a cycling retrospective

I do like coincidences, especially when they reflect something positive about my life. For example, I had my best year rock climbing the year I turned 50, when I climbed more routes graded ‘extremely severe’ than in the rest of my entire climbing career, which was particularly special because I did it all with my son Siegfried, then just 17 years old. And I’ve just had my best year cycling—the year I turned 75—all the best parts of which I did with my wife Paula. Of course, it is just that: a coincidence. When I look back to the year I turned 25, there’s nothing that I could classify as an achievement.

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When I bought my first bike, in February 1998, it was on medical advice. Actually, this isn’t quite true. I’d consulted my doctor the previous summer because several decades of running down the sides of mountains had inflicted quite a lot of damage on my knees, resulting in my being barely able to walk.

My doctor recommended that I get an indoor exercise cycle, and although I said that I would do so, I didn’t follow his advice because I reckoned that I’d be bored stupid within five minutes. However, that winter, I went out to Hong Kong for a month, and during that time Paula and I hired bikes for the day in Tai Wai and rode them out to Plover Cove. An easy ride by my current standards, but I could feel the improvement in my knee condition immediately. Consequently, the first thing that I did when I returned to Penrith was to buy a bike.

I quickly worked out a 20-mile route through the countryside northwest of Penrith, but because at that time cycling was a purely therapeutic exercise, I did no further exploration. However, a few years later, I took part in a charity ride that followed a route north of Penrith, and with some modifications, I had a second route that I could follow. I still had a car then, and I measured this second route at 27.3 miles.

For the next few years, these two routes remained the only ones in my repertoire. I used to ride the longer route against the clock, and I once did it four times in under 100 minutes over a seven-day period. In 2014, I decided that I would do the 20-mile route each day that it didn’t rain. However, I reckoned without the driest September on record and ended up cycling this route thirteen days in a row!

Around this time, I started to explore further afield. There is a crossroads on the 20-mile route where it turns left to follow the road through Greystoke Forest. One day, I decided to continue straight on and see where I might end up. I ended up tackling quite a tough hill, details of which can be seen in Twenty Miles of Bad Road.

Two years later, in 2016, I finally got around to checking out Hoghouse Hill, which I then incorporated into a 25-mile ride that included as many hills as possible, albeit not the one that I described in Twenty Miles of Bad Road. However, both these new routes were ones that I would do just once each summer.

This changed last year, when for the first time, having just retired, Paula was able to spend the entire summer in the UK, and we ventured south of the A66. As you can see from the following map, there is quite a network of minor roads in the triangle defined by the A66, A592 and A5091:

We’d started off by following the minor road that branches off the B5288 south of the village of Greystoke. Although not steep, this road is almost continuously uphill until it reaches the A66. And as you can see, all that height gain is lost almost immediately this major traffic artery is crossed:

This photo was taken on a subsequent ride through the area that followed our first foray here, during which we turned left at the obvious crossroads south of Hutton and continued through the village of Dacre. The next photo is a view looking back from this crossroads the way we’d just come:

…while this is where our route went next:

Finally, this is the rather tough climb out of Dacre:

However, it was our next ride through this area that endeared it to Paula, who loves the views of Ullswater:

This is a still from a 360-degree video shot by Paula this summer from the A5091 looking down towards Ullswater.

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Meanwhile, I wasn’t doing much cycling in Hong Kong each winter between 2000 and 2005, mainly because I didn’t have my own bike, and this situation scarcely improved when we moved into an apartment in the village of Sai Keng, #3 in the Shap Sze Heung (’fourteen villages’), in the Sai Kung area, although I did cycle to Sham Chung, in the Sai Kung Country Park, regularly. It was here that I met Tom Li, whose pan-fried noodles became the main incentive for a 72km round trip from Fanling after we moved there in 2008.

However, for the next two or three years, apart from our Saturday ride to Sham Chung, I did little more than ride up and down the Drainage Services Department (DSD) access road that runs alongside the Ng Tung River during the week. This changed in the winter of 2011/12, when I discovered a way to cross the main railway line into China (Across the Tracks), and a year later, I found a way to cross the expressway that had initially seemed like a barrier to further progress and could take me even further west (Journey to the West).

The following winter opened up more possibilities. As I mentioned in Across the Tracks, the area northwest of Fanling had been part of the so-called ‘frontier closed area’, but that status was rescinded at the beginning of 2013, and we were eager to see what the cycling possibilities were here (The New Frontier).

