Green Eggs and Ham 2 - This time it's personal

This weekend I have been mostly cycling from Coast to Coast. East to West on Saturday and West to East on Sunday. 108 miles each way. From Redcar to Arnside and back again.

Day One didn’t feel so much like a day of two halves, as a day of four quarters.

The first quarter (Redcar to Northallerton) I could feel myself doing that thing I was trying really hard not to do, which was going too fast, but even going too fast I was still mostly at the back.  Even if you’re trying not to catch them, seeing your co-riders just a little way in front does make you want to pedal faster.

Then quarter two (Northallerton to Wensley) I felt like I was going too slow.  Like a football match with too many fouls in, there were too many stoppages, and even though the A684 had been pretty unpleasant out of Northallerton, once we decided to take the back roads through Newton le Willows from Bedale to Leyburn I felt like I’d turned around and was heading back East.  I couldn’t get into any kind of rhythm, and still being at Wensley at 1.30 with the more difficult half of the day to come, made me worry about what time we’d get to Arnside.

I set off from Wensley by myself, as I really wanted to try and settle into some sort of comfortable pace without anyone else around, and this third quarter I enjoyed.  It was raining but only lightly and the Dales were beautiful and the mist over the hills and the sound of running water was quite relaxing.  Although it had been raining a lot of the day, it was quite warm so I wasn’t getting too chilly.

We stopped at the Moorcock Inn at Garsdale Head at the end of the third quarter and it was noticeably colder up there than it had been lower down.  I probably thought from there that the worst was over as I thought it was pretty much downhill to Sedbergh and Kirkby Lonsdale and then we were nearly there, but then the heavens opened.

Within a couple of minutes I was soaked from head to foot, and the two things happened that always happen to me in heavy rain.  My shoes filled up with water, and the bike computer stopped working.  When it conked out I’d done 82 miles so far.

There was so much rain water in my eyes, and they were stinging so much that I couldn’t see and I had to pull off the road, dry my face, put some warmer clothes on and wait 10 minutes for it to stop raining before I could continue.

By the time I rolled into Sedbergh, there was almost a search party forming to come and look for me.  Gary lent me some safety goggles to keep any more rain out of my sore eyes and as there was only about 25 miles to go I thought we were nearly there.  But we weren’t nearly there at all.

At Kirkby Lonsdale we stopped again to regroup and now there was only about 12 miles left, and it was 20 past 6 and I thought we’re even more nearly there now, but then the whole ride turned into a bizarre surrealistic nightmare of ups and downs and ups and downs.  We did a climb the size of the one I accidentally took us on out of Kendal two years ago, and I was neck and neck with Adam for ages, but I was cycling and he was walking and we were both averaging 3 miles an hour, and it was so not the Tour de France, and every so often he’d get back on and storm past me and I was shouting at him for overtaking me with no training, but then he’d get off and walk some more.  And this big hill wasn’t the only hill.  They seemed to be everywhere, and we must have been getting nearer to the coast but I couldn’t see it,, and this end of day one which I was waiting and hoping for, just wouldn’t seem to arrive.

And even when we got to Arnside, Arnside seemed to go on for miles before we got to the sea, and then we had to walk up a massive hill to the youth hostel.  We’d missed the chance of an evening meal in the hostel by being so late, and I was so wet and cold that I just wanted to go to bed, and it took me about 20 minutes of sitting on a chair staring into space before I could get my wet clothes off, and I had to put Ruth’s shoes on to go to the pub because mine were so wet, and they were two sizes too small, and this made me hobble, and by the time we got to the pub (The Albion), the chef had his hat and coat on and he was heading off down the road, and the landlady had to go and grab him and tell him to do some more cooking and so thankfully with seconds to spare, we got an evening meal, and I’m glad we did.

And the pub had some live music on, and although the songs all sounded the same, the nice welcome off the bar staff and the food and the music made me feel a whole lot better about Arnside, which had seemed in the rain and the dark when we arrived to be about as welcoming as the end of Full Metal Jacket.

