Ride 29/06/2025 June Randonee Lanark

3 of us on this month’s Randonee in Lanark and what a great day for it, Sunny, hot and not too much wind around. We were doing a 85 mile loop around South Lanarkshire, starting In Lanark itself before heading south as far as almost reaching Moffat but turning North again before we hit the town. This route is very much on quiet roads in the middle of nowhere, which did present a few issues for stops, but meant we had very little traffic to deal with. Our first and only cafe stop was at the Wee Crook Cafe at Tweedsmuir which was only after 25 miles of cycling, which we got to pretty quickly. Some coffee, cake and ham and cheese toasties were had before we continued on. Unfortunately the only other place I could route the ride was to a motorway service station just north of Abington, which was another 45 miles from the first stop and this would require a 5 mile divert off the route but was required. I was down to 1 water bottle so needed to stock up and also had an ice cream whilst I was there 😁 The last 20 odd miles flew by as we were now with a tail wind and were bombing it along some of the sections. In fact a lot of the route had these fast paced sections where we were doing over 30 mph, either on the flat or going down hill, it’s thanks to these sections that our avg speed was kept quite high by the time we got back to Lanark. We were even cycling over 4800 feet of climbing but most of this thankfully was low gradient or over long steady climbs with only a couple of head kickers to climb up, the worst being the last climb back up to Lanark in the last 5 miles of the ride. So, overall it was a really good ride for me, 85 miles clocked up at an avg speed of 18 mph and thats with me leading all the way around the ride, and my legs are still in one piece 😊