I’ve entered this sponsored ride in September and was wondering what the course is like. I get the feeling that my hardtail might be overkill if most of it is gravel paths and the like. My other option is to use my Crosscheck but it has cheap Shimano RS010 wheels on it so I wanted to be sure the course wasn’t too much for them as well.
Cheers.

I’ve ridden the route separately in a day, nice day out, bit dull, not technical but the challenge is to do the mileage. you could easily do it on a CX bike. I did it on a hard tail and it was largely overkill.

Many thanks, I was hoping not to drag around 2.3 tyres over that sort of distance.

I’d say a decent, lightweight hardtail is ideal. I’d add some quick rolling tyres of course as the downslink path goes on for ages. A lightweight 29er would be good but perfectly doable on a CX bike too.

One tip, start very early unless you like getting held up at anything remotely “technical”. I.e. small tree roots. I found it very annoying that on an off-road ride, lots of people struggled to actually ride “off-road”. Lots of bottlenecks before we got onto the downslink path.

CX fine for the most part as the downslink makes up 1/3rd of the mileage. A few awkward bits over the north downs and the last big descent are better on a proper mtb. I’ll be doing it on an XC hardtail this year.