There are no photos of this ride - the start time was rather earlier than I am accustomed to being in motion, so I forgot to take a camera.

A guy called Peter was doing a 100-mile circuit from Wickford. I had no illusions of joining him for the whole loop, but decided I'd do as much as I wanted then peel off to a convenient train station.

The route was rather hilly. No massive elevation changes involved, just no flat ground at all - it was all either up or down, and with a pretty stiff wind (is that enough excuses yet?):

The roads, though, were lovely. Pretty much entirely on tiny country lanes with very little traffic, and some very scenic villages en-route.

We picked up another cyclist, Aaron, in Ingatestone, where a bacon sandwich and slice of cake was consumed (along with a pot of tea, naturally). Lunch was then at Finchingfield - my candidate for prettiest village in England, and the scene of many a cream tea.

On this occasion, they inexplicably passed both cream tea emporiums and headed instead up an exceedingly steep hill to a pub. We met a pair of tandem riders there.

With 100 miles to do in total, Peter was keen to keep the pace reasonably brisk, so I didn't really get much of a breather between Elevenses and lunch. At 43 miles in, I decided this was a reasonable point for me to start searching for train stations. If the Colchester line hadn't been running a bus replacement service, that would have been pretty close, but as things stood, Elsenham was the closest, at 14.3 miles away.

Elsenham is a two-horse town in the middle of nowhere. It has a manually-operated level-crossing, which is always a bad sign. Sure enough, trains were hourly, and I'd just missed one. When it did eventually arrive, I had to go into Liverpool Street and then back out again, so I rather suspect Peter made it home before me!

By the time I got home, the total mileage was 60.7 (the GPS track below omits my two-mile ride home from the station). While the average speed was nothing to write home about, it was a reasonable effort for a pretty hilly route given that, aside from a 30-mile ride the previous day, I hadn't been on the bike for a month.

As my LEJOG training requires the ability to get back on the bike several days in succession, I also did a 25-mile ride the next day. Ok, that's not quite the 52-mile daily average I will need to achieve in May, but at least it's a step in the right direction.

Garmin GDB track | GPX track