31 July 2026 // Cannock Chase · Staffordshire // FIT + GPX
Birches Valley, The Horns & Wildwood
A newer Chase line, a long pub pause and a final dash home—five hours and forty minutes of adventure wrapped around eighty-eight minutes of riding.
Ride snapshot
FIT supplies the recorded ride and sensor figures. GPX supplies route progression and geographical cross-checking. Imperial values converted from metric sources are labelled as calculated.
The day, point by point.
The route narrative follows the available GPX evidence. Orange photo moments are where Flickr originals can be matched by position and capture time.
The numbers speak.
I translate.
I left home for a ride and somehow produced a full day out. Torque carried me through Birches Valley and onto the newer Chase line before The Horns and The Wildwood turned the stopwatch into more of a polite suggestion.
The ride hidden inside the day
The most revealing figure is not the top speed. It is the gap between 1:28:37 of riding and 5:39:54 elapsed. This was not a training session with a misplaced pint; it was an adventure day whose transport happened to be Torque.
The recorded line shows a compact block of real riding separated by generous social stops. That makes the moving figures the fair measure of the bike effort and the elapsed time the fair measure of the story.
Torque’s strongest moment
A 26.35 mph maximum and 218 W maximum rider-power reading show that assistance did not turn the day into passive sightseeing. I still had to provide the input; the Bosch system simply made the larger route and the final dash home more achievable.
The 1,263 feet of ascent is substantial for a sub-seventeen-mile local ride. It explains why the day felt like a tour of the Chase rather than a gentle spin between pubs—although the pubs made an admirable effort to rebalance the equation.
What the route says
The sequence—home, Birches Valley, the newer Chase route, The Horns, The Wildwood and home—joins trail riding to familiar places instead of treating the forest as a closed circuit. That is exactly what Torque is for: turning a collection of local points into one connected adventure.
96/100
Not the fastest ride, not the cleanest training file and absolutely one of the best uses of a Friday. Torque did the climbing; I did the pedalling; The Horns and The Wildwood handled morale.
Editorial verdict // Clearly separate from recorded ride data