in the week and a 200k ride tomorrow. The term 'easy' to Bikey Mikey is obviously relative as he shot past me shortly after Shrivenam control never to be seen again!
)
Didn't fancy the pasta at the PoW - not least because it was £9.50 when everyting else on the menu was way less than that... so settled for a kitkat and a snickers for the journey (this was to be my only food on the entire ride - not ideal).
Suffered a little on the last 20k of the stage into Faccombe as I'd run out of water and it;s pretty lumpy round them ther parts. Not least with the climb up Walbury Hill - er....twice? Anyway, got to Faccombe and just filled my water bottle and carried on. Nice run up to Watership Down and then an easy and quick run in to the finish. Bit diappointed not to clock under 10 hours (missed out by 3 minutes) but nevertheless, really enjoyed the day out. Some fantastic swoopy descents to get some real good speed up!
Many thanks to the organisers and helpers for a great route. Many thanks to the weather gods for the great weather. One of my favourite 200s.
* As normal I created a route for each stage and named them incrementally. However, the Garmin only likes routes of a realtively short name and I'd named each route Up The Downs 200 1 etc. So the GPS decided to truncate this as I loaded them in to Up The Downs. So clearly, each route got overwritten as I loaded it on, leaving me with just the last route.... you'd think I'd know by now....