In many ways the ride was the easy bit.

There are always going to be logistical problems in starting a ride that finishes 300kms away and on the other side of a country, unless you just want to turn around and ride back to the car. In our case it took a lot more working out than the riding bit, we know how to ride bikes, it’s quite simple really. 

We could have taken advantage of the option of leaving the car at the finish and having ourselves and boxed bikes trucked back to the start, but we weren’t that organised, and our complicated situation made that even more complicated, as it was we had to ride 20 kms from the finish to Morpeth, get the train to Newcastle, change for Carlisle and then as the trains were being their usual awkward selves drive the car we’d dumped at the station back to the start in Colvend and the other car, then just drive the 650km home, or actually need an emergency stay over at a handily placed friend in Kendal before finally heading down to the south coast. Given all that could have gone wrong it went incredibly well, it still might have been more tiring than the ride, but I digress. 

"In many ways the ride was the easy bit."

The Frontier 300 has been on the radar for a while but had been delayed twice because of Things so when it actually arrived it was a bit of a surprise. What? Now? Three hundred kilometres from the Irish Sea to the North Sea, the west coast of Scotland to the east coast of England, along the border between the two countries with a roughly 50:50 gravel/tarmac mix over good forest access tracks and minor roads, and a little bit of a walk on a hike-a-bike section. 

Friday night saw us turning up at the start in Colvend, parking the van up for the night and heading to the village hall to sign on, attach wristbands, pick up our route guide, collect Rawvelo gels, a could be useful later Chamois Butt’r sachet and be handed trackers to fit on our bikes, then grab essential pre big ride nutrition in the form of pizzas from the mobile truck outside and then try to get an early night for the 4am start the next day, something made a little tricky by the feisty wind, especially if you were in a tent. 

We wake in the bleary dark and try to get ourselves ready swiftly and silently as light slowly peeks over our shoulders. There was no official start gun or cacophony of over 200 riders sprinting off as normal people were still trying to sleep, just a quiet sporadic rolling out whenever people were ready so we just looked at each other, blipped on lights, clipped in and headed off east.

"It doesn’t start well as on the first descent John’s tube of electrolyte tablets jettisons its contents over the trail"

Similarly for me while it isn’t my furthest ever ride it is the longest gravel ride I’ve ever done, although it’s a very long time since I’ve done anything like this distance so I’m hoping any dormant muscle memory will surface at some point. I’m confident that our combined capabilities will see all of us to the end, but we are all acutely aware that 300km is A Long Way whichever way you slice it and anything can happen when you’re crossing a country on every kind of surface you can find in between here and there so we’re quietly respectful towards the whole endeavour. It doesn’t start well as on the first descent John’s tube of electrolyte tablets jettisons its contents over the trail, please don’t let it be one of those days.

Thankfully Focal Events have the Frontier 300 meticulously organised to minimise the collateral of any incident. There are four feed stations along the way at 60km, 110km, 180km and 230km, and it’s not just bits of banana and small lumps of energy bar, there’s fancy focaccia, hot soup, proper cake and decent sandwiches, all food that you actually want to eat rather than have to eat just to keep you going, and a beer as you cross the finish line. You could top this off with raiding any shops you’d pass along the way but there really wasn’t much need.

There was mechanic support as well and more than once we reassuringly saw an event medic on stand-by in a vehicle in the woods. As well as all this there was a hefty compulsory kit list to deal with any on trail emergencies and the option to have a bag of your stuff dropped off at feed station three if you wanted a change of clothes or some extra food couriered ahead, and then it would be left for you at the finish. We filled ours with bivvy kit to kip in from whenever we finish to breakfast, normal clothes for the convoluted trip home and a toothbrush and deodorant. 

The organisers recommended a gravel bike with a good range of gears and disc brakes for the Frontier 300, or a lightweight mountainbike, anything with 38mm plus tyres on really and there were all sort of bikes on the route. Some well fancy gravel bikes with carbon deep section everything, and aero bars, mountain bikes, plus sized MTBs with drop bars and at least one tandem, whatever bike you had would be an advantage somewhere and at a disadvantage somewhere else. The winner however was definitely the guy on the 80’s Peugeot road bike with deep drop brakes and the fattest tyres he could squeeze in there (with the help of some workshop crimped chainstays), and a gear choice that looked quite aggressive on the knees.

There are benefits to doing a ride that goes from here to all the way over there in roughly the same direction, and that’s the chance of a tailwind all the way without the dread of having to turn round at some point and battle into it. The wind gods were smiling upon us that weekend, well, the god of the westerly wind was as their strong hand pushed us all day all the way towards the finish and it made a huge difference to the ride as was noticed any time we might swing into the teeth of it. It was such a beneficial tailwind that the first riders home arrived at 4.30pm, a good few hours before the organisers had scheduled their arrival, taking just less than half a day to complete the event, that’s swift.

The off road sections are largely comprised of wide gravelly doubletrack fireroads, the UK’s only equivalent of American gravel I guess, and there are some significant sections to contend with, the 30km sector through Kielder Forest being the longest, and there’s a lot of climbing, a lot, with 4,200m of elevation over the ride. Mostly it’s steady drags that seem to go on indefinitely but there are some steeper sections in there to assuredly test the legs. The route passes through several trail centres, names that I recognise from the more chunky and bouncy off road part of my personality, Dalbeattie, Mabie, Ae, and the snaking singletrack ascent through Newcastleton trail centre is a smiley and welcome respite from the endless grey fireroads. 

