Author: Alex

In a muddle

On By AlexIn Bikes, Mountain Bike Riding2 Comments
It’s all been a bit like that

I’m compiling an extensive catalogue of songs themed entirely by what happens when rain, rain and more rain splats on saturated ground where buff six inch wide trails used to be. Sloshing through these mile wide muddy motorways, I find myself humming eighties classics including ‘Mud Is All Around‘ and ‘Don’t Talk to me about Mud‘ before occasionally backsliding into the previous decade, duetting ‘Endless Mud‘ with a virtual Lionel.

This can go on for some time. The mud certainly has – I feel like a mudaholic at a grubby public meeting ‘Hi, my name is Al and it’s been about 9 seconds since I last washed my bike/threw away some brake pads/replaced the entire transmission/ignored the sound of impending bearing collapse‘. For more than two months, every ride is preceded by sufficient waterproof apparel to clothe a small elephant, and suffixed by a sanitation regime resembling a particularly desperate field hospital in a long forgotten war.

The mucky sandwich bookended by this drudgery has long passed from challenging to enduring passing through wet, dark, cold and shitty. My entire riding life is one long dirty protest repeatedly passing through an outdoor spa specialising in a muck spraying treatment best thought of as ‘Back, Crack and Rucksack‘. Not even a new bike or brief shafts of sunlight could shift my SAD symptoms. Beer helps obviously, but mainly as it is inside, warm and doesn’t taste of damp earth shotgunned at 20mph into your face.

And this Sunday the Goshawk 50 comes around which the event website is struggling to sell “I think this is going to be one of the toughest Wentwood50’s to-date, both mentally and physically – especially if it stays wet. If you get your head in the right place, treat it as the training event it is meant to be, you’ll hopefully have a good day out. ” – wow sounds great, where do I sign up? Oh, I already have? Bugger.

Last year, this signposted the end of a 10 week – and I appreciate the use of a rather grandiose term – training plan at the end of which I’d shed nearly 10kg, ridden oh so many miles on mainly frozen trails, subsumed my beer and cheese habit and dropped a good trouser size. I was keen to see if it had all been worth the effort, and was happily rewarded with a pretty strong performance and a lower mid-pack finish. For me that represents podium form.

Roll the planet around and we find a similar shaped specimen of about the same weight, similar fitness, but not even registering on the same motivational scale. The question I’m asking myself – about 5 times a day – is can I really be arsed to drag my wet, claggy arse up and down 50 kilometres of muddy trails? There’s a few others having a go, so on the positive side the ‘misery loves company‘ defence could be wheeled out for turning up. The weather will be at least 10 degrees warmer than last years ice cold winds and occasional sleet. And I’ve already paid for a T-shirt. Er, that’s about it.

On the not so positive side, I really have nothing left to prove about why being fit is immeasurably better than being fat. While the course is a good one, it’ll be made up of more fireroad and – as I’ve already whinged about – quite a lot more mud. And it wasn’t exactly dry last year. There’s probably a similar day out somewhere else on dryer trails – not ridden first by the 200 fast boys and girls up the front.

Sure I am the first toespouse the incontestable hypothesis that riding is always better than not riding, and to lampoon those keyboard warriors who exchange winter hard work for internet hard-man withering. . I’ve even occasionally surprised myself with coping techniques for difficult challenges. And there’s always the pleasurable aftermath to sniff the waft of reflective whimsey.

Yeah, bit for all of that I am still back to the central moan that surely enough suffering has been visited on me in the 600 crappy kilometres I’ve ridden in the grip of the dirtstream since the year turned. It’s like room 101. That event is the rat in a cage. It’s an odd way to spend your days off sobbing ‘Don’t make me go back, anything but that, please no more mud’.

We’ll see. Riding tomorrow night. Still time to pull the emergency hamstring.

Purple Minion

On By AlexIn Other stuff4 Comments
Looks Dry. It isn’t.

During nightly insomnia, an entire post took shape at around 3AM postulating the purchase of Mountain Bikes as non organic memory banks. A 6am coffee-fueled brain dump revealed this was merely my subconscious coding logic for guilt. There was – as are most things conceived in that black reality vacuum of the deepest night – a hint of pretension and a whiff of self obsession which require a northern edit* to mitigate publishing embarrassment.

So instead let’s talk about how the monster rides. For those of a short attention span, the following picture shows the difference between what I thought I was building and what finally popped out of Matt’s Garage. For clarity, the Nukeproof is the one on the right.

