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As we wound up and away from the river a steady grind uphill started on a short steep section. All around us the confused nature of the ground made it really difficult to gauge where our route actually went. We could rarely see any obvious tracks or trails because of the continual overall rise of the route. All we knew for sure was that the huge hill in the distant haze would push us up to nearly 700m before we dropped steeply off ready for a reverse climb the next day. We passed the aptly named Paincastle in a haze of dreams about mashed potato and chicken dinners, the stomach grumbles were upon us.
Every possible town (i.e. Paincastle) had no shops or open Pubs, and the few roads we rode were deserted. After three hours as we pushed ever upwards onto a moor and I began to wonder if the whole world had died in some kind of Nuclear disaster. Where was everyone! This was the UK. How could we possibly ride for a whole day and find only a single open shop that didn't sell food! Another look at the map now shows a truly remote part of the UK which is cunningly masquerading as populated. There are plenty of small roads and isolated houses but not much else. Especially if you are running on cut down printed maps. In retrospect a wise move would have been to head east to Hay-On-Wye and feed ourselves a decent meal, but retrospect is a fine thing, and anyway, we only had to ride for a few more hours before our B & B and a huge pub meal awaited. Right?
We rode onward slower and slower until the sun dropped over the horizon and our emergency
Petzl LED head torches made their appearance. At this point we hadn't seen our so-called track for sometime and we were somewhat worried. Exhausted as we were some cross words were exchanged and when we caught ourselves we stopped being spanners and turned north to our nearest expected road. It had been a fine few hours riding over some fantastically remote highlands. For me the hardest part had been riding past a small self built house with a wind turbine outside nestled in one of the farthest corners of remoteness we saw. It was clearly the site of a self-sufficient farm and I would have loved to have stopped and met the inhabitants. 'Next time', I told myself, fully aware there wouldn't be one. I guess you can't have everything on a trip like this. We were certainly experiencing some unusual sights, sounds and feelings on this trip, but we were also missing out on many more'but you cant have everything! As we finally dropped fast down a hillside towards the road were delighted to find ourselves only about 2km from the nights B & B. Although we had lost our track we had moved accurately on a compass bearing for a number of hours and had pulled our first navigational 'blinder'. Good result!
Exhausted we crawled into the B & B beyond hunger and just looking forward to rest and food. The landlady that greeted us was lovely; as was the homemade cake she gave us. It lasted all of about 3 seconds as it fell vertically downwards into my cavernous and empty stomach. By now it was past 10pm so we wasted no time and scrambled downstairs as soon as we could swap clothes to ask directions to the pub. We knew there was one close by because it had been top of our booking criteria for every resting spot. The first response was excellent; it was only 2 minutes away! The second response was devastating. They didn't serve food on Mondays. The landlady announced her intention to go to bed and left us in the sitting room speechless.
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Two words sprang immediately to mind based around 'oh' and 'fuck'. Now we were in deep shit. By the time we had explored our options we realised breakfast was going to have to be offensive, ate everything we could find including the sugar sachets in the tea and coffee tray and collapsed comatosed.
I was woken in the night by a growling deep in my stomach. I was starving! I tried my best to go back to sleep knowing that I desperately needed every drop of HGH I could get to repair my knackered body, but as is always the case, when you HAVE to sleep you rarely can.
Breakfast was as close to heaven as a man can get. I ate until I felt physically sick and by the time we left the house I was confident that the day was going to be OK. At the time I didn't really know much about endurance exercise nutrition and the way the body uses and stores glycogen. I didn't know that just because I was full at breakfast it didn't mean my body had ANY stored energy, but I was about to find out! It's interesting that although Julie ate the same as I did she either a. Didn't make so much of a fuss about it as I did (Surely NOT!!) or b. Wasn't as bothered by the effects so much (My preferred solution'). For me day nine was the low point of the journey, all the demons came to haunt us and although we came out of it OK I can't say I really excelled myself.
The first moves of the day took us out of the farmhouse for 500m and straight onto private land with a big sign on it telling us to bugger off. Julie was all for ignoring it, but after some discussion I persuaded her that we would be pretty pissed off to find to people strolling though our garden in similar circumstances and that we should detour around. This added 5km onto our already long day but still only clocked it at around 65km with 2000m of climbing.
Once our warm up detour was complete the Welsh hills immediately played their Ace with a nice climb to the summit or Radnor Forest at 650m. From 125m at the farmhouse this wasn't really my idea of fun especially at the gradient we were offered, but we started our slog. By the time we had reached ' way up to the summit I was as knackered as I had been at the end of day eight. My uphill speed was so slow that for the first time since Cornwall and day 1 I seriously wondered if this was going to the be the day that it all ended.
I searched deep inside myself and realised there was no way in the world I was going to stop unless I dropped dead. I knew about keeping going at all costs from long days climbing and slogging around in alpine winters with big rucksacks at stupid altitudes. What it seemed I didn't know about was how to deal with the misery. So I took it out on Julie'Our first and only big blow out of the trip happened half way up the slope from The Bache B&B to the summit of Radnor Forest. It was far from the best way of
channeling my misery, and I'm ashamed to say it was pretty much all my doing.
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