The Tour de Yorkshire

Every now and then, life serves up a pleasant surprise - such as a brand spanking new, top flight bicycle race finishing at the bottom of the road where you live:

The race is Gary Verity's baby. The Welcome to Yorkshire chief executive was pretty keen to make sure the Tour de France's visit to Yorkshire last year left a lasting legacy, and this - with a bit of luck - will be it.

It deserves to be. Even though the Tour de Yorkshire was not enlivened by an epic, fixie prompted pile up - oh, I know you've seen the video already, but shall we just have one more look? It doesn't make you a bad person...

 Oooof! Blimey!

I do sneakily love the brief shoulder check he does after he goes under the tape: "Oh, the peloton's coming. I reckon I can keep up, I'll  just go for it."

...erm yes, so even though it wasn't enlivened by an epic fixie prompted pile up, it was incredibly exciting. The race came bombing down the hill to Peasholm Park, and then climbed up into town, behind where me, Mrs L and the girls were stood; so we heard it pass in a rush of cheers, the noise of the bikes and the clatter of the camera helicopter - which was incredibly low. See if you can spot it in the pictures below.

The commentary over the speakers really brought home the speed that the thing was moving at, naming landmarks that take a good few minutes to walk between ten or twenty seconds apart.

Then the leaders popped into view around the castle headland, with Lars Petter Nordhaug leading the charge.

The field was really spread out, which I wasn't expecting. While I knew without a shadow of a doubt that the stage route would have put me in my grave if I'd tried to ride it, there are no mountains to climb; so I'd kind of imagined that the peloton might saunter across the line together, eagerly chatting about whether to have their post ride pint at the Newcastle Packet or the Golden Ball...

There were acres of carbon fibre, but Team Madison Genesis were there too, with their extremely lovely, stainless steel Volare team bike.

Mrs L, who I have previously assumed is allergic to cycling, then insisted on spending a giggly ten minutes outside Team Wiggins' luxury motor home, trying to catch a glimpse of Sir Bradley trying to make brews for ten men with only a travel kettle:

"Oi Mark. Is it free sugars or four?"

After a good night's kip, I decided that - far from putting me in the ground - riding a bit of Stage 1 would make me feel fabulous.

It was a beautiful morning. There was some rain knocking around, but it was as if it had been turned off immediately before I opened the back door.

The tour followed the River Derwent up to Langdale End, an incredibly pretty hamlet perched on the ridge between two branches of the valley. It has a superb pub called the Moorcock. Even though it wasn't open yet, I could at least stop, take a picture and breath in the beery goodness emanating from its stout stone walls - all simple pleasures denied the peloton the day before.

I know I'm in danger of overusing the word beautiful in relation to this bit of the world, but it really does feel like whoever made it was putting in some extra effort. I love the contrast between the miniature scale of the twisting road and the solid farmhouses, and the looming hills and slopes behind.

Eventually the road leads to Bickley Gate, the back door to Dalby Forest. This is a naughty little climb, with a hairpin bend part of the way up...

...which scrubs off all of the momentum that you really need for the precipice beyond. I was on the more rubbish of my two Viscounts, and in spite of sticking it into bottom gear (and wiggling the gear lever a bit, just in case there were some more gears I'd forgotten about) there was a lot of sweating, swearing and grunting involved in getting to the top.

"Allez? Yeah right...", I thought, hating the massive chasm between my willpower and ambition.

It's so going on ebay. And the money it makes is getting spent on gears. Massive, hill climbing gears with cogs the same diameter as Frank Sidebottom's head.

As is the way on these Saturday morning rides, I more or less had the road to myself. This spotless MGB passed me on the way back down the valley, looking very much at home.

The ride was lovely, but there was another treat when I got home. Some of the pro riders the day before had logged their rides on Strava; so where I'd managed manged just shy of six miles per hour up Howden Hill, Etienne van Empel took it at a somewhat more brisk fourteen and half. And then did another 100km or so of the same right aftrewards.

He did have to wear a LOT of orange stretchy clothes while he was doing it though.

Backwoods

Good lord it was nippy last Saturday!

The girls were (sensibly) still asleep when I fell stupidly out of bed and, like someone in the grip of a terrible addiction, tiptoed silently down to the bike shed...

...which, being made out of tin sheets, made a huge "BONG!" noise when I opened the door.

The neighbours must love me.

There was a short climb, up Red Scar Lane, right at the start of the ride. I was hoping it would make me feel like a Nietzchean superman, in that confusing way that pounding up a steep hill on a machine fundamentally unsuited to gradients sometimes does, but instead it just made me feel "ARRRRGH!"

In fact that's what hills should be called from now on, ARRRGH!s.

Notice too how the namers of this fine street tried to warn off the unwary by giving it a ferocious name.