It’s the one on the right

It was a difficult birth. Some of which was – predictably – my haste to build it. Some was a distributors stock control system which essentially mined an astrology algorithm in an divination attempt to predict the content of the physical boxes. Fair to say the results were occasionally amusing, mostly frustrating and largely inaccurate, hence the mismatched rear wheel stolen from a mate.

Which was the wrong width. And the adaptors didn’t fit. So we had to machine those down. Then the Bottom Bracket wouldn’t thread because the shell had gone straight from ‘incisewith a bread knife’ to ‘ship’ without ever passing through ‘Quality Assurance’. This sort of thing went on for a while and even after two nights of intense effort and some proper hammer action, it still wasn’t rideable. A final visit to a bike workshop produced a working bicycle, but I’m bloody glad I wasn’t allowed to watch as three burly men appeared to be leaning on a T-Bar, all the while uttering words of which their mothers would strongly disapprove of.

Best go ride it then after all that effort. Years of yomping mountain bikes over lumpy terrain, coupled with an extensive back catalogue of representative examples suggested that the Mega would climb like a three legged stoat while descending in the manner of a lemming shot-cannoned over a bottomless abyss. And be fairly boring in between. What today told me was that generalisations are wonderful abstracted things but not very useful in real life.

We climb for a short while as I marvel at the black magic of a single ring not constrained by any type of chain device. There’s sufficient cogg-ery between front and back to present a ratio entirely acceptable for climbing anything in the forest, even with an all-up-weight someway on the wrong side of 30lbs. It’s hard to know how much of a real world problem this is with 90{45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2} of the trails surfaced with a thick layer of mud. It’s not much fun to ride in, but at least it showed me exactly where I’d failed to protect the frame with heli-tape. Still paint is over-rated I’ve always thought.

So climbing is fine. It’s better with the rear shock switched to a mid point pre-load allowing the bike to sit up in its travel without losing too much small bump performance. The forks are something else. Even with the myriad settings firmly defaulted to the mid point – the entire gamut of sucking up small rocks to travelling large over fearsome obstacles on downhill runs are met and dispatched with the same aplomb.

Heading downhill has the purple minion in control. It’s indestructible in terms of what terrain can offer up. It’s also laterally and vertically stiff and nicely balanced between the axles when standing up. Wide bars, short stems and ‘personal wall‘ brakes mean you can take all the control you need to manage all the risk you’re prepared to deal with. Even on flat contouring trails, the expected boredom is missing with adequate briskness being a few simple pedal strokes away. With that slack head angle and 170mm forks, there’s a pre-requisite of some ‘body english‘ on turn entry but, once in, it tracks beautifully which must be due to a combination of frame stiffness and a fat 2.5in front tyre.

Our route to tea and medals was one of the mellower downhill runs way above the centre. First we had to let two younger gentlemen rocking the 2014 enduro pyjama look drop in and almost pull off that difficult juxtaposition of wearing nighttime clothes and riding mountain bikes. Careful use of the word ‘almost‘ there. Short of giggling and pointing, we didn’t give them much of a start as there was a close-to-zero chance of us even seeing them again, never mind catching.

We didn’t. Bit since my entire cognisant capability was overloaded with the crazy 3-D puzzle in front of me, this wasn’t much of a concern. Staying on, staying somewhere close to Haydn’s rear wheel**, staying in the moment and finding time to wonder how much of any trail competence was down to me and how much to the bike. The instant conclusion reached was it was the bike of course, which in no way failed to shift the grin on my face.

We ignored the massive gap jump near the trails end, and instead headed for cake and rubbish analysis. So the bike will climb pretty well, which makes the Sunday choice a little harder as the trails dry up – because the Mega is so damn good going down. 26 inch wheels work very well indeed, and in the deep mud of today were probably a little easier. Certainly changing direction and removing them vertically from the trail are definite plus points. They don’t roll as well but the giggling part of me was thinking ‘who cares?‘.

All bikes are good. More bikes are better. Bikes with silly amount of travel can still earn gravity credits through manual propulsion. Wheel sizes are more about marketing than riding. The only obvious conclusion that can be drawn from these statements are that ‘I need a bigger shed‘ and ‘I need more time to ride my bikes’. Soon I shall deal with one of those and it won’t involve any kind of extension.

Riding today should have been a five hour death march atop the bike provisionally slotted in for the Goshawk 50 next week. This time last year I was fit, focussed and not even a little distracted by shiny new pedally things. Still two out of three ain’t bad. Or one out of three. At least one half for sure – anyway the forecast suggests it won’t be snowing and the ambient temperature will be in double figures. How hard can it be?

I won’t be taking the Mega tho. Even stupidity has its limits.

