Everyone likes an honest, value for money, fun-but-challenging bike event. Well, most people I know do anyway. Hit the North, I reckon, is all of those things and more. So when I see that someone else is also sticking their neck out and organising something at a grass-roots level, I’m immediately interested.

As soon as I read what The Bowland Badass was all about, I sent off my entry. It’s basically a very long (160 miles!), hilly and consequently very tough road sportive in the north of England that costs next to nothing to enter but also promises a signed route (important for directionally-challenged fools like me) and some support in the form of feed stations. Also pretty important for a 160 mile route.

I’m loving this trend towards low-cost, high-value road events, almost pioneered last year by my mate Allen at Polocini. The whole sportive market was starting to get too congested with dozens of overly expensive, oversubscribed events with very little value for money and unimaginative routes – luckily events such as Allen’s and now ‘The Badass’ are shaking things up, injecting a healthy dose of punk rock into an otherwise endangered format.

And if you’re worried or dismiss sportives due to their supposed ‘non-competitive’ nature, they can be great fun if the route is brutal enough, because you don’t have to keep stopping to check a map and quite honestly you can get away with treating it as a race 😉