Today has been the final day of the inaugural TORQ Enduro Challenge (in association with Bryton GPS) with TORQ team rider Lydia Gould.

I rode with Lydia again this morning for a couple hours and tackled the climb out of beautiful Kettlewell. It was then that I really wished I was doing this challenge and cemented my pending involvement. There was no rain, the sun was shining and the vista was absolutely beautiful. I Tweeted “With a vista this beautiful, how could you not want to do the TORQ Enduro Challenge” and attached the picture above, being caught in the moment.

I left Lydia at the sign post below having thoroughly enjoyed myself and having thought what a lucky girl she was. A few minutes after I left her though, she found bog, lots of it! I got a phone call from her about 2 hours later and she’d struggled on foot to cover little more than 3 miles, so it was another lesson in ‘what you plan on a map may not be suitable for a ride’. This has further reinforced our need to adapt this iconic route and perfect it before it officially gets published and we invite others to ride it.

Once she had extracted herself from the nightmare bog from hell, she jumped onto mainly minor roads for the final leg of the journey into Thirsk and arrived at the home of Bryton GPS, Zyro HQ just before 4pm. Having chatted to the guys at Zyro over a coffee, we’ve decided to take the route further north to avoid the bog and then drop down the western edge of the Yorkshire Moors to Thirsk instead for the future. This will mean that the TORQ Enduro Challenge will take on The Stiperstones and Long Mynd in Shropshire, Cannock Chase in Staffordshire, The Peak District National Park, The Pennines, The Yorkshire Dales and finally the Yorkshire Moors. I think we’d struggle to design a more iconic route than that?

Lydia’s sorting a few things out and she’s going to write a full report about her experiences for publication on the TORQ website in the next week or so. We’ll also get back to you with a summary shortly on our conclusions and when this route is going to be published for you to ride. We’ve actually worked out a fair, simple and ingenious scoring system so that should you rise to the challenge, your achievements will be documented on the TORQ website and we’ll be able to rank you against others based on the speed at which you cover the distance. We’ve also found a way to restrict daily riding hours to 12 to keep it sociable and within the spirit we want the challenge to have. We also want to encourage people to ride this route for leisure, not necessarily competitively. Anyway, as I said, there will be more on that on the next report.

Once again, if you’re wondering what this challenge is all about, take a look at the following link; it explains why Lydia’s completing this unusual challenge:

www.torqfitness.co.uk/news/torq-enduro-challenge

Many thanks to Bryton GPS for sponsoring the TORQ Enduro Challenge:

www.brytonsport/co.uk/help/landing