The Zone

The dream bike

An absolutely joyous ride today.

It wasn’t just the sunshine and the feeling of spring a month early. It wasn’t even the greenest fields. It was the zone.

The zone ? Yes. More of the zone in a minute.

I cycled up to the High Peak Trail. I don’t usually manage to do this ride until late March, or at least the middle of the month. The weather is usually too unpleasant. But today, with a wide sky and the sun bravely elbowing February aside for a few hours, I set off on the steep climb up Sheldon Dale.  I always wonder if I will still be able to do Sheldon Dale. It’s a kind of test. Steep and unrelenting it rises from the river Wye and takes you up to the undulating switchback which winds up in Monyash.

The climb up Sheldon Dale is tough, and you have to get out of the saddle and dance for a quarter of it. There is a bottle cap pressed into the road surface on the lower part of the hill, and I let myself start to get out of the saddle once I pass the cap. If I start before then, I am not likely to make it to the top.

The climb is in deep shade, and this morning there were the remains of the frost that had melted elsewhere in the sun. At the top I rode in the sun and found the road to Monyash closed for 51 days. 51 days ? Yes. Who thought of that, I wonder ? Sounds very precise to give the impression that someone had thought hard about it.

But the closure meant a detour through the fields to Flagg, climbing well above Monyash to plunge down again before climbing to Parley Hay and the trail.

The trail is always a joy. It’s fairly quiet as a rule, and this morning was almost deserted, except for a few beaming hikers also gloating at the lack of people.

Sun, birdsong, green field, hills, blue skies. Joy. 9 miles of sheer joy dropping down to Longcliffe.

And the zone. Yes, the zone found me. As a young guy I used to go out looking for the zone. Now I don’t worry to much, and just occasionally it sidles up to me to say hello. The zone is when you build a steady rhythm on the pedals, when you are doing a fair speed that feels utterly effortless and you have the sensation that you could just go on forever. You aren’t breathing heavily, your legs don’t feel dead, even after Sheldon Dale, and you just go. You feel as if you are part of the bike or vice versa. The zone is a happy place to be.

Off the trail at Longcliffe and carefully through the squeezer trying not the scratch the bike. And then off to Grange Mill and home on the road through Bakewell.

It was just a glorious ride, and a bringer of happiness.

The only downside was that the hoggin on the trail was damp, so it came up and stuck on the bike which needed a bath more than I did when we got back.

I think it knew we had been in the zone, though.