* “That kind of flowery wank might pass for journalism in London, but here we conjugate our verbs and call an earth moving spacial implement a bloody shovel. Don’t darken my doors until you’ve removed all three syllable words and failed to compare anything to a cloud”

** not the one I’d borrowed to sort my bike. I can’t deal with that level of recursiveness.

Idiot’s Monster

On By AlexIn Bikes, Mountain Bike Riding, Photography11 Comments

Nukeproof Mega AM build

Until about 1:53pm this afternoon, a post was in the virtual exit tube awaiting prose peristalsis to push it into my socially connected world. Where almost no one would read it. Which was a shame as much thought had been expended over the last two weeks in an attempt to make daily flooding mildly amusing. Tales of sleet laden trudges over high Welsh mountains jostled, with similar epic death marches through a Flanders-themed Forest. All linked by motivational reserve eroded by endless rain.

And if that wasn’t enough I’d worked in the term ‘arboreal‘ quite a number of times interspersed with a bucket load of moist similes, all finished with a mildly pretentious polemic on political blindness in a dying world. There’s a feeling here that maybe the read wasn’t as interesting in the write but no matter, it’s all raging water under crumbling bridges now.

Because of 1:53pm.

That’s when a maelstrom of want, guilt, delusion and displacement created a perfect storm marked ‘Confirm Order‘. Notice words such as ‘logic‘, ‘reason‘, ‘rationale‘ and ‘permission‘ are pointedly missing adjectives from the previous sentence. Notice also that the newest entrant into the Shed Of Dreams has the meme of something not long ejected on the grounds of misalignment due to my now firm bicycle requirements.

In my defence it was cheap. There are definitely additional strong and sound arguments on to exactly why I bought it. I just don’t have them to hand right now. Essentially I’ve aquired a relic of an unloved wheel size that I won’t use 90{45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2} of the time, and when I do it’s going to be an experience starting with ‘why is that front wheel so small and why is it so far away?‘

We’ve been here before. Many times. I’m a buying windsock when breathed on by the zephyrs of marketing and perceived betterness. So I hated to see the Rocket sat unloved in a corner of the shed, shunted behind a brace of 29ers that rocked my UK riding world. Which made selling it pretty easy especially as the speed and bravery needed to bring it to life were pretty much beyond me.

Roll forward six months. In four more we’ll be back in the Alps riding* stuff like the Swiss Downhill Course** in betwixt chairlift winching and plummeting down more handy mountains. And now I have a bike almost the same as the one recently discarded to ride it on. Only it’s worse than even that. Whereas the Rocket was a superbly engineered, hand crafted frame from a Cy’s much respected emporium, the Mega up there appears be the bastard love child of a amp-crazed welder abandoned in a dark room with a handful of aluminium lintels.

Pretty it isn’t. Whereas the Rocket was all composite curves and almost OCD attention to detail, the Mega has the look of something brought to life by a million volts and the frightened cry of ‘The Monster is Alive‘. When the delivery van arrives, I expect it to punch through the rear door, bludgeon the innocent driver to death before smashing into the house, eating a family pet then presenting itself at my feet – possibly on fire – demanding whether I’m man enough to do anything other than quiver in its presence.

I think we can all agree the answer to that is a firm no. And then we have to build it. First tho I have to lift it which might be a job for at me and a couple of friends. It appears the FEA analysis was junked for ‘screw it, do those girders come in a bigger size‘. Once I’ve added stuff to make it go forward, up and down and hopefully stop, it’s going to weigh about the same as me. Still since most of its life will be spent on an uplift truck or a chairlift, this is unlikely to be a problem. And I’ve become pretty accomplished at pushing if not.

Let’s get the questions out of the way shall we. An FAQ prepared by the deranged if you will:

Will it be better than the Rocket? Of course not.Will it cost as much to build? Absolutely not*** Will those 26 inch wheels hold me back? It’s me we’re talking about, of course not. How much riding in the UK will it get? Exactly as much time as when there’s a bike trailer, some terrifying trails and sufficient armour to play a major part in a medieval battle. Aren’t I a bit old for this kind of thing? I dunno, if with great age comes great responsibility and great wisdom, then clearly bloody not.

Is it going to be a monster? Oh Yes. Am I an idiot? Again, Oh Yes.

So it turns up later this week. And through a process of eBay osmosis shall I restock my 26inch spares box before hanging it all off the monster. Yes, this is exactly the same stuff I sold not so long ago declaring ‘Pah 26inch bikes, who’d have one of those, talk about old technology‘. And once built, we’ll be off to Bike Park Wales where I expect any acts of cavalier bravery shall be more horse than rider. Get through that unscathed and then it’s all about surviving a long week in the Alps. Might happen.

