Mad March, What a Budeful Day 200km

Ride Details

• Date Ridden - Sunday 23 March 2025
• Event Type - Calendar Event
• Points Distance - 200

Ride Stats

• Distance - 209.83 km
• Time - 10h39m15s
• Elapsed time - 12h53m53s
• Avg Speed - 19.7 km/h
• Elevation - 2895 metres
• Bike - Sabbath September AR-1

Ride Notes

A ride across Devon and into Cornwall can only mean one thing…. hills. This route didn’t disappoint, with 21 registered climbs on my Garmin!

Guy joined me for the ride and it was great to have his company for the day.

We set off from just outside Exeter towards Tiverton for the first control at 23km in bright sunshine. It was a ‘relatively’ flat for this section and lovely riding. On the ouskirts of town we hit the first ‘big’ climb of the day - the aptly name Longdrag hill - and the theme for the rest of the day was set. Up and down we went, on a mixture of sweeping A and B roads and very, very broken lanes. The latter may have contributed to the punture suffered…. which I won’t dwell on but made the elapsed time to Bude a bit slower that we would’ve liked. The coffee stop was very welcome and we then headed for Widemouth bay with a massive tailwind where we stopped to take some photos of the rolling surf.

More sketchy lanes back to Holsworthy and then the main road into Okehampton for the final control at 160km - at this point we still had 5 climbs to go! The old A30 was brilliant - realtively traffic free and fast with a tail wind. Hooray! There was a sting in the tail though - a gratuitous final climb at 190km that was really, really hard and two further tyre changes required in Exeter which put us up against the time limit…. We finally rolled into the finish just before 9pm.