Metric century from Harrogate, Friday, 24th August, 2018

[Julia9054]

If you do take a shortcut to Masham and arrive earlier, please let us know!

 

[colly]

Harrogate now. Sunny and cloudy in equal measure

 

[ColinJ]

Harrogate train on time.

Unfortunately the rain is chasing us - ha ha!

 

[colly]

Well l did put my cape on for a few miles by the Rain cleared .

 

[Julia9054]

Thank you for a super ride @ColinJ . It was great to see everyone. Currently warming up with beer and pizza in Harrogate. Hope everyone got home safely.

 

[colly]

Back home just over an hour ago. Scrubbed and tubbed and fed. Just enjoying a nifty glass of red. Like you do.

Thanks for organising @ColinJ Nice to see you again after so long and nice to see you looking so well. And Brian too It's been quite a while.

Too tired to ramble on or post pics now so I'll do that in the morning.

View: https://ridewithgps.com/trips/27013121


That's how it looked for me today. Didn't get to the magic 100 as I thought I might but it was still just under 85 glorious miles with 6800 ft of upwards.

 

[Oldfentiger]

Great ride today, and in great company as always. I started and finished at Ripley Castle so my version was 46 miles with 4000’ climbed. Enjoyed every one of ‘em.
Will post some piccies in a bit.
@ColinJ - Thanks for turning my suggestion into a decent ride.

 

[Littgull]

Another really enjoyable day out on the bikes and great to meet and ride with good friends again.

Thanks @ColinJ for organising and planning the ride and also @Oldfentiger for his input to the route.
The cafe recommendation in Masham from @Julia9054 was excellent. As well as the food and service being top notch it was very atmospheric chatting to each other as the rain was teeming down outside. I think we avoided the heaviest little spell of rain whilst we were in the cafe.

That's an impressive total mileage @colly and you were in fine fettle.

I arrived home at just gone 9 pm. Colin and I were lucky with our trains as we arrived at Harrogate and Leeds just a few minutes before the ones we needed pulled in. Our connection from Leeds didn't stop at Littleborough so after I alighted at Todmorden with Colin I cycled the 6 miles to Littleborough rather than wait 40 minutes for the next train to Littleborough. Thankfully it was a dry 6 miles and gave me a total for the day of 62.

Now showered and fed. I'll check the couple of pictures I took on my phone later and if they have come out ok I'll post them tomorrow.

 

[ColinJ]

Yes, it was a good day out on the bikes, and especially so because it was a ride that we might have called off because of disappointing forecasts.

As I posted above, we passed through several heavy rain showers while we were on the trains heading east to Harrogate, but the worst of the rain seemed to stay west of us. We did have a few light showers and one or two heavier ones, but we also got some good dry sunny spells. It was quite windy, but it wasn't too much of a problem and we got a (very welcome!) strong tailwind on the tough Trapping Lane climb out of Lofthouse.

I got a call from a friend in Hebden Bridge while we were at the cafe in Masham. She was very surprised that our ride had gone ahead, given how awful the weather had been all day there. I told her that we had managed to avoid the worst of it where we were.

I liked most of the route and will aim to get out there again next year to explore further. There were one or two roads which were a bit busier than I like so I'll try to find some quieter alternatives to them.

It was great to ride with everyone again.

Tip for the day: If you think that your tyre pressures might be a bit low, they almost certainly are, and probably even lower than you think! Just before setting off from home this morning I noticed that my tyres seemed to be slightly less firm than I normal have them. I thought they would be ok, and probably more comfortable anyway, so I left them as they were. That was a mistake. I felt an impact on the front wheel as I rode over a cattle grid at Leighton Reservoir, and sure enough, the tyre went flat - a snakebite puncture.

After some faffing about I put a spare tube in and eventually we were ready to set off again.

I thought that perhaps we had pushed our luck with the weather, and with the extra delay of the puncture we could well be late getting to the cafe for our meet-up with @Julia9054 and @Almartino so I suggested that we cut a 25 km loop from our route and head straight down to Masham from Fearby instead. It would scupper my metric century target but at least I'd get a good 50+ miler in for the half-century-a-month challenge. We agreed on that shortcut and very soon arrived at the cafe. Julia and Al were already there so we pushed a few tables together and chatted over our food and drink.

After a good stop there we headed off back into some rainy spells, but they soon blew over and we ended up riding in sunshine on roads that had avoided rain altogether.

We said goodbye to @Oldfentiger, Carrie and Kevin at Ripley. I then set off back along the fine railway cycle path with @Littgull and @colly. Julia and Al came along for a while before turning off for home.

