Is it any good? | Ride London 100 Review

I finally have done my first ride London and here are my thoughts on the course, how it went and what was provided.

righto it’s 4:20 in the morning um it’s raining let’s go do a ride London we’re cycling over to ride London now well the idea of this video is basically just ask is ride London worth it unfortunately I never got to do the S route wow this my first ride London total so I’m going to find out I’m going to judge the the route the surface how busy it is I’ve heard it’s a bit of a crash fish so little bit worried about that but hopefully the sun comes up bit later it dries up these roads I suspect there’s going to be a few punches today I’ve just rolled over the start line I didn’t realize that you just roll over I thought they going to start you as a wave but that’s fine um still just kind of stuck in the traffic here so everyone’s going pretty slow we’ll get into it soon we’re getting close to 20K in now and the punctures have been numerous I can honestly tell you there’s been minimum 100 punctures we’re only up to 20K he on the line bik to get home that’s punches before the event itself it really was raining hard and when it rains hard and fast like it does like this in the UK you tend to get a lot of debris and rubbish that comes onto the roads and you do have a lot of punctures I think for an event as ride London there were so many punctures I didn’t get a chance to film them all but really they probably should have had a few motorbikes rolling around just with puncture repair kits just to help people out especially because you can predict that it’s going to happen because of the weather we had beforehand so it’s just kind of started opening up we’re kind of getting towards the outskirts of now they’ve kind of just stuck us on the rubbish roads you don’t really get to see anything don’t see much of the city so bit disappointed with the starch I know you come over tower bridge on the finish so that might be better though well we’ve had our first roadblock uh just uh I don’t know what’s happened here but we’ve had to stop and I guess we’ll get going in a sec on that topic of stops there were three times that Laura and I actually had to stop because they had to let cars through and these weren’t just um the site cars or the event cars these were just public cars so we stopped for a total of about 5 to S minutes just waiting for cars to come through and to be honest just close the roads off keep them closed it doesn’t matter the vent’s too big to have this also if they are doing this I think they should probably have the stopping sections where they have the sensors to stop your chip time as 5 to 7 minutes can quite significantly impact your average speed if that’s what you’re going for 50k in another 50 punches uh it’s finally just started to reduce the chaos and the scenery is starting to get a little bit better as well now so I’m starting to enjoy the ride a bit more like setting into my own Rhythm as we really started to get into the ride here I noticed that there were two people one with a Time TR bike one on his Arrow bars there were a few other Arrow bars as well but I didn’t see people in them but man you’ve got to get out those Arrow bars on an event like this like surely if you watch this channel a lot I love time tral bikes and I love time traving but this is not the place to have that bike get rid of them don’t let them in you can’t be on the aob bars with this many people around no go we’ve just ticked over mile 50 and I can’t believe how busy it is still absolutely stacked the whole Road left to right both sides just see my first crash unfortunately just a lot lots of focus for two guys they seem to be okay It’s relatively low speed I think they’ll be all right we’ve come to the second stop we totally dodged the first one and you got to come off your bike and walk quite a long way but thankfully they actually stop your time so it means when you go in and come back out you’re on the same time basically so I mean you can spend as much time as you want in here I guess it’s over taking a piss a little bit but you know you don’t get punished for grabbing some food it’s good whilst I’m waiting it’s a good chance to review the course and uh if I had to give it one word so far it would be easy but I think that has it advantages so if you want to have a really fast course like you’re with a good group of guys and you want to leave early you can really push it the time that we left which was closer to 7: a.m. it’s too busy to push it you can’t really get the speed up CU you’re always trying to overtake people um but then on the other side if you’re you know more of a beginner I think anyone could do this ride if you just start cycling you can handle this ride no problem there’s nothing steep there’s nothing too hard it’s just very rolling and we haven’t had anything too difficult yet one thing I would have recommended stopping at the first stop instead of the second one here like we have because there’s quite a long queue to get simple stuff like like coffee and a snack and things like that so I’ll stop at the first one as I’m talking about the other two stops so there’s three there’s one at the first quarter one in the middle one at the third quarter I didn’t get any b-roll footage but they looked like they were