Stealing a glance down at my shoes halfway round the Dirty One-Thirty, I marvelled at just how lavishly they – and the bike – had been painted. A new pale-grey colourway had apparently permeated every crease, fold and machined surface of, well, everything. I could only imagine what my beard, scruffy at the best of times, now looked like.
It was a stark contrast to the early kilometres of the ride, during which the pack of riders I was part of was enveloped by a cloud of dust that was doing a worryingly good job of coating the insides of mouths and noses. All the same, it looked like a scene from some iconic race like Unbound Gravel in the US Midwest rather than North East England.
