GLORIOUS GRALLOCH GRAVEL

Scotland's UCI Gravel World Series offering takes the high road, as James Shrubsall finds out

- James Shrubsall

The hardpack gravel beneath my wheels was passing slowly, so slowly. Cranking over my bottom gear at a painful 50rpm and fatigued beyond coherent speech, I looked through the passing stones and waited for this, the penultimate climb of the day, to be over.

“I reckon it’d do us good to walk out to the pub for food tonight,” said my ride partner Owen Rogers breezily, as he span his enviably low bottom gear up the gravelly slope.

My reply was non-committal. Cryptic, even: “Uh.”

My face didn’t give much away either, apart from the slack jaw and wide eyes of a village idiot. Those with a particular talent for reading features might have inferred a deep-seated desire for the whole thing to please be over.

“You don’t seem very enthusiastic about the idea,” Owen grinned.

Seconds passed.

“I’ve got literally nothing,” I grunted truculently in the wide open space between pedal revs that the steep gradient had reduced my small-but-notsmall-enough 42 x 42 gear to.

We were both exhausted. Six hours’ riding across 100km of the UK’s finest uppy-downy gravel had seen to that.

We had said goodbye to our support truck 10km before and were now ploughing a lonely, unsupported furrow with 15km back to the finish at Gatehouse that somehow felt like much more than that.

One big descent later and we were on the final haul, a winding traverse around a shallow balcony that stretched on and upwards to the horizon, where tarmac and a final four miles of almost unbroken descent homeward awaited.