I did entertain some fears on Saturday night that I might not be able to do Day Two.  My eyes were hurting, and I had a stiff neck and a headache, and a bit of walking around in someone else’s shoes didn’t help.  By the time we got back from the pub it was nearly 11 and I couldn’t believe we were setting off again at 9 am.

Before I went to bed I drank a bottle of energy drink and then I had another one at 3 am, and while I was drinking this second one I started to think more positively about Day Two.  This was my reasoning at 3 am.

Day One had been hard, but a lot of the hardness had come from not knowing how hard it was going to be.  The last 30 miles or so with the hills and the rain had really tested me, but Day Two I knew I’d be doing the 30 miles on unfamiliar roads first, not at the end and once we got to Dent I knew the route, and there wasn’t any unknown bits.  Also, all day on the first day my legs had felt strong, so I reasoned I could probably do the pedalling all right.  Also, Day Two we’d be getting closer to the finish and to home all the time, and also the weather forecast said it was going to be dry, and also we might have a tailwind.  And in the planning, I’d always regarded Day One as being the hardest day.  All these things I was thinking and so around 3 am I stopped thinking I couldn’t do it, and I started knowing that I could.

Unfortunately my mood was dampened somewhat when I went to get my clothes out of the drying room at 7.30 am.  Although my clothes were dry, my shoes were still like two massive hyper-absorbent sponges that seemed just as full of water as the day before.

As soon as I got back on the bike on Day Two, I felt good.  My legs didn’t feel like legs that had done 100 miles the day before, they felt like brand new legs, and as I rolled down to the hill to the pier I felt pretty positive, helped by the fact that it was almost sunny.

In the pub the night before, the route for Day Two had been altered to avoid all the ups and downs of the end of Day One, and although this meant riding on the A65 to Kirkby Lonsdale which wasn’t ideal, it was good enough.  There was a nice flat part out of Arnside along the sea front which mirrored the start of our C2C in 2010 from Walney only that time on the other side of the Estuary (or whatever it is) and feeling the wind behind me strengthened my feeling that today was going to be a lot easier than yesterday.

I forgot where the bridge was in Kirkby Lonsdale where I was supposed to meet up with everyone and so I spent about 10 minutes pointlessly riding round the town, and although this was a waste of time, it seemed like a nice town to be wasting my time in.

I stopped a man who was passing by and asked him the way to Dent, and he pointed me in the right direction for the bridge, and he seemed to think I was a bit nuts going to Dent because it’s hilly that way, and I didn’t bother to tell him I was only going to Dent on the way to Redcar, because he would probably have called me an ambulance and asked for me to be put into care in the community.

I did spend a bit of time after that moaning to Stephen and Graeme about things I hadn’t liked about Day One, but then if ever there was a cure for moaning it’s the road from Barbon to Dent.  I don’t know if that Dale has got a name, but it was beautiful.  Graeme described it as a hidden gem, and it was, and it was at that point that the frustrations of yesterday seemed to fade away, because roads like this are the reasons that any of us ride bikes  (sometimes I wonder if I even am a cyclist, but I think I probably am now, after this weekend).

We found our way to Dent and as we rode through Dentdale we were overtaken by quite a few road cyclists doing what turned out to be the White Rose Challenge (the long route), and we had a bit of fun with some of them on the big hill up to Newby Head casually chatting to them, and mentioning in passing that we were on our way to Redcar, and that that was where we’d set off from yesterday.

From the top of Newby Head we had that big descent into Hawes, although I must have misremembered it because some of it I actually had to pedal on this time, and I rode by myself on that lovely road from Hawes to Askrigg which I loved so much on our last Coast to Coast, and I loved it again.

Although I felt really strong, and I was confident of making it all the way, I was concerned that by the time we got to Askrigg for lunch it was nearly 2 and we’d only done 45 miles out of 108.  At this rate it was looking like a 9 o’clock finish.

