One Saturday in Hell or l’enfer du Nord Yorkshire.

By Neil Muir

Neil in a warmer location

“Get back on your bike!” He barked angrily. “Get back on your bike and ride. “I had just landed on my face in the mud for the sixth time. It was like the Somme here. Muddy trenches filled with water. I was sliding around unable to keep upright. I was covered in mud. I even had mud in my eyes and contact lenses. How had I got myself into this mess?

My peremptory partner was Lawrence Tring, a talented road and MTB rider some fifteen years my junior. He was a champion, a winner of these type of Trailquest events -orienteering on wheels. We were in the Dalby Forest in the North York Moors National Park competing in a 2-day event. This was day one.

We had arrived the previous evening, in the dark we had struggled to find a place for our tent in a sodden, waterlogged field already full to capacity.

It had been pouring down for hours…

And it was still raining the next morning as we lined up with hundreds of other riders.

Make no mistake, Lawrence was after winning this race, or at least, getting on the podium. That was where he was accustomed to finish.

This was a “score” event where each control is allotted a value: the more remote and hard to find, the higher the value or score. The aim was to plot your own course and gather as many points as possible within the allotted time of five hours. If you finished after the deadline then pints were deducted from your total.

“Get back on your bike and ride!”

I had left all the route choice and navigation to my partner. I say partner rather than Friend as, you may by now have gathered, we had fallen out.

Lawrence is a superb orienteer so all I had to do was to follow his wheel!

for me this was no small feat. Lawrence’s original partner for the event had been
Rob Waller, another youngish talented mountain biker from ERC who had won several Trailquest events. I was a very last-minute replacement for Rob, but sadly no substitute.

Get back on your bike and ride.”

So here I was out of my depth metaphorically and almost literally in the aftermath of the deluge which had hit the course.

We were in the North York Moors, a place of wild beauty and steep inclines. Sutton Bank (25%) and Rosedale Chimney (33%) are two roads typical of the gradients you can find here. The off-road terrain was even tougher.

No matter, I was on my lovely, and much admired, yellow Giant ATX which I had bought off British MTB champion Emma Guy. With its bottom gear of 22x28 you could get up anything. Or, so I thought. That was before my baptism at l’enfer de Yorkshire and crucifixion by Caesar Lawrence.

But at least the weather was improving and my “offs” reducing as the tracks dried up. The rain had stopped and the sun was out.

I soldiered on under the commands of Captain Tring. We were gradually accumulating a decent pint score. In reaching the most distant controls we had gathered enough points to lie third overall.

But this had come at a cost. I was feeling tired. No! I was knackered. I was doing what Jackson Browne would call “Running on Empty”. It’s what the French call “pedaller dans la choucroute, or, dans le vide. i.e. pedalling in the sauerkraut, or the void.

But now we had to get back to base without losing too much time. To make this easier, we were choosing tarred roads rather than tracks. The gradients were vicious 20+%. I was in my bottom gear and barely moving. My front wheel was coming off the road and it was wheelie hard to stay upright.

By now, Lawrence had bowed to the inevitable and stopped barking out orders. Ironically, the sun had come out and made the day rather hot. We had both run out of water and were gasping. There were no drinks stations and no obvious places to get a drink so we had to ask at a remote farmhouse.

Time ticked on…..

I’m a sub-3 marathoner and have done several Karrimor Mountain Marathons in which you have to run for two days in the mountains with your tent and sleeping bag etc on your back. But, I had never felt this tired before.

We lost all our hard-won  3rd place points and even went into a negative point situation because we were so slow.

Six hours on(and off) a bike is very , very tough. I could not start the next day so we were officially DNF.

The event was won by two young Slovakian brothers called Yuri and Peter Sagan! No that is a fantasy. The rest of this tale was just a nightmare!