The North Race has the best brief in British ultra-cycling: leave Restrap's factory in Leeds at noon on Saturday 5 September 2026, ride as far north as you can, and be back by noon Sunday. Self-supported, no drafting, no fixed route - just you, a GPS tracker, and a compass bearing. The prize maths is equally blunt: £10 for every 10 km of latitude gained, £10 for every 1,000 m climbed, winner takes all.
How far can that format stretch? Further than seems reasonable: the current record belongs to Doug Hart, who covered 497 km of latitude across a 692 km ride. Sit with those numbers a moment.
Our plan is more mortal: a 472 km out-and-back drawn in Komoot (route-building is a routing tool's job - PitStopper's job starts afterwards), from Leeds up through the Dales and Kielder to the England-Scotland border, touch Scotland, turn around, ride home. Load the GPX into PitStopper, set the start clock to Saturday 12:00, and the whole ride gets timestamps - which for a noon-to-noon race turns out to be the entire game.
First, can we even make the cutoff?
PitStopper's cycling model is gradient-aware (it saw the climbing and quietly added "+10% rest buffer for 6,113 m"). Sweeping the base speed:
| Flat-ground base speed | Estimated ride time | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| 22 km/h | 24h 09m | Nine minutes past the cutoff. DQ. |
| 24 km/h | 22h 08m | Home at 10:08 - breakfast in hand |
| 26 km/h | 20h 26m | Comfortable, if you're not |
The rest of this post follows the 24 km/h rider: back at 10:08 Sunday, with under two hours of margin. Respect to anyone who watches that cutoff maths and books the full 692 km anyway.
(Full disclosure: that rider is not me - a noon-to-noon 472 km is more ride than I've got, and I'll be checking the results after the dust settles rather than dot-watching it live. Which stings a little, because the race starts at Restrap HQ and my bike is already half-dressed in their big bags - regulars will have spotted them in the photos dotted around this site. All the kit, none of the legs.)
The race is mostly a night ride
The Clock Time panel lays the problem out before you've searched for a single shop - a 22h 8m estimate, an "Overnight Trip" warning, and the day's daylight budget next to a last-quarter moon:
One click on Add Daylight POIs and those times land on the route itself:
| Event | At | Race clock |
|---|---|---|
| Sunset (Sat) | km 167.5 | 19:57 |
| Dusk (Sat) | km 181.6 | 20:35 |
| Dawn (Sun) | km 378.7 | 05:49 |
| Sunrise (Sun) | km 392.2 | 06:27 |
Read the middle two rows together: 197 km of the ride - 42% of it - happens in the dark, under a waning last-quarter moon. And the geography is unkind about which 197 km: the border crossing at km 236 lands around 23:30. On this plan, you touch Scotland by headtorch, in the emptiest terrain of the whole route, with the entire return through the North Pennines still ahead.
385 resupply points. At night: zero.
The corridor search found plenty within 500 m of the line: 208 cafés, 87 convenience stores, 38 supermarkets, 25 petrol stations, 21 bakeries. A daytime feast. But this race isn't ridden in the daytime - so we read every place's OpenStreetMap opening_hours against the clock model. The night tells a very different story:
| Place | At | Race clock | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Spar + Texaco garage | km 163.8 | 19:47 | Open until 22:00 - the last reliable top-up |
| Kielder Garage | km 251.3 | 23:50 | Shut since 19:00 |
| Co-op | km 280.3 | 01:09 | Shut since 22:00 |
| Hexham: Tesco Extra, Aldi, Lidl, Waitrose... | km 305.4 | 02:19 | A whole town of food, all of it shut (Tesco closed at midnight - missed by 2h19) |
| Penny on the Move | km 363.4 | 05:07 | Opens 05:00. Open for seven minutes when you arrive. |
From the Spar at 19:47 to Penny on the Move at 05:07: just under 200 km and nine and a bit hours with nothing open on the route. Whatever crosses the border with you gets carried from Wensleydale. (And a word of genuine affection for Penny on the Move in Middleton-in-Teesdale, whose 5 am opening hours make it, on this plan, the most important shop in the North of England.)
One important nuance before you strip the tri-bars off in despair: petrol stations are the night rider's wildcard. The route passes 28 of them, but only 5 carry tagged opening hours in OSM at all - and untagged does not mean shut. Pay-at-pump runs all night, and plenty of forecourt shops keep hours nobody has mapped yet. Two untagged garages sit squarely in our night window: Border Auto Services at km 228 (22:44, just before the border) and Teesdale Service Station at km 363 (05:07). PitStopper's popup gives you a Street View button for exactly this job - five minutes of armchair recon on those two forecourts could redraw the whole night plan. (And if you visit, tell OSM what you find: the next rider will thank you.)
The four places with an explicit 24/7 tag tell their own story though: two are within 1.5 km of the start line in Leeds, and none are in the night. Check before race day, not in Kielder Forest at midnight.
Out-and-back means everything happens twice
Because the outbound and return legs mostly take different roads, surprisingly few places get a true double visit: the 500 m search corridor brushes about a hundred POIs from both directions, but only around twenty sit within 100 m of the road both times - properly ride-past-the-door-twice territory, mostly where the two legs share tarmac near Leeds and through the pinch points. PitStopper treats every pass separately either way: same shop, two entries, two distances, two arrival times, two verdicts - and each pass's popup shows its own distance from the road, so a "second visit" that's actually 400 m across the valley is easy to spot. The popup for the Tesco Express 400 metres from the start line (20 m off the route, both ways) says it best:
The Sunday trap hides in this doubling. A Co-op two kilometres from the start advertises Mo-Sa 00:00-24:00; Su 12:00-18:00 - open around the clock on Saturday as you leave, shut on Sunday morning as you crawl back past it at 10:04, fifty-six minutes before it opens. Sunday hours are the quiet enemy of every noon-noon race: your entire return leg happens in the one morning of the week when Britain's shops sleep in.
The prize maths, priced by PitStopper
The route gains 1.48° of latitude ≈ 164 km north and climbs 6,113 m. At The North Race's exchange rate:
| Line item | Amount |
|---|---|
| 16 complete 10 km blocks of latitude | £160 |
| 6 complete 1,000 m blocks of climbing | £60 |
| Total, if nobody beats you | £220 |
There's something rather brilliant about a prize you can price from your GPX before you've turned a pedal: the format pays for exactly the two things that hurt - latitude and altitude - so route design becomes an investment decision. A flatter line up the coast buys latitude pounds; a bolder one through the Pennines buys climbing pounds; our route splits the difference at £220. And the ceiling is gloriously real: Doug Hart's record ride was worth nearly £500 on latitude alone. Winner takes all - so the number PitStopper puts on your plan isn't really prize money, it's the opening bid everyone else has to beat.
Do the same for your plan
The workflow is the point: route in a routing tool, plan in PitStopper. Draw your own bid for the north in Komoot or Ride with GPS, load the GPX, set the clock to Saturday noon, add the daylight markers, and search the categories that keep you moving - then read every opening-hours badge against your arrival times, not the shop's idea of a normal weekend. Export it all as a FIT course and your bike computer carries the plan: every still-open shop, the sunset, and the turn for home. Good luck to everyone rolling out of Leeds in September - we'll be checking the results.
The North Race details from thenorthrace.co.uk. Resupply data © OpenStreetMap contributors, opening hours as tagged in July 2026 - verify anything your ride depends on. Route planned in Komoot; analysis on PitStopper.