Still no point dying wondering eh. Rationale and Logic are over-rated. Idiocy and Delusion is where it’s at in 2014.

* or in my case mincing. Having the Rocket last year in no way imbued downhill skills which in no way should invalidate buying another bike to do pretty much the same on.

** which I’ve subsequently discovered my mate Dan rode on a hardtail. Best to gloss over that for now I think.

*** Because I shall be long in the second hand market. As promised to Carol who took about 2 seconds to deconstruct my arguments for new shiny thing ownership before explaining to the children, that yes she had married an idiot.

London. No still don’t get it.

On By AlexIn Pretentious nonsenseLeave a comment

This blog stumbled, embarrassed, into the light from the darkness of my commuting angst. A working week sliced and diced by a thousand weary cuts splitting my happy home life from a somewhat less joyous vocational experience. Being alarm-turfed from bed at 6am/slice. Digging out the least stinky riding kit/slice. Suffering frostbite and trenchfoot six+ months of the year/slice. Pedalling the same old ground day after day/slice. Useless trains that were always packed/Slice. Rain bashing the window I’d soon be outside of/Slice. Grotty work changing rooms/Slice. Is the shower working anxiety/Slice. Repeat with no prospect of escape.

But these were mere nics and burrs when transposed against the ‘hack my head off with a blunt cleaver, it’d be a mercy‘ of doing this every day in what some people* proudly label as ‘the best city in the world‘. One could take a narrow view that this may well be true if your hobbies include killing cyclists, mainlining endless fuckwittery, pushing, shouting and shoving. Not for me though. Not even close.

There were odd days when the gladiatorial contest of staying alive ended with the Christians besting the Lions, but mainly it was a drudge full of danger and dirt under a cityscape of dazzling modern brashness silhouetting a thousand years of fascinating history. I’ve always maintained London can best be described as ten million idiots wrapped around a stunningly interesting core. As a ghost-town it’s hard to hate, but peopled with Londoners it was impossible for me to love.**

Five years ago I waved it goodbye with a pair of fingers and have missed it hardly at all. Occasional sallies into its mean streets and fetid tunnels reinforcedmy old prejudices, and the first train out cannot run soon enough. Although not quite- hidden in the boonies you vaguely remember that by scratching beyond London’s grimy surface, there’s all sorts of mouth-open-wide amazement for those of us who find crop identification mildly exhilarating.

That was me then; on a sunny winters day blinking my way out of St. James station. First order of the day breakfast, so ignore the main street franchise and instead duck into an alley partially blocked by builders’ vans.Behind which was hidden an authentic London Cafe with a blackboarded menu offering Bacon and Eggs. Tea or Coffee. No credit cards, don’t ask as a punch in the mouth often offends. Run by some cheerful Polish dudes who provided this mildly hungover traveller a pint of tea buttered up to a heart-stopping Bacon Roll for about four quid.

Sated, I had something else to spend; Time. An hour of it to invest under a winter warming sun in a now mostly deserted post-rush hour city. First stop, a circle of the lake in St James Park giggling at those paying thirteen quid for ‘breakfast in the park‘, stepping away smartly from hissing swans and misidentifying the Disney spires and endless crenelations of a shimmering palace.

My bet was the Kremlin, a local suggested the less interesting/more likely Queen’s residence now much photographed by Japanese tourists grouped by tour umbrella. Many of whom were adjusting focal length through the simple medium of stepping back into the traffic. Where amped up taxi drivers attempted to run them down. Gave the cyclists a bit more of a chance I suppose.

And what cyclists! All shapes and sizes, some astride the latest race tuned technology, more wheezing slowly on Halfords specials with knackered everything and brown chains. Even a few intrepid Boris-Bikers weaving unsteadily between rows of gunning cars. I have absolutely no idea how I survived five years of this, it’s absolutely bloody mental and yet somehow survival rates are slightly better than sticking ones head into a melting nuclear reactor. Bonkers.

Refreshed by a second artisan beverage, I was amazed that such a small square of real estate could contain three ministries of state, Scotland Yard, a big bit of the treasury and the headquarters of a dozen major corporations. Squeezed between these corporate behemoths were proud, regency houses blue-plaqued with eighteen century prime ministers and philosophers.

My aimless peramble gave rise to a grudging respect for London. The juxtaposition of stuff older than most nation states mingling with high tech/high rise thrusting corporations. The identikit high streets sharing custom with esoteric cafe’s in winding back alleys. The suited and booted worker ants jostling with finger pointing tourists. Maybe familiarity had bred contempt. Sure, I still would never want to live here, but it’s not entirely terrible either.