Around this time, I also developed a ride that I named ‘the long and winding road’, which starts from a ‘resting’ pavilion on ‘journey to the west’. A few years ago, I took an Australian friend around this route, which he described as ‘thrilling’. And that was before I added ‘the spiral ramp’ and ‘the iron bridge path’!

I never used to do any cycling on Sundays, for reasons that I cited in Across the Tracks, but the ‘frontier closed area’ status of an area northeast of Fanling was rescinded in 2016, and that became yet another area for development (The Final Frontier), a process that is ongoing (see below). However, because there is a lot of industrial traffic on key road sections during the week, this ride is possible only on Sundays.

I started last winter by compiling a list of more than a dozen narrow path segments that I’d worked out in the previous two or three years with the intention of shooting videos, but that never happened, largely because I was finding more and more new paths. In fact, I uploaded 34 videos to my YouTube channel in the first five months of 2021, which reflected just how many new paths I was finding. Here are three of the best from ‘out west’:

…while here are two from ‘the final frontier’:

At my age, I find it difficult to go out cycling on consecutive days, although this might have something to do with the distance I cover each ride. A few years ago, I went out cycling 99 times in seven months, but the average distance per ride was just 61km. If you check out this table (I like to keep detailed records), you will see that I managed just 65 rides over an eight-month period, but if you do the maths, you will see that the average distance per ride was over 85km.

The distance highlight occurred in March, when I did three 100km+ rides in the space of five days.

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During the summer, we started by doing the established routes, and I’m not sure at what point I thought we should try to do a different route each time we went out. All I had was an Ordnance Survey road atlas (scale: three miles to the inch) to plan each route. Paula was happy for me to do that planning, and I would show her the route we’d just done when we got back home.

We explored the Ullswater area more thoroughly, including one ride that took us along the full length of the lake to the hamlet of Hartsop before returning the way we’d just come. The following five images are stills from another panoramic video shot by Paula that was spoiled by her thumb intruding into the top left-hand corner:

Obviously, I’ve cut out this blemish. The last image shows the hill we’ve just cycled up.

Here are two more photos taken in this area. The first shows another hill that we’ve just cycled up:

We didn’t take many photos in other areas, but this is one taken north of Mosedale, about 10 miles west of Penrith:

In fact, we went out in all directions: as far west as Mungrisdale; as far northwest as Durdar; as far north as Armathwaite; as far southeast as Crosby Ravensworth; and as far south as Shap (Hartsop (above) was the furthest we ventured southwest). Unbelievably, we passed through no fewer than seventeen villages that I don’t think I’d ever visited in my entire life, including four—Stockdalewath, Raughton Head, Gaitsgill, Wreay—that I’d never even heard of!

As I’ve already mentioned, the main highlights for Paula were the rides around Ullswater, but the highlight of the summer for me was the ride I planned to coincide with my 75th birthday. You can follow it on this map:

We started by heading out to Cliburn, southeast of Penrith, then continued via Temple Sowerby, Newbiggin, Culgaith, Langwathby, Little Salkeld, Glassonby, Kirkoswald, Staffield and Armathwaite, returning via Calthwaite, Hutton End and Newton Reigny. Before setting off, I’d also checked Google Maps, from which I learned that a hill north of Kirkoswald had a name (‘Potter’s Bank’). This was a clear indication that this hill was a bit of a brute. In fact, just before we reached the bottom of the hill, a woman walking along the road shouted out “Good luck”! There were three other hills on the route of similar intensity.

I had thought that I might have been just slightly over-ambitious with this route, which we could have cut short if we needed to, so when we got home, and I was relaxing with a beer and a generous spliff, all I could think was “Wow! We did it.” Not bad for 75.

Having mentioned not going out on consecutive days above, in early September, I noticed that we were about to get two days with the temperature above 20 degrees, and it seemed a shame to waste one of them, so we didn’t.

So that was summer 2021. We went out cycling 23 times, each time doing a different route. And Paula described it, on several occasions, in one word: ‘wonderful’.

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The rest of the year has been something of an anticlimax. Having to spend 21 days in quarantine upon returning to Hong Kong severely dented our fitness levels, although we were slowly getting back to an acceptable level. Unfortunately, I aggravated an old lower back injury at the end of November and wasn’t able to do any cycling. However, Paula and I were out on our bikes again yesterday for the first time in a month, and I didn’t feel any adverse reaction. It was only a short ride, as far as the Kam Tin River (56km), but I’m ready for 2022. It can’t possibly match 2021, but I’ve still got a long list of videos to shoot, and areas that I want to explore next.