Groad Culture: Groad riding

Olly takes the unilateral decision to rename Gravel Union, much to the bemusement of his colleagues and we suspect, most of the readership.

If you type #groadslikethese, #gnarmac or #grassupthemiddle into Instagram you will fall into a gigantic wormhole of inspirational images, fun looking bikes and adventures, riding away from paved roads. But surely, it’s just #gravelriding with another name I can hear you say! And you would, of course, be right. But also, wrong. We’ve published stories before trying to define exactly what gravel is and how one rider’s gravel can be another rider’s cobbles. Now I’m going to argue that for 99% of us, we don’t actually ride “gravel” at all, we actually ride “groads”.

Obviously, a few of you will be fortunate enough to live in a gravel mecca, where everything outside your door is paved with tiny chippings of rock forming the hardpacked yet also loose and somewhat sketchy surface that we all know and love. For everyone else though, while we might have stretches of “pure gravel” within reach, we are way more likely to have to link these stretches of gravelly heaven with sections of road. So, I’m going to start a petition to rename Gravel Union to Groad Union. Who’s with me?

What got me thinking about this was a recent ride planned with a couple of fellow gravel riding fans. My never ending search for newness had thrown up some interesting discoveries recently. A little while back, I was trying to plot a road cycling route which took in our favourite cycling café, but which was long enough to mean we would arrive at the café exactly at lunchtime. This meant adding in some additional sections of road early-on in my normal route. Obviously, I decided to put in something new and they were a revelation! Technically, at the time we were riding on road bikes (albeit shod with 38mm tyres) and the routes that I had found were marked on the definitive mapping as roads (and therefore legally accessible by everyone from pedestrians to juggernauts).

What we actually found was what you can see in the image at the top of this piece. Looks like somebody at the Ordnance Survey had a slightly fluid definition of ‘road’ when they undertook the surveying and mapping of this region. The roads in question were just wide enough for a normal car, were chopped into sections with gates and had a surface which varied from ‘proper’ tarmac to loose gravel, most of which had strips of grass growing up the middle. They were also liberally dotted with sheep droppings just for added entertainment value. While searching for road riding nirvana, I had managed to find gravel perfection. Or more accurately, #groad heaven. The new sections I had discovered totalled around 10kms – not enough to use as the basis of a ride, but a fantastic addition to an existing route.

So, with this spark of inspiration fizzing around in my brain, I started route planning. My idea was to create a big day out that neatly combined the goldilocks proportions of ‘proper’ roads, groads and ‘proper’ gravel. As our route was in the wilds of Northumberland, where filling in winter’s potholes seems to have been put on the ‘do-next-year’ list, even the proper road sections weren’t exactly smooth. Luckily, shoddy road surfaces (and lack of traffic) were a boon to us as aspirant groad riders anyway - it all helped the ride feel a little more fun.

The weather forecast for the day was typical of British springtime – a mix of sunny/cloudy, cold/warm, wet/dry. It made packing the right gear and wearing suitable clothing somewhat of a nightmare, particularly as the route involved sitting at an outside café table for our lunch. My solution was to break out some bikepacking luggage and fill it to the brim with different clothing options. Down jacket, spare waterproof jacket, winter hat and gloves for a late April ride? Might sound a bit over the top, but it was actually perfect (and all got used at some point).

Once I had the route and the clothing sorted, the next dilemma was bike choice. My planned route was a bit gnarly for a road bike (even when fitted with big volume tyres), but there was too much tarmac in the route to make riding a mountain bike an ideal solution. So, I went for a good compromise – a gravel bike with big volume, but minimally treaded tyres. The 700x50 WTB Ventures roll super well and although they are deeply sketchy in wet/sloppy/muddy conditions, I was hoping the surface would be pretty well drained. Fully kitted out, my bike weighed about the same as small 1960s tower block, but once rolling you didn’t notice the load and the bike packing bags behaved impeccably – no movement at all, even on some of the more ‘challenging’ sections of the route.

Image courtesy of Francis King

I’d planned the route to start gently and ramp up (literally) as we went on. By some miracle, the weather was significantly better than the (frankly awful) forecast and the only time we had sustained rain was when we were sat under some shelter at lunchtime. The proportion of tarmac to gravel tipped slowly in the favour of gravel as the day went on, but at the end we still had enough energy left to add in some extra sections of #gnar. When we did the ride, CV19 restrictions in place at the time meant some of the normal cafes and places to stock up with food/water along the route were closed. I knew about some of this when I was researching the route, but one place I had banked on being open was firmly shut, which led to a few downcast faces, as we knew we had quite a tough climb to take on afterwards and a climb without a belly full of tea&cake is hardly worth doing is it!?

Between the three of us, we managed to cover quite a variety of away-from-the-road bike options. Francis was on a CX bike with a 33mm tyre on the back (and only slightly bigger on the front), Clive was on a gravel bike shod with low 40mm tyres and I was on my steamroller with 50mm tyres shoehorned in. There’s pros and cons of each option, but all worked perfectly and we managed to avoid punctures or other mechanicals (we’ll gloss over my rear bolt-thru axle coming unscrewed while we were riding on tarmac just before lunch….). With a competent/brave/mad rider on board, you can ride pretty much any surface on any bike. Just don’t tell anyone we said that….

Not long after lunch, the route passed through an area used by the military from time-to-time as a shooting range and there were numerous gravel tracks leading away from our tarmac road. Some of these tracks had been recently upgraded with an extra surface dressing of stone, which in places had migrated onto the tarmac road. This comedy on/off alternation between road and groad was a perfect demonstration of typical conditions for many riders, albeit shrunk in scale to a few metres rather than the more typical few kilometres. As the afternoon pushed on, some of our routes were closer to mountain biking than road riding, but pushing yourself a little is all part of the fun isn’t it.

“You should think about varying your diet a little” said the lady working behind the cashtill in the village store I was standing in. In front of me was three half litre bottles of coke, two large bags of crisps and a chocolate bar. I looked more closely at her to see if she was joking, but she was being deadly serious. I was standing in her shop clad head-to-toe in “I’m obviously a cyclist’ gear and I weigh less than 62kgs (so perhaps not destined for an overweight health clinic anytime soon). I realised she seriously thought I was going to eat all of this (perhaps that says something about her more typical customer?), whereas I knew that just outside the door of shop, Clive and Francis were sitting soaking up the late afternoon sunshine and waiting for their just-another-10-kms-and-we’re-finished calories to be delivered. With two of my planned café stops shut, a last minute bit of route inspiration had delivered us a village shop just at the right time (as enthusiasm and energy levels were dipping somewhat). Our impromptu stop had the benefit of a scattering of outside chairs to sit on and even some warm sunshine. Plus, the novelty value of a sign on the gate to a small children’s park opposite which read “Please do not urinate in the children’s playground area”. Perhaps that said something about the normal clientele too?

Caffeine and crisp levels topped back up their required levels we headed on towards our finish line. Appropriately enough, the last 10kms of our ride were on tarmac. It was still somewhat pothole riddled and gravel strewn in places, but was essentially smooth and easy going. With the sun still beating down and the #groad flashing passed under our wheels, a sociable spin was the perfect way to finish our ride. I haven’t totted it up, but my guess is that out of a total of 125kms, around 50% was tarmac. No-one would be able to claim it was a proper gravel ride, but we got a definite stamp in our riding log books for having had a decent #groad ride that day.