And then it was. Buzzing overhead like an irritated mutant wasp was a bright yellow police helicopter festooned with massive lights, camera and – possibly – machine gun action. It swept over the high rise buildings, rotating this way and that clearly searching for bomb-carrying lunatics, escaping bank robbers or any individual not associated with the Masons.

This was amazing and a bit scary. I fully expected black-clad MET Ninja’s to throw out ropes and descend into the mean streets. My expectations were not met as, after a couple more minutes of the orange snout sniffing out trouble, engines whinged, rotors sped and the Helicopter became a fading dot in the sky. But that’s not the terrible thing. No, when I looked around me to see what your average Londoner would make of our little vignette of Patriot Games, there was a real shock waiting.

NOBODY looked. Not even a glance. Just me and the tourists excitedly waving their middle digits. Really? I mean really? What passes for normal around here? Do Transformers have to rampage through the city and rip out buildings before anyone feigns interest? And only then because it’ll just give the bloody tube a reason to be delayed. I wanted to grab the nearest too-cool-for-school sharp suited nutter and demand ‘Am I hallucinating or did some sodding great helicopter just swoop between those buildings?‘

But I didn’t. Because I’m English and it’s this kind of quiet reserve that’s served us so well in Love and War. Sort of. Anyway I couldn’t get away fast enough, and it was only as the train put some distance between me and that massive edifice of insanity could I give it some more thought. And that thought was this – whatever the reason, whatever the prize, whatever they tell you, stay well away from London – it’s stacked full of loonies and aliens.

Honestly I’d rather spend time in Birmingham. And on that bombshell, the defence rests.

* but not people who you’d trust with matches. Boris Johnson for example.

** Whoever said ‘if you win the rat race, it’s important to remember you are still a rat’ made the point somewhat better.

Class Bore

On By AlexIn Pretentious nonsense4 Comments

There is a point in your life when one must take a stand. Even if this is from a sitting position. In a league table of misquotation Edmond Burke’s* “The Only Thing Necessary for the Triumph of Evil is that Good Men Do Nothing” is second only to Marie Antoinette never saying ‘let them eat cake‘. But I like it anyway because it’s justslightlyless pretentious than Voltaire’s “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it“**. Both are which are far less pretentious than pseudo intellectual quote derivation pretending to be clever. Ahem.

I like to think of myself as well balanced – directly resulting from a chip on both shoulders; the first a bonafide working class upbringing terraced between steeply clustered houses each with a coal cellar, and the second a hand-ringing liberalism, mostly a Pavlovian response to the horror of my Dad casting off those credentials and voting Conservative of his own free will.

The fallout has left me with a healthy disrespect for authority, a delusional belief in meritocracy and a worldview mostly baselined by the assumption the world would be a far happier place if 1{45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2} of the population didn’t own about 90{45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2} of it. It’s also given me a passive hatred of those born into entitlement who fail ever test I’d ever set; Cost versus Value, Altruism versus Self-interest, Friends versus Possessions. And yet there’s a little bit of me than envies a life kickstarted by a silver spoon projecting young Henry/Henrietta into the cultural stratosphere without ever passing any test that wasn’t audaciously skewed in their favour.

The physical manifestation of this unjust hegemony tends to drive me to deeds beyond any normal bravery and quite some way further outside of decorum and good manners. I feel a representative example would be instructive. Travelling to London on Birmingham’s finest express service sandwiched me between two estate agents, and a multiple of that from the legal profession. When I am elected world dictator there shall be no draconian policies regarding trains or mobile communication except when the two intersect. At which point, the scorpion pits awaits.

Some of this is my fault. Okay, let’s get it out there, all of this was my fault as a middle-aged inventory malfunction had me awash with a thousand songs but no way to play them to myself. This English reserve not to bother my fellow man was clearly unfelt by my carriage companions. The brillcream boys behind me were trilling their latest deal at high volume to an audience who were clearly as uninterested as I. An assertion validated by the short call duration and a desperate ‘who shall we tell next?’

