Dales Divide: Across England, Through the DAVE
It always starts quietly. Arnside doesn’t feel like the beginning of something hard. It’s too calm for that. Sea air, soft light, people moving slowly in the morning. Bikes leaned against walls, last-minute checks, conversations that drift somewhere between excitement and doubt. And then, almost without noticing, you roll out.
The idea is simple. Ride across England. Touch the East Coast. Turn around. Come back. Around 600 kilometers. Roughly 10,000 meters of climbing. Gravel, bridleways, broken roads, long empty stretches where time expands and contracts depending on how you feel.
It’s early season. April. UK. Which means the route is only part of the story. This year, the other part had a name. Storm called Dave. At first, it didn’t feel like a storm. Just wind with some rain. The kind you expect here. Something you lean into without thinking too much about it. But the deeper we went into the route, the more it started to shape everything. The wind stopped being background. It chose violence, damn.
There are sections on the Dales Divide where you feel very small. Open moorland, nothing to break the horizon, nothing to hide behind. Just you and whatever the weather decides to do. That’s where it hit properly.
Sidewinds strong enough to push the bike sideways. Gusts that came without warning. Rain that didn’t fall - it moved. Horizontal. Constant. Quiet in a way that made it feel endless. Somewhere along the Cam High Road at 11:00 a.m. I rode through snow flurries carried by the wind… You stop thinking about speed - start thinking about the absurdity of it all.
I had already made things harder for myself. Somewhere around 100 miles in, I realized I had waited too long to change my brake pads. One of those decisions you keep postponing because everything still technically works (until it almost doesn’t :) ).
I didn’t lose my brakes completely - but close enough to change the way I moved through the course. Every descent became slower, more deliberate. Less trust, more calculation. At some point, I had to stop and deal with it properly. Fix what I could. Make it safe again. It cost time. But not fixing it would have cost more. That’s the thing about races like this. Mistakes don’t disappear. They travel with you.
The storm kept building. And somewhere in the middle of it, I made another decision that seemed small at the time. I switched my phone to airplane mode. Battery saving. Simpler. Quieter. Disconnected. Which also meant I wasn’t seeing anything. No updates. No messages. No warnings from other riders. No information about how bad the conditions were getting ahead. By the time I realized, I was already too far in. The wind stronger. The exposure worse. The kind of situation where continuing forward doesn’t feel like strength anymore - it feels like ignoring something important. So I turned around.
It’s a strange feeling in a race. Going back. I found shelter. Waited. Let the worst pass. It felt like losing something. Time, momentum, maybe position. But mostly, it felt like making the right call a bit too late. When I got moving again, everything felt quieter. Not easier. Just clearer. I had even thought about a DNF for a breakfast morning, but in reality, the race had completely frozen. Nobody was moving. Everyone took shelter. It felt like the whole game had been put on pause.
The race stopped being about anything external. No expectations. Just the basics. Eat. Drink. Move. Fix things before they become problems. Don’t rush decisions that matter. Somewhere along the way, I found a rhythm again. Not fast. But steady. And in races like this, steady is enough more often than people think.
The finish came quietly. No big moment. No clear shift. Friends waiting with hot homemade soup that tasted better than any five-star Michelin dish. Just the realization that I didn’t have to keep going anymore. I finished as the first woman. 16 open. It took a while for that to mean something.
And then, a few hours later, standing at a petrol station, everything became chaotic again. My bike got stolen. After all of it. After the storm, the decisions, the long way across and back - it disappeared in a moment. And then something else happened. People noticed. Messages started coming in. Shares, calls, help from people I didn’t know. Small actions, everywhere, adding up to something much bigger. And somehow, the bike came back.
“The cycling community is the superpower.” It sounds simple. But after a race like this, it doesn’t feel like a phrase. It feels like something real.
The Dales Divide isn’t defined by its route. It’s defined by what happens when things stop going to plan.
A storm you didn’t fully understand at the start.
A mistake you knew you were making, but made anyway.
A moment where going forward stops being the right choice.
And then - finding a way to continue. If anything stays with me from this race, it’s not the result. It’s how quickly things shift.
From control to chaos.
From confidence to doubt.
From moving fast to just moving.
Funny how the most important decisions aren’t the ones that make you faster, but the ones that keep you from stopping altogether.
Next time, I’ll change my brake pads earlier. And maybe leave airplane mode off - just in case. Damn it, Dave. You absolute bastard.
