It was too congested to be a really good ride IMO. (If you have low patience, watching for a couple of minutes from 9:00 gives a pretty good feel for what it was mostly like. I was soft pedalling and unable to get up the front to make mayhem due to all the bodies in the way. The Tour o' the Borders is much better..)
Which start group were you in? I was in the 'premium' group at the front (posing for pics with Chris Boardman) and took 4h30 overall, but I don't recall being passed by a recumbent - you might have come by when I was at a feed station.
I didn't have a problem with congestion - probably because I was mostly pootling round at my own pace, just enjoying the scenery and chatting to other riders, so I spent most of the ride being passed rather than passing other riders. Although I did latch on to a quick group as they came by at around 90km and so covered the last 40km in not much over an hour.
Is 'sitting on a wheel' a lost art in sportives?
I got the impression that many of the riders had never ridden in a group before. Some very strange behaviour. Quite a few apparently treating it like a race but not understanding that they'd have been faster working with rather than against the other riders around them.
I was also disappointed on the long descent after Schiehallion to have to slow down several times because of numpties ahead of me slamming on the brakes when they really didn't need to. And on that final stretch, on the wide
closed roads, I ended up spending a lot of time on the front of the group just to persuade them to take the best line through the sweeping bends rather than hugging the left.
Bizarre.
Don't think so. https://www.thecourier.co.uk/fp/news/local/perth-kinross/168891/etape-caledonia-hell-handbike-marcus-vows/ etc. etc.
Glad to know Marcus finished. I interviewed him the evening before the ride and he was playing down his chances of getting round. Lovely chap, and hugely inspirational. We posed for pics outside the hotel with his hand-cycle and loads of passers-by stopped to ask about it. He was so charming and willing to talk that they ended up going away promising to donate to his charity, so I'm not at all surprised he met his fund-raising target.