But from there on, we picked up speed.  At Leyburn at nearly 3 pm we had another stop for food, and at this point I had the sobering thought that this was where we’d started the final day of our last Coast to Coast and so we effectively still had a full day’s ride to do starting at 3 pm.  But then the sun came out, and for the first time this weekend I took my raincoat off, and I had bare arms and a Green Eggs and Ham T-shirt on, and as my legs were still feeling strong I set off as fast as I could down the A684 first to Bedale and then to Northallerton, and I was riding with Graeme and Stephen and we were all wearing matching tops and we were laughing and feeling good.

And by 4 pm we were in Northallerton, and suddenly a 7 pm finish looked more likely.  But we were never going to get to Redcar by milling round a car park so I set off again, and buoyed by the reassurance of being almost on home soil and being able to see the Cleveland Hills, our hills, I rode some more, and finally after being a bit spread apart during the weekend, we all managed to ride together in a group, and I wondered if we’d been doing some of that Forming Storming and Norming that groups do and now we were Performing.

We stopped at Hutton Rudby and all had a drink together, and I accidentally had a drink of cider which seemed to affect me in approximately the same way that Kryptonite affects Superman as I felt a bit sluggish afterwards, but it was nice to sit round and half a laugh, with a dog barking on the roof.

And before long we were back in Redcar and there was a cheering crowd to meet us, and the Pollitts had brought champagne, and I drank some of it straight out of the bottle like they do at the end of the Grand Prix, and then someone told me that there were glasses, so I had a glass of champagne and a Snickers.

I doubt that  necking champagne straight out of the bottle and eating a Snickers at the same time is recommended in Debrett’s Guide to Etiquette, but I don’t imagine those ladies who walk round with books on their heads do many Coast to Coast bike rides either.  But we did.  Twice.

People who do challenges, when interviewed, often spout a load of crap about what they found out about themselves while doing the challenge.

Well, the only thing I found out on this trip was that all those bloody horrible rides I did to train for it, in the end paid off because they had put some stuff into my legs that made it possible for me to do the thing I'd trained for, and that's probably the point of training.  And it deserved to be called a challenge, because lots of it was challenging, and I'd like to say I remained relentlessly positive throughout, but I didn't, but it didn't matter whether I felt positive or not, because I kept pedalling anyway, until it was over, and then I stopped, and at the end I did something I've never done before, I kissed my bike, and I know it's stupid to kiss inanimate objects, but if you're going to do something difficult, it helps to have equipment that doesn't let you down, and it didn't, and I had that feeling as I was riding up to the Sea Front in Redcar like I had in the last 10 minutes of my last A Level exam, when I put my pen down and just watched the clock wind down the last few minutes, because by then I knew I’d done everything I could and there’s a satisfaction that comes at that point that’s a distant relation of the apprehension you feel at the start of something, when you know you’re probably capable of doing it, but you can’t quite be sure, because you haven’t started it yet, and so there’s no evidence.

Well, I not only started it, but I finished it too, so now I know I can do it.  People were there to see it, and there are photos too.  And in some of them I look like a lab technician who has just had an experiment go horribly wrong in his face, but there are photos all the same.

So, well done to me, and to everyone else who rode with me, and to everyone who supported us, either directly or indirectly.

Thanks to all the children for lending us their dads on Father’s Day, and to all the wives who willingly tolerate their husbands going off on these slightly nuts lycra clad adventures,  especially to Tracey for lending us Tim on his birthday.

Thanks to everyone who made donations to the charity, and finally thanks in advance to all those people who are going to have to spend sizeable chunks of their futures listening to us go on about how great we once were…when we cycled Coast to Coast in a day, and then just to prove it wasn’t a fluke, we did it again.



 for another perspective on the trip, see Graeme's ride report here

for those who enjoyed this, here is the story of our original coast to coast in 2010 which had less miles, but more accidents