Anyway, climb done, there was a run through beautiful Forge Valley, followed by a bit of A-road. I was out so early that there were only two or three cars on the stretch out to Brompton, which is where I turned off.

Brompton is one of a string of villages sited in the crease where the flat bottom of the Vale of Pickering turns into the southernmost slope of the North Yorkshire Moors. This was the bit of countryside I really wanted to explore. I rolled the bike up a long, steady climb, until all of a sudden I was in Wykeham Forest, which was a dead ringer for a first season X-Files filming location.

"Wykeham Nursery"? Oh sure.

There were even sinister biosecurity warning signs.

And long, eery roads through the forest that just lead to ... more forest.

Throughout this long, long ride, I more or less had the road to myself. I only passed one car, at the exact moment that I realised that I could no longer feel my deep-frozen feet and was staggering around the verge, wiggling my toes and trying to return some sort of circulation to them.

Then, the road turned right, and I could see light through the trees:

Even through the early morning mist, the view was well worth the climb. It looks a tiny bit Swiss, doesn't it?

I could hear sheep in the valley below - whose name I did not know - calling out "Bar! Bar!" to each other in their Yorkshire accents. But there were none of the noises associated with humans.

Ideally, I wanted to get down into the valley below, as I was fairly sure the river at the bottom was the Derwent; and that would take me back to Scarborough through the back door. And there was actually a wonky sign post, with a board telling me I was on the Moor to Sea cycle route, and that I could follow it to Scarborough. But the signpost was pointing unconvincingly towards a clump of fir trees and a churned up forest track, so I stuck to the tarmac road.

Regular readers will note that I let the Sludgy Green Bike out of the shed. That was because, even though it was cold, the calendar said it was the last day of February, or (in the cycling calendar) the start of Drop Bar Season. A single nervous daffodil by the side of the road backed up this conclusion. All of a sudden, the flat bars on the Inferno just look wrong, while the curly wurly drop bars on my two Viscounts look racy and fast.

The greens and browns of the pine forest even made the most of the Sludgy Green Bike's sludgy green paint. As I churned up the four and a half mile climb that was the payment for the view above, I thought happily to myself about sticking the Sludgy Green Bike on a popular internet auction site, and spending the fifteen to twenty English pounds that it might make on a good day on something frivolous.

Looking at it leaning against that bench with that lovely secret valley behind it though, I started to warm to the thing in spite of myself.

I thought about the quiet magic of exploring by bike. I'd only ridden four and a half miles away from the A-road at the bottom of the hill, but I had the world to myself. Edward Abbey put it like this: "Distance and space are functions of speed and time. Without spending a single dollar from the United States Treasury we could, if we wanted to, multiply the area of our national parks tenfold or a hundredfold - simply by banning the private automobile (from them)."

Not a man to mince his words, Mr Abbey. But he's making a point worth thinking about there: my own ride through this corner of the North Yorkshire Moors National Park could have been over and done with in twenty minutes in a car. But I would have missed the satisfaction of climbing the hill myself. And I would have missed the joy of screaming back down it, rolling on tyres made in Sri Lanka. While the civil war was still being fought. That retail for £5.99 (including shipping). And I would have missed the view through that little window in the tree line entirely.

The free bike: or, The Ballad of the Inferno

Riding a bike often feels amazing. After all, who would  not be seduced by racing though a forest, being whipped across the face by tree branches, on something which looks like it might have been built in a secondary school CDT class? Or leaning your bike over so far in a fast corner that your pedal bounces of the tarmac?

There's another side to cycling that I love and that is the bizarre economics of it. Riding a bike can be incredibly expensive. Bike firms like Specialized will happily let you hand over a massive dump truck full of money in exchange for a bike a bit like Mark Cavendish's. Who buys these things? Chaps who wax their legs, that's who. This approach to cycling is built on a massive surplus of cash and a willingness to indulge certain well known bike firms in their experiment to see what kind of price tag they can attach to a bike before someone claps them on the back in a manly way and congratulates them on the scale and ambition of the joke. Turned one of the simplest and most useful machines ever invented by man into a weird plaything for the super rich? Well done!

There's another way to approach cycling, which is essentially to try not to spend much money on it. Bikes - some bikes - essentially last for ever. While other pieces of machinery expire around them, bikes can keep rolling along, sustained by their extreme simplicity and the surprising expertise that often went into making even basic bikes. My Claud Butler is like this. I bought it from its first owner, whose mum and dad had got it for him as a present for getting a grammar school place back at the end of the 1960's. Every major component is the one that the bike left the factory with, and none of them show any signs of wearing out. You might not think that extreme tight fistedness is a sound way to enjoy something. But the Claud is a little tangerine miracle, full of soul and warmth. As you can see, I invest a fair bit of emotional attachment in the bike. But the bike pays me back. It is game for whatever, and when I catch sight of it, it always makes me smile. There it is, orange paint glowing slightly, looking fast even when it is standing still. Saddle up, handlebars down, fewer spokes on the front wheel than on the back.

