We are raising money for the Special Care Baby Unit at Winchester which is where Noah spent the first few days of his life.

Having said that we would ride the length of Bournemouth Bay along the prom we were informed late on Saturday by a friend that the Annual Race For Life was being held on the Seafront on Sunday!

 

So we had a quick rethink and decided to do the Itchen Way from St Catherines Hill, Winchester to Woodmill, Southampton instead.  This basically follows the old tow path along the Itchen Navigation for 10 miles and was going to be more technically challenging as unlike the Seafront it isn’t flat concrete, this also meant that doing it on my 5 foot Giraffe as originally intended wasn’t going to be possible so I reverted to my Cross Country Unicycle.  Tim and Alex deserve a special mention at this point because they were both riding unicycles with small diameter wheels which meant that they would be pedalling more to cover the same distance, neither had ridden further than 3 miles before and Tim had learned to ride specifically for this challenge and hadn’t ridden off-road at all!

 

We departed from St Catherines Hill Car park just before 11am with Alex’s dad Ian bringing up the rear on his Mountain Bike carrying a charity box.  Ian did a great job of collecting money from passers by and had the full range of responses from ‘sure here’s a tenner’ to ‘No, you shouldn’t be riding on the footpath anyway’ - despite the fact that we were travelling at less than Jogging pace and doing it for charity. 

 

The path started as a wide flat gravel path, just after the M3 it was down to a footpath’s width but was still a good freshly laid gravel surface, however soon after Shawford it deteriorated to muddy undulating single track with sections where the undergrowth including nettles and Brambles was encroaching on the path.  The rest of the route down to the M27 alternated between smooth tarmac and very overgrown muddy single track with some short sections that were not navigable on a unicycle, there were also a few footbridges to negotiate as the route weaved back and forth over the old canal, on one such bridge over a sluice gate Alex lost his balance and his unicycle ended up in the water, luckily it floated and Ian was able to reach down and grab it!

 

After 3 hours+ we arrived at Mansbridge and the final stretch through Riverside Park to finish at Woodmill where we all enjoyed Ice Cream.  Total distance 10.4 miles in 3½hrs.

 

However, given that I’d done rides of this distance before and to make up for the fact that I hadn’t been able to ride the Giraffe, I decided that I needed to make it more challenging to earn my sponsorship, so I rode back to Winchester the way we had come and then carried on back to Alresford, I arrived home totally spent and very sore just before 7pm having completed a total of 30 miles in 8 hours.

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