Further Merry England: The Long Way There
Ride over. Race hard. Ride back.
Words: Justyna Jarczok Photos: Tom Hill/Restrap
Getting “there” Looking back, the hardest part of Merry England (one of the events in the Further calendar) wasn't the race. It was getting to the start line. Flying to England would've been easy. Boring. So one morning, over coffee and a map of Europe, I convinced myself the obvious solution was to ride there instead.
A week later, somewhere between Poland and Cambridge, I'd stopped trying to stay dry. It rained almost every day. When it wasn't raining, there was a thunderstorm. When there wasn't a thunderstorm, there was a headwind that felt strangely personal. Eventually, wet just became normal, and by the time I rolled into the UK, I'd already earned my rest days. The sun finally appeared, pints in the pubs tasted better than ever.
This was my second time at Merry England (called Equinox East last year), and I didn't come back for the route. I came back for everything that happens between all the riding.
Camille has created something that doesn't really feel like an event. It feels more like a reunion. The fire burns long into the night, all the food deserves its own blog post, and nobody seems particularly interested in going back to their tents. There are barely any photos from those evenings in my gallery, which probably says everything.
The Plan
I actually had a race strategy this time. Reach the first singletrack first. Not to make a statement, I simply hate technical traffic. I'd rather spend a few extra watts in the opening minutes than spend the next hour braking, unclipping and apologising to others. So when the race started, I committed. It worked, as the group stretched out, I entered the first trail exactly where I wanted to, and for a brief moment, I thought this might actually become a straightforward day.
Then England reminded me what British gravel really means. Grass pretending to be gravel. Gravel pretending to be tarmac. Ruts. Farm tracks disappearing into fields for no obvious reason. More ruts. Trails that look perfectly rideable until they suddenly change into rock gardens or sand pits. The route was brilliant, though. The surface was character-building as always - then the temperature started climbing.
After nearly a week of riding across Europe in cold(ish) rain, my body simply refused to understand what was happening. Within an hour, I stopped thinking about racing and started navigating from one petrol station to the next. Forget pacing. Forget power. Forget tactics. Just give me something cold, FFS!
Chocolate milk suddenly sounded like the greatest drink humanity had ever invented. Unfortunately, my relationship with Red Bull has become slightly unhealthy. So naturally, one ended up in my bottle as well.
If you've ever wondered whether chocolate milk and Red Bull belong together... ...they don't.
A few kilometres later, I was lying on the side of the road negotiating with my own stomach and questioning every nutritional decision I'd made that morning. Sports nutritionists, please avert your eyes!
Looking back, that probably sums up the race better than anything else. A good ride and an absolute shitshow are not mutually exclusive. This one somehow managed to be both.
For the next few hours, I survived almost entirely on water. Every petrol station became an oasis, every patch of shade felt priceless. At one stop, I bought ice pops and stuffed them under my jersey, briefly convinced I’d discovered professional-level cooling. Twenty minutes later, they’d melted into sticky syrup, and I’d somehow become the most attractive object in Norfolk for every flying insect in the county. Still not my worst decision of the day - that was buying a bottle of flavoured water only to pour it over my own head.
Hours passed. Mostly water. Very little food. Dropped like 5 places down? Very little confidence that things were going to improve. And then, as ultras so often do, the race quietly changed without asking permission. One gel stayed down. Then another. The stomach stopped arguing, and the legs slowly came back. Somewhere in the middle of nowhere, I realised I was back in the game.
Stand Up. Bounce Back.
Those two sentences stayed in my head while “Enjoy the Silence” by Depeche Mode played on repeat for what felt like half the night.
Night has become my favourite time to ride lately. Everything gets quieter, simpler, colder, emptier. The world shrinks to the beam of your front light, the sound of tyres rolling across whatever the British insist on calling gravel, and the occasional pair of glowing eyes staring back from the hedgerows.
You stop overthinking things. The next corner is enough. The next gate. The next trail disappearing into the darkness. Those are the hours I wish someone else could experience, and not because anything spectacular happens, but because nobody would believe how strange they become.
Somewhere around midnight, I was singing Depeche Mode at full volume to completely empty roads, before politely asking rabbits and sheep to vacate the trail. They seemed deeply unimpressed. The only conversation that really mattered, though, was the one happening inside my own head: “Please, how about you don't puncture now, Justine.”
Every now and then, my Suunto watch buzzed with messages from friends following the tracker. I tried hard not to look. Before sunset, I'd made a deal with myself that I'd check the tracker after sunrise. Until then, the only rider I wanted to beat was the version of myself who'd been lying in the grass a few hours earlier, convinced the race was slipping away. Only after the finish did I fully realise I'd opened a comfortable gap with around 200 kilometres to go.
The night rolled on in that strange, ultra rhythm where time stops making much sense. Petrol stations became tiny checkpoints between songs. During one of those stops, I somehow managed to sprint through a shop, buy everything I needed in under a minute, nearly choke on a bottle of water outside and immediately get asked whether I was running from the police.
Just before sunrise, my nose decided it wanted to contribute to the story as well. A nosebleed felt oddly appropriate. By then, one more thing wasn't going to change much. Then, almost without noticing, the sky began to change colour and to be honest, the final kilometres felt strangely peaceful.
That's one of the things I love most about ultras. They spend hours convincing you that everything is falling apart before quietly giving it all back. I rolled across the finish line with the sunrise.
483 km. 3,528 m climbed. 24.1 km/h average.
20 hours and 54 minutes elapsed, including 50 mins of breaks (absolute luxury).
My fastest ultra to date. And enough to take the overall win.
Race Fast, Live Slow
I'd come to England hoping to race fast. I hadn't expected that my strongest performance over this distance would also include vomiting by the roadside, surviving for hours on water alone, experimenting with every cooling strategy except sensible ones, and making enough nutritional mistakes to keep me entertained for the rest of the season.
I unclipped, lay down on the grass and stared at the sky. My eyes were a dead giveaway that I had way too much caffeine in my bloodstream. Everything I owned was sticky. My bags looked absolutely horrible. My legs resembled an abstract painting. I probably smelled like fermented fish, and my head was spinning as if I'd just come back from a techno party.
The fire was already going, and riders kept rolling in, each carrying their own version of almost the same story. Before long, nobody cared about finishing times anymore. The conversations drifted towards punctures, wrong turns, the heatwave, and the moments that had almost broken us before somehow becoming the funniest memories of the weekend.
Beer, hog roast, coffee, legs that could finally stay still for a while, and a mind slowly winding down.
The next morning, most people headed for the train station. I clipped back in, turned east, and started riding home across Europe. Because if riding to the race had seemed like a good idea, then riding back home only felt like the obvious next chapter.
Because why not?
