A month ago I set off to ride GBDURO, and a couple of days after that it was all over. I had injured myself, scratched from the event, and the journey was left incomplete. As I sat at the side of the road the sense of sadness and disappointment set in, and I couldn't quite reconcile how big of an anticlimax this was. I had envisioned completing the GBDIVIDE and rolling into John O'Groats with a sense of achievement that easily overwhelmed the exhaustion. This was a ride that meant a lot to me, and it represented so much [...]

The week(s) in riding: It’s been a few weeks since my last installment of The Gravel Diaries. I’ve been busy preparing for the upcoming GBDuro, and it’s turned into a substantial undertaking. For those who don’t know about the event, I (and around 15 others) will be setting off from Land’s End on the 1st August to ride self-sufficiently all the way to John O’Groats, via Wales, over a mixture of road and gravel. In light of the current Covid-19 situation, we now have to carry everything we need with us from start to finish, and are not permitted [...]

The Week In Riding: After taking a few days off the bike, followed by a couple of shorter days to ease the legs back into it, I embarked on my biggest ever week of riding. I wanted to do a run of back-to-back long rides to see how my body adapted to the build up of fatigue. Having historically always stuck to a pretty regimented training plan, where I would take a recovery day every three days on average, I'm not that accustomed to getting back on the bike day after day and riding very long hours again and [...]

Getting Into Gravel: For a lot of people, including myself, gravel riding is a pretty new concept. Coming from the road, I had to change my style of riding a lot, and embrace the fact that I was a beginner again. Bike handling was always something I felt confident with on the road, so I was surprised by how many new skills I was having to hone for gravel. When it came to making the transition into off-roading, or when I was heading out into some more difficult terrain for the first time, I went with the approach of [...]

The week in riding: Without planning on it, over the past week I spent more hours in the saddle than ever before. I might have trained harder in my former life as a full-time cyclist, but I've never ridden as much. And I've definitely never enjoyed myself on the bike more. It's taken a long time for me to unlearn my previous way of riding, and to be able to just kick back and have fun with it. There always had to be a strict plan, a watching of the numbers, and a constant analysis. There's definitely a place [...]

Who am I and where am I starting from? Before launching into the riding, routes and reviews of this series, I realised I should quickly give a little background on myself. I was formerly a professional road racer, and spent all of my time on skinny tyres and tarmac. During my years spent riding in the World Tour, and those spent getting there, I barely touched the rough stuff. In fact I didn't even own a mountain bike, let alone a gravel bike, until the last couple of years. For the past six months I've been riding long distances [...]

We are really excited to introduce ‘The Gravel Diaries’; a series of weekly blogs that we will be hosting on our website. During the lockdown we’ve been seeing more and more riders getting out locally on their bikes, and in particular out onto the gravel. It’s inspired us all to ride more, and we’ve decided that we want to create more content based around actually being on bikes; from ride reports and kit reviews, to Komoot routes and lessons learned along the way. We’ve enlisted the help of ex-professional road racer, Molly Weaver, to document her journey into adventure [...]

The Kinesis G2 is definitely up there as one of our favourite, and often underrated, bikes in store. As soon as we got a chance to test one out, we knew it had the ride quality to match its style. We've always been very careful to only stock bikes that we believe are the best in their respective categories. Some of these receive the recognition and acclaim that they deserve, whilst bikes such as the G2 fly under the radar. The Kinesis G2 is nimble, fast handling and plenty tough enough for the rough and tumble of UK gravel [...]