"The tyre makes the disappointing spuft spuft noise and goes down fast"

It’s far too early on in the ride when I thunk the front wheel into something solid on a fast descent and there’s a few seconds of sucking air through teeth thinking I’ve got away with it before the tyre makes the disappointing spuft spuft noise and goes down fast. A quick spin of the wheel reveals tubeless gunk spitting out of a teeny hole in the tyre bead right on the rim that’s not wanting to seal any time soon. Bugger. I’m slightly consoled by the fact that there’s another rider on the other side of the track in the same situation and it’s a quick but messy tyre off and inner tube in, then pedalling on hoping for a phone signal to tell the others what’s happened and then spending the next, ooooh, 250kms being kind to the front end. 

I’m riding alongside the other puncture guy a while later when he rolls over an innocuous lump in the trail and his rear tyre just gives up. I stop to help, as you do, and in the process of getting him going again discover he mended his previous puncture with one of those incredibly expensive, incredibly lightweight, incredibly fragile orange inner tubes, and he’s running incredibly expensive, incredibly supple, incredibly fragile fat but slick tyres. In retrospect I should have left him there staring at the mess of his life choices but when you’re on the trail you help someone in need don’t you? A little further on the guys at the giant-sized Salsa deck chair parked in the middle of nowhere let me know my ride companions got bored of waiting and have carried on so I scam a now much needed spare inner tube off them and press on, or try to as puncture guy messes up his gears on a steep climb right in front of me and falls off. It’s definitely time to remove myself from this situation. 

This is made slightly trickier by the fact we’re suddenly right on the Garrogill hike-a-bike section of the ride. Mentioned in the ride gumpf as a “500m hike-a-bike which is steep” in my head this was a jolly scramble up a bit of a hill but it’s more than that, a lot more than that. It’s a proper sweaty push, grunt and heave up a big portion of mountain shoving a bike up steep grass, across streams, up gulleys and along sunken paths of loose rock. It’s taking a while, it requires a lot of effort and people are having to stop for a proper rest, I realise I can push a bike faster than many people, and the view is pretty spectacular. 

"The forest sections are vast and deserted, with just the odd wind turbine glowering over you"

It’s a very empty part of the world, if it wasn’t for the fact that you’re in the orbit of a couple of hundred other cyclists you would be very very on your own out here, anywhere on the route, the forest sections are vast and deserted, with just the odd wind turbine glowering over you, but luckily because there is a large group of cyclists strung out across the width of the country there’s always someone to ride alongside to chat to if you want, or share stem-staring with up another long ascent to help the miles skip by. 

And while the gravel riding might grab the headlines there is much to be said for some of the tarmac that we roll along, because there are miles of really beautiful roads up here cutting across a seemingly endless landscape. The slim tarmac ribbon weaving across the tops of the Langholm Hills will long stick in the memory, the beneficial shunt of that tailwind encouraging speeds that made a gravel tyre sing and the heart grin. 

While that tailwind was a definite bonus the rest of the weather looked like it could make the ride a bit more of a challenge. In the days preceding there had been a lot of forecast page refreshing and there was no getting away from it, at some point we were going to get wet, there was some consolation that it would be on our backs but still. The skies had been threatening all day and even teased a few times making the waterproof jacket on or off decision a constant bother but it’s not until we’re well into the day at 220kms that it decides to finally let rip. By pure chance we’re squeezed under a shop front in Bellingham making the most of a supermarket resupply opportunity which gives us barely sufficient cover from the downpour that’s enough to have the guttering gushing into the street. 

We decide to watch and wait it out for a while, discuss whether heading to the pub over the road might be worthwhile and witness a steady procession of riders getting soaked as they try to reach the safety of the scheduled feed station in 10kms time. Our faff time in the relative dry remarkably coincides with the rain stopping so we press on over wet roads to stop again at that feed station in Corsenside Parish Hall for a hot drink and full use of the facilities. 

This is where the last cut off on the ride is, and there are blankets and sleeping mats tucked in the corner for this, but that doesn’t come into effect until half past ten and we’re well ahead of that, it’s not even dark yet. I have had no idea how long this ride was going to take us, I had a vague guesstimate that we’d get to the finish at about 3am and I have it written in my ride notes that supermarkets on the second half of the route shut at 10pm, that’s how optimistic I was. The sun is still up in the sky and this far north in mid-summer it’s going to stay there for a while longer, only 70km to go now, just a decent Sunday ride to go then…

"The sun is still up in the sky and this far north in mid-summer it’s going to stay there for a while longer"

The last few miles seem to take forever, we’re not flagging but we’ve definitely slowed a bit and riding into the darkness has robbed a bit of speed so it’s a blessing that a lot of the last section is on road, although there are enough cheeky climbs to contend with, and there’s a brief moment where we think we’ve made it to the finish but it’s just someone having a fire on Druridge beach and there’s still some more to go and it’s only when we start to hear the faint strains of music and ride into a pool of light that we know we’ve finally done it. 

"We’ve crossed from one side of our island to the other"

Annoyingly it’s past midnight, but only just so we fail to make it in the same day by mere minutes, I blame helping that guy with his puncture and a thousand other micro delays but a brief look down at the screen reveals that we’ve averaged exactly 15kph, spot on the speed suggested by the organisers to complete the ride within the Saturday, go us! We’ve crossed from one side of our island to the other but because it’s dark, we’re a bit tired and fancy a bit of a wash and a sleep there’s little inclination to open those finish line beers to celebrate and it feels a bit of an anti-climax, because we still had to face the challenge of getting home.

If you’d like to find out more about the Frontier300 event, you can check out their website here