My post-cancer joy ride in the Yorkshire Dales

Toward the end of January 2023, my son and I drove to a shop on a cobbled side street in north-west London to buy new bikes. His was for his 13th birthday; the reason for mine was harder to explain. I had just gone through chemo, and one of the things I used to distract myself with on the long days between sessions was looking up Bromptons. That’s what I promised myself at the end of the round, partly because I wanted to get in shape after a hard year: six months of gradual decline as the cancer took hold, followed by three months of rapid decline while the chemo did its work. But also, of course, because the bike was a symbol of escape. 

Henry had no interest in Bromptons, but he grew excited when they showed us how to fold and unfold them. Then we rode off together into Kentish Town on a pair of demos, with Henry ahead, while I followed 20 feet behind, feeling again the old, childish pleasure in a new toy. It was the first happy, forward-looking thing we’d done since my diagnosis.

Weekend biking trips have become one of the things we do together. It started during the pandemic, as a way to get out of the house. And while I was ill, I’d spend hours looking through writer Jack Thurston’s rural bike-ride guides, planning out the routes we would take if I got well. Then it turned into a part of my recovery. Every week I tried to push my limits further.  

Freedom is part of the appeal of the Brompton

The cancer left its mark, obviously, in the form of scar tissue. Many of the symptoms I had when I was sick still visit me: a heart-in-mouth feeling, random breathlessness. These are sometimes indications that I need to slow down. But my cardiologist said: “Try not to limit yourself. Your body will learn to cope with what you let it cope with.” Still, every time I set off on one of these rides, part of what I have to push against is fear.

The Yorkshire Dales was our first real target. Aside from the challenge, I wanted to have the feeling again of being on the road. Freedom is part of the appeal of the Brompton: the illusion it gives of a pared-back existence. A bag with a change of clothes, something waterproof, decent shoes. A bike you can fold and put in a car or on a train. Once you have these things, you can just keep going, you can go anywhere. 

So on a Friday afternoon earlier this year, Henry and I set off to celebrate a kind of anniversary: two years of remission.

It was dark by the time we turned off the endless M1, and then, suddenly, we were somewhere. Our headlamps lit up dry-stone walls, twisted trees, narrow bridges, dipping lanes: the Yorkshire Dales.

Thurston’s route runs over what he calls the “rough stuff” of the Swale Trail, rising out of Reeth toward Gunnerside. After a pub breakfast, that was the first thing we tackled, on a cold, overcast day that turned out to be good cycling weather. We were riding Brompton’s latest off-road version, the G Line, with bigger wheels and fatter tyres.  

Eventually the track gave way to a steep country lane, which took us on a long steady climb toward the Tan Hill Inn, the highest pub in Britain. It’s a bleak landscape. You feel like hobbits crossing Mordor on the way to Mount Doom. Then it was downhill all the way back to the hotel. (One of our refrains as we struggled up the hill was “Eyes on the pies”.)

Day one was over, and as I lay in bed that night I worried about the ride ahead. We had just covered 28 miles in seven hours and were both exhausted. The next day’s route was closer to 50, and afterwards we had a five- hour drive back to London. I suggested, into the dark of the room, that we could cut off part of the route the next day and spare ourselves one of the biggest hills. But Henry was determined. Earlier, we’d had a conversation about what it was like for him when I was sick – how he had hated seeing me physically hesitant. So I thought, OK.

The sun came out across the lushest parts of the dale

We made an early start, by teenage standards. (The co-owner of The George Inn, who served us in the morning, clicked around the breakfast room on cycle shoes; it turned out he had already ridden 12 miles.) The lane out of Hubberholme runs along the valley, but after Kettlewell the pain begins. In the guidebook, Thurston writes: “When I caught my first sight of the hairpins of Park Rash, I thought there had been some mistake. No road could possibly go up there.” Fairly soon we were walking side by side, until at last the sign for Richmondshire appeared.

At the summit, the sun came out across one of the lushest parts of the dale. We coasted. Henry flew ahead of me, getting smaller and smaller, and I watched him go, tasting not just my own joy but some of his. These are the bits you ride for, when you spend all the hard-earned capital of the ascent on a single bender, a five-mile spree. The colours of the valley blur, the stream weaves in and out, the momentum carries you over bridges and down, and even the brief uphills are an excuse to blow more cash on the next descent. 

One of the perks of having been sick is that you get instant access, afterwards, to sentimental feelings: this is what you hung around for. Henry, as usual, was taking pictures and, together with the photos from our last trip, they form a kind of long-exposure narrative of their own. Not just the hair returning to my head, my face thinning out after the chemo, but Henry growing older and taller, the appearance and then disappearance of a faint moustache, a slightly more self-conscious camera smile.

Thurston describes our last ascent of the day, Fleet Moss, as “a long climb that gets steeper the further you go on”. There are signs by the roadside to announce the gradients: grim warnings. By the time we struggled past the Wensleydale Creamery, we were already broken men. A park ranger on a quad bike buzzed past, shaking his head at the sight of us: father and son, pushing their bikes along. But I didn’t care. One of my theories about biking is that if the reason you don’t want to do it is the hills, then you should walk the hills. So we walked.

Jack Thurston’s rural bike-ride guide

Markovits’ latest book

Fleet Moss is high enough that the weather actually changes as you reach the top – the wind picks up, the temperature drops off a cliff. It was four o’clock by now, half an hour to sundown, and we still had 10 miles to go. I had the sense you get at the end of a long day that it’s time to seek shelter. But I wasn’t worried. The worst was over. I also remembered the long descent from before: the prettiest miles of the whole route, with a rocky stream at the foot. Farmhouses and fields flew past us in the declining light, bent trees and taller shadows. Then it was just the long drive home, back to ordinary life.  

Ben Markovits’ latest novel, The Rest of Our Lives, is published by Faber at £16.99