RAB write-up, day 5: Haydock to Carlisle

Planned route: 116.4mi, 5,558ft
Actual route: 118.15mi, 6,247ft

It was back to a 6.30 start for day 5, so I was up at 4.45, dressed, fed and prepped bright and early. I say prepped ... I was as ready as I could be, but I didn't feel ready enough. Day 5 is long, and also turned out to be the first in a sequence of days where the official elevation quoted was a serious under-estimate. For someone who motivated himself by watching the figures clock up on my Wahoo, thinking I had to do five and a half thousand feet but actually having six and a quarter to do ... well, you can imagine how I came to feel, later in the day.

Day 5 was also the last of the very hot days. So hot was it, in fact, that I appear in most of the official photographs that day with great globs of suncream all over my face, not properly rubbed in. It's not a great look, and one of many reasons you won't be seeing many photographs on here that actually have me in them. But here's a picture that's a bit more representative of day 5:

Because 5 was the day the landscape really started to change - without wanting to sound like the clichéd southerner I am, it started to feel like we were properly up north, and the hills got a bit more mountainous to prove it.

The day's route started by working its way through Chorley and skimming off the edge of Preston. The spire of St Walburgh's church in Preston really stood out, even from a long way off; I later read that it is the tallest church spire in England (i.e. not including cathedral spires like Salisbury and Norwich), at 91.4m. It certainly caught my eye and, like many places I cycled through on RAB, made me want to revisit another time when I could just be a sightseer: Perth was another such place, and Penrith. There were other places that didn't begin with P too...

At the day's first pit stop, I gave up on trying to manage the pain of my saddle sores by myself, and went to see the medic. At this point an attractive young lady asked me to step into her tent and drop my shorts, something that doesn't happen to me every day. She - doctor, nurse or medical student, I don't know, and at that point didn't care - proceeded to strap me up with gauze pads and Rock Tape, effectively adding an extra layer of protection to my blistered bottom, and reducing the chafing of some very sore skin. And if I could have bought her a box of chocolates or a bunch of flowers, I would, because the difference this made was immediate and significant. I won't lie and say it didn't hurt down there any more, because it did - but it was dialled right down and, crucially, stopped getting worse. For the first time in three days, I started to see a way in which I might be able to complete the event. It was a lengthy pit-stop, of course, and on a day when the briefing had warned not to dilly-dally at pits, but it had been time well spent. The lovely doctor, with her reel of Rock Tape, was my new best friend.

The scenery from then on helped my mood too, as the route wound its way through the picturesque Trough of Bowland, towards the River Lune and some scenic bridges. In no time, the second pit of the day hoved into view, in the pretty lakeland town of Milnthorpe. In the shadow of the church, a large banner proclaimed that we were now "over half way there", with only 480 miles to go to John O'Groats. I know this was supposed to me motivational, but when's the last time you cycled 480 miles, let alone in four and a half days? Still, after dallying just long enough to eat and get a photo with the banner, I pressed quickly on, knowing that the hills of the Lake District, and more specifically Shap Fell, lay ahead. And after briskly negotiating Kendal, and a quick blast up the A6, there it was.

All the worst hills have names; Shap, the ascent to Shap Fell, is pretty hard, but would only just scrape into my "top 5 hardest hills on RAB". Because it's long, rather than hellishly steep - it just goes on and on. And like some other hills on the ride I could mention (Cothelstone and the Lecht being examples), Shap starts with its steepest section, then flattens a bit, then just rolls upwards. As it turns out, for a hill I'd really worried about, the ascent of Shap was fine - not fast, by any means, and I did have a breather half-way up, but it was fine. Having a Deloitte cheer squad at the top was a nice touch too, to wave big flags and ring cow bells - it really added to the sense of achievement. Shap was done ... no time to stop and enjoy it though, time was ticking, and I was, as ever, keen to get to basecamp. Each day had a notional deadline of 7pm - if you weren't at camp by then, you ran the risk of being scooped up by the broom wagon. I did not want that to happen to me, and after my longer than usual morning pit stop, I was behind my personal schedule. I did stop at the extra mini pit stop laid on in Shap village though, needing fuel for the longer than usual third leg.

The bulk of the ride from there was following the A6 to, and through, Penrith, a town I've driven past so many times on trips to Scotland but never been into, much less visited properly. From there, it was a long drag to basecamp, just south of Carlisle, with a couple of saw-tooth grippy hills near the end, to finish me off. As it was, I rolled into camp at 6.05pm, more than eleven and a half hours after I'd set off that morning. I was properly, properly tired, but pleased to have beaten the broom wagon comfortably. I still had the joy of ripping off Rock Tape to come, of course, as well as the evening's duties: shower, eat, prep bike. To that list, I could now add "visit medic" for a rendezvous with the lovely doc who gave me two choices - either she could give me more pads and Rock Tape and I could attend to myself in the morning, or I could come and see her again at 5.30am when the medics' tent opened, and she could sort me out. Lovely as she was, I opted to take the supplies and sort myself out. I mean, how hard could that be? Read the day 6 write-up to find out.

As day 5 ended, the rain arrived...