Bolsover & District Cycling Club

A glorious summers evening heralded a new event on the calendar. Polaris Clothing of Dronfield decided to celebrate Bike Week by extending an invitation to local riders to join many of its employees in a 30 mile sportive into the peak district

A handful of us arrived around 6pm (Graham , Tom , Paul Smith & me) at the polaris offices and paid our trivial £2.50 entry fee.

Polaris didnt do a massive promotional run for the event (perhaps through a fear of generating too much interest) and as a conseqence there was just a scattering of riders at the event.

nevertheless , our group set off , fying the club colours , with a gentleman from Dronfield , Robert asking if he could ride with us. Of course in true B&DCC flair we did our best to make him welcome and supported him over the tough terrain (which he coped with brilliantly considering the ride was longer and hillier than he was used to )

The drag from Dronfield up to Owler Bar turned my lungs inside out , starting too hard without any warm up is a lesson i wont repeat , The rest of the bunch hung back to help me out and id started to recover as we took the super fast drop down the A625 towards Sheffield.

Turning off for ringinglow and heading over to burbage rocks , we lost Graham Whiting as he caught the back wheel of Paul Sleaford from the Norton wheelers and left us all behind for a 15 mile additional loop around hathersage. At 61 years young Graham can really drop the hammer when he wishes.

A fantastic fast descent (peppered with rouge sheep) dropped us into Hathersage , and the fast road into grindleford saw our small group working together pretty well to keep a decent average speed.

Unfortunately the beast of a climb up Curbar was waiting for us , and while Tom danced his way to the top in the company of a bewildered rider out for a training ride , the remaining three found it a sweaty , stinging slog...looking back i loved it , but by god it was painful at the time.

We shortly found ourselves back at the finish area in dronfield , where we found the entertaining stunt show from Jez Avery a welcome reason to hang around.

Thanks to Will & the bunch from Polaris for making us welcome and putting in the effort..we all enjoyed it and would all hope to make it again - th eroute is certainly worthy of a decent sunday ride too