Another ride this morning 23 miles, gives me a good week of 96 miles and 10800ft. Enough to make my little legs ache!
Another ride this morning 23 miles, gives me a good week of 96 miles and 10800ft. Enough to make my little legs ache!
Don't roll with a pig in poo. You get covered in poo and the pig likes it.
A bit less than 30 miles today. No idea where I went, the fog was too thick to see anything.
In his lifetime he suffered from unreality, as do so many Englishmen.
Jorge Luis Borges
From places like Pateley Bridge or Malham one has a choice of climbs listed by Simon Warren so one can go up and down and up and...Keighley is the same. So today I linked three climbs. Hainworth Lane (from the A629) is a cobbled classic which gains 520’ in 0.9 miles with a max 19%. From the B6265 in Riddlesden is the winding climb from the Leeds-Liverpool canal up to the water shed at Keighley Gate on Ilkley Moor. This drags for 2.7 miles and climbs 915 feet with a max of 12.9%. And there is “the best cobbled climb this side of Flanders?” that is Thwaites Brow.
It isn’t so much the steepness of this climb (17.5%) or the height gain (406 feet) or the length of 0.7 miles that makes it interesting but the fact that the cobbles suggest a century or so of utter neglect. They are uneven, broken, angled oddly and just missing, with gaps to break a wheel and savage bends and the road is narrow and a busy rat run for white van man and taxis.
On most climbs you know if you stay calm, keep your pulse out of the “red zone” and keep moving forward you will succeed; but with Thwaites Brow you never quite know if a van will career round a corner into the line you have chosen and you’ll have to put a foot down, or worse.
If Michelin did hill climbs Thwaites Brow would be *** and “worth a visit”. Simon rates it 9/10 and in the whole of Yorkshire he only rates four climbs higher but one of those is Rosedale Chimney on which Simon snapped his chain twice - but then it does climb 595 feet in 0.8 miles including some 24%. (The road sign says 1 in 3 but veloviewer.com says 23.9%.) I have watched someone zig zag using the full road width to climb this on road bike gears and concluded that it was, perhaps, too long a way to come from Ilkley.
Last edited by Graham Breeze; 10-11-2020 at 12:25 AM.
"...as dry as the Atacama desert".
Well if it is worth doing once why not twice?
Having watched Simon Warren's video ascents of Thwaites Brow, Hainworth Lane and Ilkley Road on youtube (with %incline, watts, speed, gear change clicks, panting and grunted commentary) I put them together again plus the trip over the rocks and gravel that make up Keighley Road ("road" as a donkey would recognise, not a Maserati Ghibli) from Ilkley, for 20 miles of fun with 3300 feet of climb.
It may be tiring but it does make one feel virtuous.
Last edited by Graham Breeze; 11-11-2020 at 09:53 PM.
"...as dry as the Atacama desert".
Marco you seem to be piling on the distance, which is good to see after your troubles earlier in the year...
An absolutely glorious Autumn day for a bike ride, cool, breezy with blue skies. We firstly went out to Flagg and over to Earl Sterndale, Crowdicote, Brund, Warslow and down into the Manifold Valley. Back up to Hartington and along the gated cowshit covered road to Pilsbury and then up to Parsley Hay where refreshments were taken from the Blueberry Kiosk.
Whilst enjoying a Date Slice we were approached by two fit young ladies who asked if we had a pump. One of them had found on taking her mountain bike out of her car that her rear tyre was completely flat. I managed to inflate it with my little Lezyne pump, which surprised me as it was pan flat and was I expecting it to be punctured.
I asked the girls if they were local, as I was prepared to let them have my pump and they could drop it off at a later date. Local they were not, they had driven up from Leicester that morning for a ride on the High Peak Trail. FFS.
Then there was a heated argument between a dog walker and a cyclist including the lines of "you nearly killed my dog you arsehole" " no I didn't you deaf twat, I rang my bell". It went on for a few minutes and was getting close to blows being exchanged. One of the Leicester girls chipped in with "look you two no one got ****ing killed". Nice.
I then realised that I knew the dog walker, who regularly marshalls and timekeeps on some local fell races so my friend and I intervened and managed to get them both to agree to disagree!
Back on the bikes we returned to Earl Sterndale, Chelmorton, Taddington and a nice blast down the A6 to Ashford in the Water and Bakewell before the uphill drag home.
An eventful day of 50 miles, 4,934 feet in a steady 3hr 42min.
Visibility good except in Hill Fog
I must admit, i felt rather unsafe on my tyres this afternoon, and it was only a ten minute ride into town and back, and only a slightly damp road!