HOW TO NAIL YOUR FIRST GRAVEL EVENT

Fancy taking on a big day out on the gravel? James Shrubsall went to the Dirty Reiver to find out how it's done

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Stealing a glance down at my shoes halfway round the Dirty One-Thirty, I marvelled at just how lavishly they – and the bike – had been painted. A new pale-grey colourway had apparently permeated every crease, fold and machined surface of, well, everything. I could only imagine what my beard, scruffy at the best of times, now looked like.

It was a stark contrast to the early kilometres of the ride, during which the pack of riders I was part of was enveloped by a cloud of dust that was doing a worryingly good job of coating the insides of mouths and noses. All the same, it looked like a scene from some iconic race in the US Midwest.

My ride, the Dirty One-Thirty, is the 123km middistance version of the Dirty Reiver – one of the UK’s biggest gravel events and 200km long.

Held in Kielder Forest in Northumberland, on the edge of the Scottish border, the ride skirts the huge Kielder Water reservoir and continues south in a big, ragged loop through the forest. There is almost no tarmac, with riders instead being treated to smooth forest tracks – the sort of gravel riding that most of Britain’s curly-barred offroadies go to sleep dreaming about.

Despite the excellent surfaces, a light but insistent rain that set in around the third-way mark meant riders’ skills met with an extra test as the course slowly became coated in a slick, thin mud. The bright colours of the start pen slowly became ever more muted as wheels flung the stuff over bikes and riders, with a veil of mist adding to the atmosphere on the peaks of some of the highest climbs. ‘Epic’ is a word used way too often, but thanks to the weather, the distance and the terrain, anyone who rode this year’s Dirty Reiver can brandish it with impunity.