But for all their shallow look-at-me fuckwittery, they barely register on the ‘I am going to kill you now‘ meter which the lawyer-clan boosted beyond ten, beyond a Spinal Tap 11 and off the fucking scale. My upper-class-arsehole bingo was already mostly populated with ‘braying voice‘, ‘pain barrier volume‘, ‘snorting laugh‘ and ‘pompous self satisfied smugness‘ crayoned in at about a thousand PSI. First tosspot#1 led out with his hackyned ‘How I saved Roy Keane from Bankcrupcy‘ story before he was trumped by dickhead#2 giving it the big one about some ‘a-list celebrity‘ who’d retained his tosspotness by denying the cheap seats access to what coke-snorting looks like when filmed from a dodgy mobile phone***

And then as my head was one millimetre from smashing into the seat in front, dickweasel#3 launched into a story of his six year old daughter, pausing only to remind the smug collective that his family had been in the vanguard of grammatical correctness for 400 years, who had returned from school excited to tell ‘DaDa‘ – a term of endearment for which murder feels appropriate – that the new teacher was quite nice but *forced laugh, shark smile* failed to ascertain the difference between ‘fewer‘ and ‘Less‘. ‘That’s my girl‘ he triumphed. Poor bloody kid.

Readers, I cracked. Maybe you had to be there. Maybe you had to be me. Maybe this stuff isn’t important and it’s absolutely okay to acquiesce to a race where money and power means you get a head start. Maybe. Maybe not. Anyway, I shovelled work papers into my rucksack, stood up and made that stand. Venturing out into the corridor, two steps had me level with the table of cleverly amused laughter at the lower races. I stared them down and met their silence with ‘If you used fewer words, you’d be a lot less fucking annoying‘.

The silence extended awkwardly so I filled it with ‘you know, if you were so bloody important, surely you shouldn’t be sharing the carriage with the standard classproletarians‘. I probably could have done quite a whole lot better had more thought been given to my repartee. As it was, the unnatural quietness passed beyond anything I felt comfortable with, so I haughtily headed off to a seat not peopled by those who paint a grand vision but see nobody in it.

That seat was part of a four filled with the crumple suited ordinary Joe’s who pretended to be centered in an informational tornado aggregated on their phones, but were really just playing candy crush. My kind of people.

Come journey’s end, weary bodies levered themselves from uncomfortable seats to try again with public transport on our capitals finest mass transit underground system. I failed to move because the white heat of righteousness was still burning strongly. Let those who believe the class system holds strong cross me now and offer rebuttal, insult or possible court papers for slander.

They passed alright, but failed to reward my bravery with even a glance. Not because I had bested them, but because I was beneath their contempt. I still felt this was about a draw though – the industrious and clever will one day oust the privileged and inbred. That I lived in a country where what you did was more important than where you started. And the currency of experience has infinite value whereas that of exchange is merely transitory.

So then I walked into a bar, wall-to-wall filled with normal looking people happy to pay£5.50 for a pint of beer. At which point, it cost me quite a lot of money to forget that you must deal with the world as it is, not the way you want it to be.

* or possibly someone else. Or different words. This is what viral looked like in the 18th century.

** He didn’t say it. I’m trying to make a point here. If you can work out what it is, please let me know.

*** Which had me despairing about the shit we think is important. Followed closely by the thought I probably need to get out more.

Consequences

On By AlexIn Bikes, Mountain Bike RidingLeave a comment

It has been quite a week, riding wise. Four consecutive rides, then two days off before finishing with an epic – starting at 9am and finishing in late twilight*. This sequence is unusual enough on long summer days atop dusty, hard trails. Or even frozen winter mornings when that seasonal experience is preserved from the ankles down – rock hard singletrack under windless bluebird skies have a visceral and visual quality much ignored by the three-season mountain biking community.

None of these scenarios even partially match the rim deep mud, the endless slashing rain, the tree rattling wind, the gray-clamped sky, all peopled by delusional nutjobs who maintain slithering about in this depressing landscape is somehow an improvement on staying inside. My first ride put the Sun into Sunday and the ‘how many bloody people‘ into the Malvern Hills. Monday lost the sun and the weekend ramblers, but kept the slop, Tuesday had me finding new and interesting ways to fall off my cross bike, Wednesday exchanged night for day but the depth of mud and misery remained the same, and Sunday was merely a composite kaleidoscope from the previous week.

Numbers contextualise the experience. 150 kilometres. 3650 metres of vertical climbing. 13 hours in the saddle. A bit more if you factor in breathing hard and drinking lightly. Three different bikes, all brown. Five sets of riding kit, also brown. Two sets of winter boots living mostly under a radiator. One washing machine toiling beyond any concept of warranty repair. Mud moved, collected or eaten not recorded – had it been we’d been rounding up to the nearest metric ton.

Obviously it’s not all good, clean fun. There’s fun to be had, but it becomes increasingly diluted as another favourite trail has nothing to offer but tread-filling saturated dirt and the opportunity to participate in the nascent MTB offshoot of ‘not being able to steer or brake’. And then there are the noises – not just the sound of man bodysurfing mudpack but – transmission grinding itself to swarf, brake pads being filed back by grit, bearings graunching as trail-shit replaces grease. The human ear is not sufficiently attuned to discern the removal of paint, the stripping of expensive water resistant compounds and the slow death of a hundred small but vital components.

