The sound of the wind hissing against the window of my room above the pub fills me with dread. It’s 10pm on a Monday, and I’m lying awake in bed in Barton-under-Needwood, a well-to-do village just south of the Peak District. Eyes open, I’m fixating on the violent whistling outside. I knew the wind was coming. I had spent much of the last few days thumbing through weather forecasts, trying to find one that was favourable, a calmer outlook that would put my mind at ease. The verdict, on every one, was wind – inescapable wind, barreling at 20mph from the south, with gusts at twice that speed. It is, I will later understand, the eve of the hardest bike ride of my life.
I’ve come to the Midlands to try the home roads of a champion, the 2022 British national road champion, to be exact. Canyon-SRAM’s Alice Towers sent me the route. It’s one of the 21-year-old’s “go-to” endurance rides, heading north on country lanes over the sharp climbs of the southern Peaks and back again. “I almost know it off by heart,” Towers told me over the phone, ahead of the ride, before issuing a warning. “It’s not an easy loop,” she said. “You can’t cruise round it. You’ve definitely got to push the pedals and make yourself work for it.” I was too proud to tell her that, at 64 miles and 5,000ft elevation, it is already longer, and hillier, than anything I had ever attempted before.
At this point, there are two things you should probably know about me. Number one is that I don’t do long rides; in fact, my housemates mock me for rarely covering more than 20 miles. Number two is that I hate the wind. At 6ft 5in with broad shoulders, I’m built like a sheet of lasagne. The wind, for as long as I have ridden a bike, has been my sworn enemy. “It’s never a crosswind,” Towers forewarned me. “It’s either a headwind or a tailwind.” She’s not wrong.
Distance: 64 miles (103km)
Climbing: 5300ft (1600m)
How to get there
The ride starts and finishes in Barton-under-Needwood, a steady six-mile cycle south from Burton-on-Trent train station. By car, the village is located just off the A38, about halfway between Birmingham and Derby. “There’s a Co-op on the high street that’s got a car park,” Towers said. “You can go in there for snacks.”
Where to stay
There are a handful of traditional pubs in Barton, each with rooms to rent. I stayed at the Three Horseshoes, which has three delightfully modern rooms starting at £65 a night. For a bigger-town feel, stay in Burton, famous for its Marston’s Brewery, with a malty scent in the air to match.
Bike shops
The route begins outside Cycle Division, a lone bike shop among quaint village stores in Barton, which housed Towers’s local club growing up. There’s another independent shop in Burton called Cycling 2000, as well as an Evans Cycles. If you come unstuck while on the route, there are places to get your bike serviced in Uttoxeter and Ashbourne.
Tailwind send-off
As I set out the next morning, crunching over the gravel of the pub car park, a comforting nudge, like a friendly hand in the small of my back, sends me on my way northwards. Immediately, I’m being wafted along country lanes, pedalling effortlessly alongside dry stone walls topped with a layer of moss. Behind them, the branches on the trees ripple in unison with the grass below, pointing me in the direction of the Peak District. My train journey from London only took two hours, but I feel a world away from the stuffy traffic and blaring car horns of the capital. Here, there are bluebells at the road’s edge, not fragments of shattered glass. I pass an ornate country manor, Sudbury Hall, and make the mistake of letting a tractor overtake me, leaving me in the downdraft of its load of manure. The scent, mixed with that of the wild garlic, only adds to the bucolic aura.
“I started discovering the roads in lockdown in 2020,” Towers said. She had hoped to join me today, but a last-minute change to her race calendar meant she was no longer at her home, a stone’s throw from my start point. “I’ve always wished I just lived half an hour closer to the Peaks, because then you can get an hour further into them. That’s my favourite place to ride, especially in the summer. There are so many undiscovered roads for me in the Peaks.” Over the years, Towers has spent hours on these lanes with her younger brother Lucas, who rides for Spanish team Caja Rural-Alea. “My brother is a massive Strava guy,” she said of the 20-year-old. “He’s always stalking segments, and then he’ll be like, ‘Oh Alice, I’ve found this lane we can go up on Sunday.’” Towers added that, while she is no QOM chaser herself, she “sometimes just grabs a few unintentionally”. When I hit the first of a trio of climbs, it’s clear that I will be breaking no records.
It’s only when I’m standing in the giant car park behind the Co-op that I remember why Ashbourne sounds so familiar. Every year, the town hosts what it calls its Royal Shrovetide football game. It dates back to medieval times, and involves two teams, over 100 each in size, trying to transport a large ball to goalposts three miles apart. There are very few rules, but “committing murder or manslaughter is prohibited”. It’s an afternoon of good-natured violence, then, which typically spills into the river.