better stocked and less people at them so there was more access to food and gels and stuff like that especially the first stop if you can stop there get loads of food and gels your time’s paused anyway another thing that I noticed is that there wasn’t I couldn’t find any carbohydrate drinks they were given out water which is great but I quite like to take my carbs through a drink and I’d rather fill up that way then just fill up on gels as well just a personal thing that one as for how the rest of the ride went I didn’t film it so I’m talking to you now it was much of the same just kind of like General Countryside the road surface was fine for here in the UK the norm amount of potholes then there was one Hill towards the end I can’t remember what it’s called Post in here it wasn’t a tough Hill I mean it even box Hills a fairly easy Hill and it wasn’t even as hard as Box Hill anyone can get up here really it wasn’t too much of a challenge and if you’re still looking for a very fast time it won’t really get in your way apart from that Hill the only bits that really bothered me on the ride were the narrower congestion zones so sometimes it went from both sides of the road down to one lane and this is where really tightened up and you just couldn’t get past people there were just too many people to really hold that your own personal speed or if you’re going for a faster time you had to be shouting all the time on your right on your right well we’re done we’re at the Finish like 166k or whatever that was yeah the ride was uh I’m going to give the whole thing a six out of 10 there’s a few things that annoyed me and the weather wasn’t one of them the uh we did get down ped on again but there was one there was three more where we had to stop come to a hard stop and just let some cars come pass I feel like if you closing the roads just close them it just takes away all of your momentum takes away a lot of the enjoyment out of it just to sit and watch Cars go past two minutes so that actually bugged me quite a lot finally on that topic of stops this brings me into crashes for the last time we had to stop for traffic to come through we stopped for about 2 minutes there Laura and I had to come to quite a quick stop as we pulled up to it then a gentleman did actually go into the back of Laura uh it was a slow speed one so thankfully nothing happened but I can see there being another crash situation there on the topic of crashes I did see two more and these were when the zones got narrower as I said earlier in the video as you were leaving London and as you were coming back into the outskirts of it it’s just because the group bunches up more so if you’re going to be Focus it’s got to be those two times I think people were just getting tired and just losing a bit of focus which is why it happened also at the end here I was expecting more food more drinks stuff like that there’s like nothing you get like one high five energy bar and that’s about it I’m very hungry and I want to eat when it comes to the toilet situation they actually did very well here they were basically every 10 Mi along the course and there were signposted about 1 to 2 km before you got to the toilets as well so they were very frequent and you could always get into one if you needed to they were just along the whole course you didn’t PE along the side of the road and actually I didn’t see anyone doing it here are my final conclusions for how the event is and do I like it first of all I think if you’re a beginner this is a great course for you you could very easily get around it you can go at your speed you can do it with a group of friends and there’s good enough fuel along the way also there’s not much climbing in there there’s 1200 M which seems like a lot but it’s very rolling you really hold a lot of speed as you go through the event and that being said it could also be great if it’s your first btif or your first 100 mile as well so I think it’s a very good one for that the other group of people that I think this would be very fun for is if you’re just with a your group of mates could be whoever and you’re all going to go for a fast time you want to see how fast you can do 100 miles then this course is for you like I said it’s fast it’s rolling and it’s mostly uninterrupted if you get lucky I will say as a rating this event gets a 7 out of 10 for for me because it is well organized for just how many people are there it’s almost unfathomable how many people do ride London with that being said I don’t need to do it again if I was going to go with a group of guys and do 100 miles as fast as I could then yeah I would go back but I don’t have the desire to go do it again I just wasn’t wowed by the event the roads are okay the scenery you didn’t see much you didn’t get to see too many of the sight stuff at London the Bridge thing at the end was very cool but you didn’t get to see much of it still with all of that being said I mean we did have Laura and I we had quite a good laugh afterwards and I think a sign of a good event is you tend to talk about it afterwards because you enjoyed it but as I said wasn’t wilded by it well guys I’d love to know what you thought about ride London did you have the same experience as as me or was it different I’ve been Jason this has been cycling unbox I’ll see you in another video