Can I ride a 200km 12 months in a row? #5: The 300km DIY to the North

If you’ve been following this series then you’ll have heard me say things about how the weather has been kind, and my luck will run out at some point. Things like that. Well, here we all are.

A bit of background to this ride: My car decided it required a new clutch approaching Junction 29 of the M1, which was sub-optimal.

Anyway, cue some faffing and an amusing quote for a repair from the main dealer in Sheffield before I got the car towed to somewhere that would fix it for less than a kidney. Sheffield’s 300km away from Bath, and Dan said he fancied a night on two wheels, so I registered the ride as a DIY audax and we set off on Sunday evening. Here’s me looking happy at the start…

…and here’s Cirencester, at one-fifth distance. 

Last time I tried to ride to Sheffield, getting this far was 3 hours into driving rain and a headwind, and then Dan’s crank fell apart and we had to get the train home from Oxford Parkway. This time, it was easy! Although it was still into a bit of a headwind. Don’t worry though, it got harder.

The Cotswolds were as the Cotswolds always are: lumpy, and bigger than you think. There’s a lovely road out of Cirencester that gradually rises to the plateau, at a point in the ride where the legs are fresh and a gentle climb for a long time still feels like a good thing. By the time I got to Broadway tower it was dark, and the kickers through the pretty villages had done some damage. The flat smash to Stratford was okay, even the traffic-free bit on the gravel of the old railway. At the 24-hour garage some guy rolled out of a taxi, absolutely battered, and insisted on giving us a hug. Then there was a brief downpour, timed exactly to the point that we were safe under a nice roof. And we thought: that was lucky. And that was the last time we were lucky for a while. There are not many photos of the next bit.

It was always going to rain. It started raining not long out of Stratford, as we wandered through the lanes south-east of Birmingham, and then it was properly raining by the time we were picking our way through the heavily-populated bit around Coventry. Trudging through the outskirts of Kenilworth in the dark was never going to be the highlight of this ride, but even less so in a downpour. By the time we got to Nuneaton we were soaked, and tired, and cold. Google helpfully informed us that both the McDonald’s restaurants in town were open all night, so we promptly made our way to the one nearest the route, which wasn’t: cue a very unwelcome detour all the way to the other side of town. By this time it was nearly 4am, so we voted to eat a lot of chicken and sit it out until it was light, with only some mad aussie biker for company. Company we weren’t really in the mood for, to be honest, but if a mad aussie biker wants to talk to you then you’re getting talked to, aren’t you? 

We shivered off just after 5am, and the rain was abating, and maybe things were looking up, and then I immediately got a puncture. I’d stuck some posh wheels on the Lauf because I’d been planning to use it for faster rides over the summer:

But my other audax bike’s in bits, and I couldn’t be bothered to swap the wheels back, and they’re running tubes because they wouldn’t seal tubeless in the limited time I could be bothered to try. It was a reminder to me why I like tubeless: a tiny bit of wire from a tyre casing poking through the tread and you’re on the side of the road for fifteen minutes hoping you’ve packed a tube with a long enough valve (I hadn’t; Dan had). My bad for not trying harder with the tyre booster. I was glad Dan was with me all through the ride, but especially at this point: If I’d had to deal with a puncture on my own at 5am, in the rain, with six hours still to do, on 20 minutes of sleep against the window of a fast food outlet, I feel like I’d have probably sacked it off and got a train the rest of the way. Especially since it happened right outside Nuneaton station.

At some point between Stratford and Nuneaton my Hammerhead had helpfully informed me that the next climb was 90km up the road. This is good news, right? That means nice flat roads, right? Sadly not: Nuneaton to Derby was mostly on rolling terrain that was never flat, and never quite made the threshold for what the GPS considered an actual climb. It was draining riding. The weather had cleared up, though, and the sun came out. Eventually it was flat, along the traffic-free Cloud Trail, before we looped round east of Derby and rode the newly-resurfaced river path in from near Borrowash, which is excellent. As was the Cinnamon swirl at Bear Iron Gate in town, so much so that I only remembered to photograph it after I’d scoffed about half.

One leg to go, and the first bit was a gentle climb for a long time, at a point in the ride where that just feels like an endless, depressing slog. Then, ten Hammerhead-categorised climbs in the last 40km – almost half of all the climbs in the ride – except it was basically the same as the bit after Nuneaton, and this time the rolling roads had just made the cut as climbs. So we ticked them off, and then there was one actual, long, final climb out of Dronfield to get up to the garage where the car was waiting with its new clutch, ready for the long drive back down south. 

Five down, seven to go. This isn’t what I was intending, but they all count. The next one might be a bit different, and involve trains in a planned kind of a way. Stay tuned.

https://www.strava.com/activities/15033653217

PS If you’re in or around Sheffield then I can recommend M&T Transmissions for clutch/gearbox type stuff. Not a sponsored thing or anything, they were just really good.