First Ride Of The New Decade.

First Ride Of The Decade

Friday 3rd January 2020
Clay Bank
The Ginger One

Oddly enough the first ride the year, turned out to be pretty much the same as the penultimate ride of last year, as our quest for new trails away from the slop of Guisborough Woods continues. Me and the Ginger One met at Clay Bank car park, on a fine morning, none of the grey clag which greeted us last time. 

The push/ride/carry up Carr Ridge was no easier though and the wide sandy tracks over Urra Moor are becoming wide sticky tracks from the dousings they are suffering. We even repeated the long drop down into Baysdale Abbey despite knowing we would have to endure the snivelling pant back up the road. Advice in cycling magazines is generally of the “find an easy gear and spin” variety, these are the same magazines where no-one goes for a bike ride, for a laugh with their mates; it’s ‘training’ which is only preparation for the main purpose of having a bike - ‘racing’. Perhaps, in the light of how many cyclists actually race, they ought to be reassessing their demographic and secondly they need to move somewhere with real hills, hills where you are out of gears in the first ten metres and upward motion can only be achieved by stamping on the pedals and swearing on the exhale, where the only spinning is your head from lack of oxygen. Naturally, all this exertion prompted talk of electric bikes, my plan is to try and keep with the analog pedalling for another ten years, until the big seven oh before venturing into the murky world of pedal assistance. The way things are going I’ll probably be the last person in the world without an electric bike, an anachronism, like these twentieth century Victorians who still use cheques and think the internet is new-fangled. 

A little breather at the top before continuing to Turkey Nab, the new improved Turkey Nab, already showing signs that good old Mama Nature and our 4x4 brethren (one life: live it - so long as you can afford the diesel) are restoring the track back to a nice, slabby downhill. Another couple winters and it will be back to normal. From the gate we went searching for another trail spotted on Trailforks, Borrowed Time, not at first obvious, especially to the Ginger One, whose tracking skills tend to be limited to finding bars which sell John Smiths while he is in foreign lands but it soon became apparent. An enjoyable few minutes followed as we swooped up and down between the trees, weaving around on damp loam, following the trail downward to Guisborough style (vertical drop into a ditch) finish at a fire road. 

Passing Bank Foot farm, we stayed in the woods to ride the trail called Back To The Car, which Rod and me rode last week. Unfortunately back to the car is another four miles for us, we could see the sun glinting of our vehicles in Clay Bank car park, high above us, as we cruised undulating fire roads, gradually climbing until we reached the road and girded our loins for the last 500m. Think of all those rides with a lovely downhill finish, arriving at the car or the cafe, grinning like a baboon on MDMA, just reverse everything and imagine arriving at the car park like Sisyphus and his rock, ready to collapse in a heap and let the feral pheasants peck chunks off your debilitated carcass. Or perhaps that’s only me.

"Look I can see...

...my van from here."