The Claud taught me that dramatic improvements in athletic performance can come with practice. I kind of knew that already. But the Claud doled out an actual three dimensional lesson, so that I really know that now. What happened was this: I did a charity bike ride through the night to the coast. It was only 54 miles, and the gradient profile was beautiful; all the climbing was in the first third of the route, and the remainder was gently downhill to the sea. It nearly killed me, and my legs felt so weird - massive and useless - at the end of the ride. Watching the black sky fade to grey behind Blackpool Tower, I promised myself I would never participate in this kind of self inflicted pain-a-thon again.

Luckily the ride was not repeated for a year, which was exactly the amount of time for me to doubt the horribleness of the experience and sign up again. It also allowed me to get a bit of practice in. Well, a lot of practice in, actually. I changed bikes too, dropping the heavy, uncomfortable bike for the Claud. The Claud is, according to the scales, only a kilo lighter. But is has magic and alchemy powering its moving parts as well as me, so it feels a lot lighter. The ride out of Manchester was completely different. I kept wanting to overtake and going for it. I told myself to calm down a bit, and started looking around for someone who was going at a pace which seemed quick but not exhausting. I didn't have anyway of seeing how fast I was going, and I knew it would help me pace myself if I had someone else for reference. Eventually, I found two lads who were making good speed on an Enigma and a Specialized. I tucked in behind them, and drafted them up the long, steady climb towards the summit in Blackrod.

It felt much quicker, and it was: when I reached the finish in Blackpool, it was still definitely Saturday night rather than Sunday morning, with scenes of drunken carnage being acted out one street back from the seafront. I checked my times when I got home, and was pleasantly surprised to find I'd knocked an hour off my time from the year before.

Then there's the money side of things. Because the Claud was built with components that apparently never wear out, all I have to do to is ride it instead of driving the car and my bank balance automatically starts to look healthier. I keep expecting this trick to stop working, but it will be four years next month since I bought the Claud and so far it never has.

A word of caution though: Bicycle economics works on slightly different rules to normal economics. So you can't assume that all bikes will work in the same, miraculous way that the Claud does. This piece is really about The Free Bike. The Free Bike is a British Eagle Inferno, a not-quite-mountain bike from the dawn of the 1990's, afflicted with a Global Hypercolour / Jamaican flag themed fade paintjob and a name which slightly sounds like the name of far right political party's journal. I got The Free Bike when Mrs L was having one of her periodic sessions of throwing away anything not part of the fabric of the house. I was cheerily throwing the latest load into the tip when I noticed a gentlemen unloading a couple of bikes from his car. I hailed him, and enquired whether the bikes would be going into the tip. He confirmed that they would. I immediately found a place in my heart for The Free Bike (though sadly not for the pink and silver Emmelle that was its companion) and took it home. If I hadn't been steering, I would have been doing some Fagan style rubbing my hands with glee. I made the mistake, you see, of assuming that because The Free Bike charged me nothing for the privilege of coming to live with me, it was - like the Claud - going to cost me nothing for the duration of its stay.

In fact, The Free Bike quickly revealed a massive appetite for components. It snapped a brake cable, exploded a tyre, massacred a seatpost bolt and bent a saddle. It shattered a chain, ate the bearings in the pedals, destroyed a cassette and snapped another brake cable. I loved it though, and treated it as though it was a reliable way of getting to work even though it clearly wasn't.

The Langsetts went on holiday to Pembrokeshire last week, and The Free Bike came with us. That's where the picture at the head of this piece was taken, half way through brilliant blast along some forest tracks, watching the sun sparkle on the rain drops. But this was the ride where The Free Bike's appetite for destruction finally caught up with it.

Coming back up the hill, there was an innocuous "Twang!" noise from somewhere down in the engine room. The back wheel abruptly stopped turning, so I got off to see what the problem was. In fact, there were about four or five separate problems, each one of which had caused another failure to follow it until the back end of the bike looked like this:

The back wheel that has slipped out of alignment, the derailleur caught in the back wheel, the chain down the back of the cassette - all these things are fixable. But if you look closely, you'll see that the drop out - the little yellow 'C' shaped bit of metal that holds the back axle - has peeled open. You might want to amuse yourself by zooming in on the earlier photo to see whether you can spot any evidence of the whole back end falling apart; I know I have.

The drop out's going to need replacing, and I'm not sure what The Langsett Guide to Frugal Bicycling says about damage to frames which would cost more to repair than a replacement frame would cost to buy. The Free Bike is up on the repair stand at the moment waiting for me to work out how to deal with the fact that it suddenly is not free at all.