LEJOG - Stage 8

Another really hard day at the office. If your office is sitting on a very uncomfortable seat for 10 hours and climbing hills in awful weather. Exhaustion had also set in after yesterday's epic effort.

For the first time on the trip I had a full nights sleep, well 6 hours, which would serve me well for the day ahead as it was big. Again, more technical issues with an alarm this time but lucky I woke at 6.50 to find our only alarm had run out of battery. We could have really messed this day up if we hadn't have woken by chance.

We had a late breakfast as they wouldn't serve early but we felt we deserved this from the previous days work and desperately needed it to set us up for a huge 120 mile day ahead.

Our morning session was very fast paced and we made ground very quickly reaching town after town. Loch Ness was a major let down and the area of Drumnadrochit is not a place you would want to spend a lot of time.

We then had a lot of rolling hills that we had a bit of fun on when climbing. Andrew was trying to keep up and has a lot of determination but I think he needs a "little" more training before he starts playing with the big boys. I have tried to give him an intense climbing school on this epic challenge and I am not sure I can do anymore to coach him. He may be some that is just impossible to mentor in this area. A little bit of "fergie" style mind games on one hill, while he was hanging on, saw him dropped and gone.

We lunched at Inverness after 66 miles, leaving 54 miles remaining. We got on the road again at 2.45pm after some decent nosh at Bella Italia. It was hard to be in Inverness as I knew this was the place I was flying home from in a few days time after completing the challenge. Mentally it was hard to comprehend.

Climbing was top of the bill for the afternoon session as we headed for our place of sleep in Lairg. We had antihero  tough few hours of driving on to the end with lots of boring main roads to deal with. We the. We were then graced with something of sheer beauty when we reached Struie Hill viewpoint 10 miles before home. It was simply breathtaking at dusk

Due to the length of the ride today at 120 miles we were again out of light and it turned dark on getting to the bottom of this hill which was bad news for the rest of our roll in.

We pulled over with nine miles to go, in the dark and rain, as Andy needed to stop to readjust. I was reflecting on how lucky we had been on the trip so far and said the immortal words "I was surprised we hadn't had any real accidents by crashing in to each other" to which Andy ordered me to shut up. I didn't think he was the superstitious type...

...ten minutes down the road, which was pitch black and the rain still teeming down, we approached a train crossing. It was very very dark and very very wet. Going over the track lines that are lined with rubber I lost my front wheel at 25mph. I went down hard hurting myself and the bike. Andy was very closely tailing me at the time and as I buckled he went straight over me and also went down incredibly hard. The first reaction was to get out of the pitch black road that we were laying in as cars, trucks and lorries were still actively passing us. After that we regrouped and evaluated damage to us and the bikes. The bikes are not to bad but I think we will only find out about our own state in the morning after sleeping. A few ripped clothes, grazes and bruises are currently evident and with all this happening 1 mile from our hotel it has really deflated the end of our penultimate day.

Here are today's stats from Andy (my Garmin has died)

Total ride time = 7hrs 48mins

Distance = 189kms

Calories burnt = 3694

Elevation = 1522m

Lairg to John O'Groats tomorrow (pending injuries)