TILTING AT TOWERS

Faced with a daunting weather forecast, Tom Davidson takes on Alice Towers’s favourite training loop and learns how block headwinds forge champions

- Tom Davidson

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 Bartonunder-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 everyone, 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-SR AM’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.