"I want a pony" - New Forest skate 5th Nov 2006#

Mon, 19 Feb 2007 17:08:01 +0000

Alex had planned an 80k circular route for us around the New Forest, heading anticlockwise from the top right corner. By 8:30am (approximately ;-) we'd arrived in the car park where everyone was to assemble, and were standing around trying to decide how much clothing would be appropriate. It was colder than it had been in London at daybreak two hours previously, so I went for the "wear everything" approach - with Helly Hansen, team warmup jacket, fluoro windbreaker, fleecy tights, thin gloves and helmet, I thought I'd be fairly toasty by the time we actually started moving. In retrospect, it got warmer quite quickly, and I maybe should have resigned myself to shivering for the first few miles.

The New Forest is, in short, a lovely place to skate. The scenery you can see for yourself (Alex took photos The traffic is infrequent, and patient. The surfaces are mostly pretty good (a couple of very short and quite evil stretches, and worth keeing an eye out for the cattle grids, but in general it was easily on a par with London). There was a certain amount of up and down: in the morning this was pretty much all skateable; in the afternoon we walked down a couple of very short steep twisty hills on single track roads. And despite their being allegedly wild animals, we found the ponies less likely to be panicked by skaters than the horses in Hyde Park. We stopped in the morning after about 15km for coffee and cakes, and again at lunchtime for pub food. Weather for most of the day was warm enough that I was overdressed, and found myself shedding clothing at each stop. The pace was mostly "comfortable" for most of the group - although in the morning there was a bit of drafting going on on the flat bits, for most of the time we were moving at low enough speeds that slipstreaming didn't really make much difference. I had managed - again - to forget my HRM, but by the "able to hold a conversation" metric I was happily in the recovery/easy aerobic zone for all but the uphills.

We got back to the car park before the light failed, and headed back to London via a warmly anticipated steak and beer in Basingstoke. A splendid day out.