I didn’t come to Ashbourne for violence. I came for Lucozade and Coca-Cola. It’s one of Towers’s favourite places to stop for coffee. “I’ll get a cortado and a brownie or a cinnamon roll,” she said. So there you go, at least in one respect, you’re sure to be able to emulate a national champion.
Feeling the pinch
The opening kicker is the longest, rising out of Wootton on a road called Back Lane. Its steepest pitches tick over 10% and, cruelly, come after a cattle grid, which rips the speed out from underneath me. As I rise out of the saddle, the hedgerows disappear, and the single-track path winds up through an open plane, verdant fields as far as I can see. Then comes a second cattle grid, and a third. The slats between the rusted metal bars appear cavernous. I grit my teeth and rattle over them. On the descent, the road cuts through the camber of the hillside, down towards Ilam. Sheltered from the wind, I want to tuck my elbows in, drop my chin to the bars and kick through the pedals, but I can’t. I’m transfixed by the sheep. Lambing season has just passed, and woolly obstacles are scattered across the road in threes – a ewe and her two offspring – each family spray-painted with its own blue number. Andy Jones, my accompanying photographer, tells me the lambs will be lucky to make it to Christmas. I slow to look at one, lying against its mother, struggling to keep its eyes open as it tilts its head wistfully towards the sun. It’s a beautiful moment of serenity, but one that doesn’t last long before I’m climbing again.
The gradient this time is 15%. As I hunch over my stem, a man probably twice my age sails past me. “This is the worst bit,” he says, dancing on the pedals. “I mean, the best bit!” he quickly corrects himself. I want to quip back with something witty, but I can’t speak through the panting. His back wheel skips ahead, over the crest, and onto the downhill. The third climb is where I really start to suffer. The road, which goes by the name ‘The Pinch’, is wedged between a craggy hill and a leafy forest. Again, the gradients are in the double figures, but this time I’m grinding so slowly that my GPS computer auto-pauses, assuming I have come to a halt. I last a few more pedal strokes before I’m actually forced to put a foot down, feigning to photographer Andy that it’s to “soak up the views”. When I go to restart, the pitch is so fierce that he has to give me a push.
Towers, too, has suffered on these roads. “I had a really bad memory in the winter at the start of 2021,” she told me. “I double punctured and I didn’t have enough tubes with me, and it was -3°C. I was stranded. I didn’t have phone signal. I had to flag a car down and then phone my mum, but it took her ages to get there.” An hour later, her mum pulled up in the rescue vehicle. “She picked me up and I couldn’t talk. I was borderline hypothermic, an absolute mess. I always bring two tubes with me now.”
The relief from the final climb is momentary. I turn right and suddenly I feel like I’m cycling through sand. I try to get as aerodynamic as possible, resting my forearms on the bars in the now outlawed puppy paws position, and cross my fingers there are no UCI commissaires perched among the bushes as the road drops steeply into the market town of Ashbourne.
Endless endgame
The final 20 miles, despite being the flattest, are the hardest because of the headwind. Deafened by the sound of the gusts, my mind goes to Towers’s solo break the day she won her national bands, aged just 19, in Dumfries and Galloway.
Wind prevailed in Scotland that day, too, paired with driving rain, and I start to realise now how her home roads made her so suited to the conditions. Like Towers that June afternoon, I’m roaring solo towards the finish line. Each pedal stroke feels heavy, but I trudge on.
Approaching the town of Tutbury, I get a distinct whiff of roasting coffee. I wonder if it’s a phantom smell, the type people experience when they’re having a stroke, before I spot the Nestlé factory, and I am able to rationalise. My arms are in agony, my face stiff with salt, and I drop into the small ring for every slight incline.
With only a handful of miles to go, I get the impression my finish in Barton-under-Needwood is never going to come. I am the victim of a wicked prank, I figure, in which someone has picked up the village and moved it 10 miles further south. Then it appears, the gravelly pub car park, and I punch the air with relief. “It kind of encapsulates British riding,” I remember Towers telling me of the route beforehand. “Nice market towns, grippy roads, sheep, a few climbs. A bit of everything.”
The next day, riding back to the train station in Burton upon Trent, the weather is fresh and still. The ripple in the grass has gone, as has the wind’s hiss. My legs ache, but I smile to myself, proud to have suffered in the best traditions of British riding, and to have conquered a loop, my most challenging to date, that helped forge one of the country’s finest talents.