Brian and I said goodbye to colly in Harrogate and rode round to the ticket barrier at the back of the railway station. We walked through and our train came immediately! We were lucky in Leeds too. I felt sorry for Brian having to do a bonus ride in the dark back to Littleborough though, but at least he got a metric century in. I came up 10 km short at a total of 90 km (56 miles), but I couldn't be bothered to do the extra this time.

Oh, I just decided to check the punctured tube for evidence of the 'snakebite'. (Carrie and Kevin had never heard of snakebite punctures so I had explained to them that an impact causes a wheel rim to chomp the tube, causing a characteristic pair of holes.) Here is today's example ...

Thanks all - see you again some time soon!

 

[Oldfentiger]

 

[ColinJ]

I have seen quite a few posts on the forum by middle-aged people who have just bought bikes. Quite a few of them say things like "Of course, at 43 years of age I am too old to be doing long rides..." I chuckle at them, but I think it is a bit sad that people are so quick to put themselves down. Every one of us in Phil's photo below is well into his 60s and regularly does long hard rides in the steep hills of Yorkshire and Lancashire. What's more, we all know riders 10 or 20 years older than us who are still doing it too. Remember the saying - "Use it, or lose it!"

 

[Sea of vapours]

Re the above post: agreed, Not only are the 'they' in question not too old, lots of people have demonstrated very considerably that building up to pretty demanding rides can be done from a low base and years well beyond the spring chicken level.

And on the ride itself: sorry not to have made it due to weather, but I've done my planned intercepting ride today and the weather between here and the ride locale was vastly better than yesterday. Today was short sleeved jersey weather all day, and I was too warm at times. As it turned out, I'd have been about half an hour early to meet you in Pateley Bridge, then the section I'd have ridden with you was only about 90 minutes, partly due to your enforced route change, so it wasn't a great idea anyway. Thanks for inspiring me to do Trapping Hill again though. It's been bugging me for just over three years and I really needed the motivation, so that worked :-)

Where's this cattle grid then? Is that the one about 2km before the reservoir? I'm surprised your tyre stayed inflated long enough to get you to where you stopped if so!

 

[ColinJ]

And on the ride itself: sorry not to have made it due to weather, but I've done my planned intercepting ride today and the weather between here and the ride locale was vastly better than yesterday. Today was short sleeved jersey weather all day, and I was too warm at times. As it turned out, I'd have been about half an hour early to meet you in Pateley Bridge, then the section I'd have ridden with you was only about 90 minutes, partly due to your enforced route change, so it wasn't a great idea anyway. Thanks for inspiring me to do Trapping Hill again though. It's been bugging me for just over three years and I really needed the motivation, so that worked :-)

Well done. It sounds like you chose the right day for it - riding back in the rain into that headwind wouldn't have been good!

Where's this cattle grid then? Is that the one about 2km before the reservoir? I'm surprised your tyre stayed inflated long enough to get you to where you stopped if so!

That sounds about right.

I didn't drink much first thing before setting off to catch the train and I barely drank anything on the ride before we got to the reservoir because I wasn't feeling thirsty in the cool, damp conditions. I hadn't realised it until I got the puncture but I'd been getting dehydrated. As soon as I set to work on the flat tyre though it became obvious to me because I felt fuzzy-headed and was finding it difficult to concentrate.

I spent about 15 minutes trying to find something stuck in the tyre and then @colly mentioned the cattle grid and asked if it might actually be a snakebite puncture? As soon as he said it I remembered that there had been a thump from my front wheel as I'd ridden over the grid and I had worried then about a possible snakebite. The fact that the deflation didn't happen immediately meant that I'd had time to forget it by the time that the tyre finally DID go flat.

As you may be able to see from my fuzzy photo, the holes in the tube are quite small, not the usual slit-cuts found in snakebite punctures. I'm sure that's why the tyre took minutes rather than seconds to deflate.

 

[ColinJ]

I've just had a look at the cattle grid on Streetview. The imaging is fairly recent so I am fairly sure that the grid will not have been repaired since then. It is easy to see why an inadequately inflated tyre on a bike carrying an 83 kg rider would have problems hitting that concrete lip at speed!

 

[Sea of vapours]

As you may be able to see from my fuzzy photo, the holes in the tube are quite small, not the usual slit-cuts found in snakebite punctures.

Those actually do look like a snakebite, unlike the normal sort! An interesting object lesson in the insidious effect of dehydration too, by the sound of it.

Impressive degree of resolution on that Streetview image, and yes, it does look rather sharp. The lateral elements of the grille look more slender than usual too, though that may well be a photographic artefact.