This was my first 200 km audax, so I'm very pleased to have finished in time (just over 12 hours).
Shortly after Ben Harris and I arrived, the organiser was chasing round asking if anyone was Gareth Rees, so we knew you were still out there.
It must have been quite an easy day of it; we got back with 2h20 to spare, and that's never happened to me before!
The curious thing, actually, is that I hardly ate at all. We bounced the 50km control because the queue was so long, aiming to instead collect a tearoom somewhere along the way. However, we decided just to stop on a bench for five minutes and have a little something, then press on to the 90km control - but they managed to lose my food order, so I didn't eat there other than eating some more of my malt loaf. Then at 144km the control turned out to be a teashop, which did me a smallish jacket potato and some lemon cake. I only started to feel hungry around 165km, and ate the rest of the malt loaf which kept me going to the end.
So... for a 200, I ate one banana, one malt loaf and Red Leicester sandwich, one small jacket potato, and one slice of cake, and finished faster than every before. This is deeply unnatural. Normally I expect to have to sit down and eat properly every 50km whether I like it or not.
I wonder if this is connected to starting the day not with pasta but with an omelette sandwich the size of my head?