We crack on though with mud heading in that direction because the options are grimmer still. My body is used to exercise – it may complain incessantly about pain and suffering, but without it physically I become increasingly restless, and mentally I miss the revolutions to unwind difficult days. Spring feels closer than it is because of this mild winter, but it’s within reach and there’s fitness gold at the end of March’s rainbows for those of us earning double mud miles through winter.

So now we’re all about eeking out components until we’re fully out of the dark. My winter boots are held together by thin strips of velcro and habit, but replacing them feels like accepting winter isn’t mostly done. Chains, Cassettes and Chain rings on my three most used bikes are hooky and slippy, but fitting new and shiny stuff will merely render it similar within a few rides. Forks, shocks and seatposts have exchanged lubrication fluid for a mess of emulsification, but my friend Matt is a wizard with all things oily so extended post-ride triage sessions should see us through.

And riding is always – well nearly always – better than not riding. Sunday felt like a death march especially as our trail scouting revealed nothing but carrying through logged woodlands, repeated muddy climbs and a zero count of new downhill trails. By 3pm, we were at least two hours from home over two big hills – news which triggered a storm hard enough to have us all reaching for emergency rain jackets. There was a measure of grim pounding out the miles through endless muddy trails and some further local depressions as yours truly had a mildly arse-y flouce over the pointlessness of it all.

So we went to the pub. With a total of one light between the three of us.** Quick pint consumed, world a better, if darker, place. Headed home into the bastard headwind which had swung around to haunt us all day. Rolled into Ross some eight hours after we’d left leaving me no option but to hose bike/clothes/kit in further dark and rain. Some time later – as I was oiling unarticulating knees with a decent Merlot – I reflected on a week where a serial assault on the endless horror of trails was somewhere between a bit silly and totally insane.

We’re back to options; one is doing nothing which I’ve already discounted, and the other is road riding which feels like a solution looking for a problem. So we’ll carry on in the hope that our sacrifices begin to crank the season-handle. I just hope someone is listening.

* Darkness really. It’s odd to be asked at 9:01am if you’ve remembered your lights.

** And that was a rear light. I considered asking for a carrot juice chaser with my beer.

Spin, Doctor

On By AlexIn Bikes3 Comments
This is why outside is better than inside

Many, many years ago my brief illicit flirtation with a turbo trainer ended once MouseLung(TM) receded sufficiently to reaffirm muddy vows with my mountain bike. Subsequently, occasional bursts of insanity has seen my trembling finger hovering uncertainly over the ‘buy now’ button, while an instrument of pain filled my browser screen. The certainty that – in reality – its dusty carcass would lie unused in the dark reaches of the ‘shed of dreams’ ensured that button was never pressed*

My friend Jez is the flipperati’s ‘Mr Turbo‘. A man with the awesome self-discipline to exchange a warm winters’ bed for a 6am bastard torture contraption while confidently pitting his fitness against a set of goals best thought of pitching up somewhere between ‘laughable and unattainable‘. He talks of power output, wattage, intervals, heart rate zones and all sorts of other shit that, frankly, feels far too hard when the option is to look outside and utter a ‘I think we can safely consider than a raincheck, now where did I stash those Pringles?”

So not one of those, but thanks anyway. Instead I’ve drawn a straight line between quitting before starting to group therapy via guilt and ego. My Venn diagram of riding buddies has Malverns in one circle and Forest in the other. The intersection is minuscule ensuring flipping back into the hilly world of the Malvern Hills reminds me what proper fitness must feel like. With the forest boys, it’s more what proper drinking feels like 😉

In that group** my arse is handed to me on muddy plate whenever geography dives for the river. Point us the other way tho and my cheating choice of bicycle and some raging re: dying of the light can see me up front on the climbs. It’s a shallow victory but as a man who regards a tea spoon as ‘quite deep‘, I’ll parade it as some kind of ‘no other bugger cares‘ trophy. So when Matt began to lyrically wax over the benefits of a static spinning class, I began to worry.

In the spirit of enquiry then I pitched up on a dark, rainy night to a converted industrial unit split between classes of women aerobically gesticulating, and a more mixed group herded into a small, sweaty room segregated by bike like objects at regular intervals. Bike-Like in a form which included one of the normal two wheels, a shiny saddle clearly sourced from some kind of kinky sex-shop and a transmission systems entirely missing the physical realisation of a freewheel.

