I have had a sense of trepidation over today. It is long, although even before being reduced by my slightly extended day yesterday, not the longest. But its profile looks daunting: there appears to be no respite to the hills. I tell myself that my legs are stronger after over a week on the road. I tell myself that successfully completing the day will put me on target to finish this journey tomorrow. And I tell myself that the days are long and there are plenty of cycling days on past journeys that I have not finished until early evening. But I also tell myself that I know my body is tired, that there is no reason that I must finish tomorrow and that lighter evenings or not, if I am exhausted I would need to stop. I was not worrying unduly: it has been a day dominated by hills.
I am still learning about features on my bike computer, sometimes features that I would happily do without. One of those is a display that pops up showing the profile of a hill you are climbing - although only the steeper, longer ones - with lots of information which at times I would rather not know such as the distance left and the inclination. Today though, early on, I noticed in one corner a ‘4/20’. Clearly I was on the fourth climb of twenty that day and I am not sure whether it was information that helped or hindered me. And those twenty were only the big ones.
Although there were occasional flatter sections, for much of the day the hills were relentless. If I were not climbing up a hill then I was descending one and there seemed to be nothing in between: a long, slow climb up would be followed by a quick descent giving little time to recover before you were climbing again. Those climbs registered by the computer seemed to be the steepest or the ones measured in miles and they would find me quickly dropping to my lowest gear as my legs became lead: heavy legs trying to propel a heavy bike upwards is not a good combination. If I made four miles per hour I was lucky and my computer seemed to delight in telling me how long I took to complete each climb: any in the region of three miles long was over forty minutes. It was a day where I felt that I was eating into the hours rather than the miles.
As the day started I climbed short hills in high banked lanes laden with grass and bluebells. But my focus was on the climbing rather than the view. There was twelve miles of respite on the road to Exeter, with a pleasant coffee stop in Broadclyst village hall chatting to locals, but beyond the city the push towards Dartmoor began. Hard, slow climbs through woodland were followed by long descents. Despite the physical effort I was initially in a positive state of mind: the closure of the road I had committed myself to - and which would have added more miles and hills if I had not been able to walk by the roadworks - was a potential hiccup rather than a showstopper, the hills a challenge to be overcome rather than to be overwhelmed by. I stopped for a healthy lunch at Moretonhampstead on the edge of the Dartmoor park and then the ascent to the moor proper began, a series of climbs and falls taking me steadily upwards. I would eventually reach heights of almost twice that of the valleys through which I cycled in the Grampian Mountains all those days ago: Dartmoor is tough. I was surrounded by expansive views of the moor, animals grazing on the rugged gorse and dry heather landscape, and the green of more productive land, distant and far below. As I climbed steadily upwards though, it was less about enjoying my surroundings and more about being fixated on series of points just in front of me that could be mentally ‘ticked off’ to give some sense of progress on those long, slow and dispiriting ascents.
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| Heading Up |
I occasionally managed more continuous, faster cycling on flatter sections on the top of the moor but it was still a series of hills, just longer and more gentle, and it was a mental and physical effort to force myself to do so. And still there were hard climbs too, thrown in for good measure. Even the long descent to Tavistock, which signalled the end of twenty miles of Dartmoor, was not free of them.
I reached Tavistock late afternoon, tired but happy: it was a key point on my day’s route. But my aim today was Liskeard which still lay nearly twenty miles away and I noted I had only completed fourteen of those twenty big climbs. Somewhere between here and there were another six and I was genuinely concerned that they might be beyond me. But I was also not happy to stay in Tavistock and leave them until tomorrow. Undecided, I looked at hotels in Liskeard and the prices made the decision for me - a good thing as it turned out - and instead I booked into the village of Callington ten miles along the route. I set off alongside Tavistock’s river Tavy and out of town.
Of those six climbs deemed noteworthy by my bicycle computer, three it unfolded were between Tavistock and my accommodation. The first was a short, hard climb out of Tavistock itself through a residential area and onto the main road to Liskeard. Any hopes I harboured that this road would not have brutal ascents were to be dashed and as I crossed the river Tay on an old stone bridge and entered Cornwall I was met with a light rain shower and another hill, the last big one for the day and the one that broke me.
As I climbed the three miles of that hill through Gunnislake I was at first confident. But it was unrelenting. I was getting so slow that I was having trouble holding my line on a narrow and verge-free road busy with commuters heading home. Twice I stopped to rest but it made little difference to my legs. So, with the hill rounding out and within a hundred yards of the top, I pulled into a petrol station, bought fish and chips from a tiny shop next to it and ate them sitting in the car park. Afterwards I set off on the last five miles to Callington. Despite my extended break and the now reasonable road they were slow miles and by the time I arrived at my accommodation it was ten hours since having set off from Wellington this morning. I am only about eight miles from Liskeard but at the moment it might as well be a million. More importantly, it makes getting to Land’s End tomorrow an eighty-four mile day, almost my longest to date. After today I am not as optimistic about achieving it.
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