Clifton CC

It sounds like it's been rather a good weekend for Clifton. Over on the racing board, we have Richard's win and several other good placings. In time trialling, we have Jess's 16th place in the national 10 mile championships. Does anyone else have any good news stories?

For me, it was the 2 Daves challenge ride with the eponymous pair, plus Mark, Pete, Karl and Ian. I know Dave and Dave may look fairly normal (or at least I say so in polite company) but in reality they're both crazed sadists: what other sort of person would plot a route so convoluted, just to fit in as many of the NY moors' most evil ascents as they possibly could? At one point, I was approaching the Castleton cafe on the right, when I had to turn left and go down a big descent, just so I could go up another stiff climb before being allowed my cake! Anyway, I'd hardly ridden for the past few weeks so I was feeling overweight, overgeared and underpowered. Still, what a lovely day for it eh? It was a proper day out with a hard but enjoyable route and good company. Also, Pete needs to make sure he enters the hillclimb this year: the way he was sprinting off up anything remotely inclined, he's in with a chance of winning it. Anyway, here we all are, about to descend into Rosedale.


To prove I was there, here's one with me in it too.

8.45 Ride
Great bank holiday weather again

8 of us left the square with one minor omission.
Proving (as if proof were needed) that I'm barely awake at that time on a Saturday morning, I left my helmet hanging on the railings outside the art gallery

The route took a few impromptu minor variations one of which included Millington pastures.

Despite one p******e we were all back in York for midday, where I found my helmet still hanging on the railings


It turned out to be an interesting experiment. STRAVA results showed that whilst my descents were a little on the cautious side, having no helmet is great for climbing abilities (or perhaps it was a response to the competition).



Summary:
52 miles, 17 mph, 528 m climbing, great company, brilliant weather, classic Wolds roads...

Sorry I didn't make the 8,45 ride but I thort it best to save my legs for Sunday which was going to be my 1st attempt at a century with some local friends that I knew would look after me if I cudnt manage it. So headed out of malton at 7.30am and did the wolds way with a fair sized group.(21 starters) only to find out the only day of summer had come. I managed 124.4 miles.last 5 miles with heavy legs but now got the urge to do a saturday or Sunday club ride to see if I can hang on with the big milage guys and girls.

Me and Paul Scott headed over to Ingleton to do the 5 hour NYMBO. Looking at the map before we started it looked like we were if for a lot of those contour lines. The start of the ride was at Ingleton School which also seemed to have a bakery attached (which we would hartily recommend for pork pies and bacon butties the food of champions!) We started at about 10:20am and it was a glorious day! We probably rode a bit fast (both of use complained later that that the other rider was going a bit fast for comfort). Note to self: must communicate this point a bit more.

From Ingleton we went south east to Clapham before going straight up a 200+ metre climb to Clapham Bottoms then back down to Austwick before going round to Horton in Ribblesdale and then up to 572M on the pennine way just south of Hawes. We then had a great offroad descent down to Newby Head Moss before going down into Dentdale.
Going down into Dentdale was a bit of a mistake as we then had a 300m road climb back up past the railway station for 25 points before coming straight back down and carrying on west down Dentdale.

Our plan from here was to go back over Whernside on the bridleway but we were running out of time so had to go on a terrible bridleway to get onto the road in Deepdale followed by a very steep road climb (seemed about 1 in 4) over White Shaw Moss.

From here we were hoping of making good time back, but we ran into a strong headwind and managed to get back in 5hours 2mins.

We should have got more points that we did, but still were the top scoring pair and were heartened by doing 50 miles with 1700m of climbing of which 1100m was offroad climbing.

I also waved the flag for Clifton alongside Jeff & Scotty on the big Daddy of NYMBO competitions out of Ingleton, which takes in the monster slopes of Whernside and Ingleborough. It truly was a glorious day on the peaks. As Jeff said, him & Scotty impressively won the pairs. I came across them a couple of times en route – they cunningly tried to distract me from my deep zone of concentration by trying to joke with me but I was having none of it! I narrowly missed the podium, snaffling enough points to finish 4th out of 20 in my age category, which was better than a slap in the face with a dead fish. The 1,200 foot high ‘wall’ on the West side of Whernside towards the end, as referenced by Jeff, was the steepest, longest climb I’ve been up for ages, thank goodness for granny rings on mountain bikes! A day of 5’s: 5k feet of climbing over 50 miles of bridleways in 5 hours made it a tough workout, but it was absolutely sensational to be battling it out in such a grand place on a beautiful day.

D.