And the fella running it was – while sprightly and in generally good condition – pretty fucking ancient and that’s baselined from a man who looks in the mirror every morning and wondering who the grey,old twat looking back at him might be. Still, how hard can it be? Really it’s riding a bike which is pretty much my default not-working activity, the room was peopled by nobody wearing lycra or oiling themselves up***, and boxed by a 45 minute time limit which barely gets the forest crew to the first pub.

Perceptions are wonderful things. Inability to walk, hummingbird heart rates and schadenfreudeless so. All as the result of a losing combination mixing deluded resistance oneupmanship and going after it in the manner of the first man at the bar come post January Dryatholon. Subsequent weeks followed a similar pattern especially as Spin Class falls less than 24 hours after Sunday rides that may finish in the pub, but mark out the previous five or six hours slogging through hilly organic plasticine.

It’s addictive tho. Because while treasuring any kind of pain is not part of my world, it’s less than an hour of suffering. It’s inside, dry, warm and only mildly fetid. The instructor mainlines my tragic 80s rock music agenda, and – here’s the important bit – Matt’s not getting a fitness jump on me. But we’re getting that jump over everyone else. For which we die a bit by a thousand cuts; some of those being endless sprint/climb intervals, a few more being heart busting ‘jumps‘ between sitting and standing and a particularly sadistic exercise of sprinting like a bear-chased man two inches out of the saddle.

There’s no polite way of saying this; that fucking hurts a lot. Much of this was tangentially in my mind as I sauntered into the Asthma clinic on the back of a six day cycle where I’d ridden five of them over a 100k, and up a further 3 kilometres of vertical distance. Sure I walked like an aged cowboy and was pathetically grateful the appointment was on the ground floor, but buoyed by the realisation that everyone else there looked pallid and sick, whereas I just looked knackered.

Blood pressure: beyond healthy. Weigh in: Much Smugness. Lung Function: Better than a man of my age would puff and way beyond what a chronic asthmatic should realistically be able to project. Weekly alcohol consumption: lied a bit.

So my three month recurring appointment was downgraded to ‘come back next year unless you’ve died first’. The doc left me with the happy news that since my first appointment, some five years ago, my blood pressure was down, my weight had dropped 11kg and my lung capacity gone the other way by 16{45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2}. She was keen to understand the secret of my success. “Spin, Doctor‘ I replied, apparently amusingly.

And then I showed her that photo on my phone. Because much as spinning has wormed itself into my riding life, nothing – and I mean absolutely nothing – gets close to skiving off work and going riding with your mates. And you get awesome light for free.

The next person who responds to the cost of my bike with ‘you can buy a car with that‘ shall be met with half a smile which is code for ‘crikey, you couldn’t miss the point more if you were firing a moonshot‘

* after all, my road bike fulfils that function superbly.

** or, as it increasingly is, any group

*** which is my enduring image of Gym-Rats. For which they really need take a proper look at themselves. And not in the mirrors such establishments install to reflect your awesomeness.

Rambling.

On By AlexIn Bikes, Mountain Bike Riding, Photography1 Comment
10,000 other people not shown

I know I know, I do that a lot. Today though we’re more about the correct use of the verb as championed by at least a thousand walkers in the Malvern Hills. Sunshine lights their way and winter hibernation is in full retreat. Every evolutionary branch was represented – the double-poler striding out in grim determination, the full-rucksackers Sherpa-ing sandwiches, tea and random paraphilia to the highest point, the sweat-panted sweaty on a post-Xmas guilt trip and the family outing rounded out by bored children and perambulating dogs.

And a few mountain bikers. It’s a source of constant amazement to me that the Brownian motion of all these tribes, squeezed into a narrow range of hills, rarely sparks the tinderbox of frustration. That’s probably because 90{45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2} or more of trail users work extremely hard to respect each others space, and do not believe in a hegemony where they are first.

A few do tho. Walkers who wouldn’t dream of blocking another of their kind, but make a literal stand when faced with approaching wheels. Or MTB’rs slicing through family groups on some kind of pointless Strava mission. Cross the streams of these groups and it’s all finger pointing, two finger waving and ‘Outraged of Malvern‘ furiously typing an extreme tirade to the long suffering local rag.

The Malverns have an odd dynamic with half being entirely MTB legal and the other half not*, the ownership model where Conservators steward the land and endless committee’s and steering groups looking to square circles. Or possibly remove them as MTBing has long been the black poster child most darted at by those who a) speak loudest and b) ride not at all. It’s a lazy and sweeping generalisation to point accusing fingers as ‘those who don’t understand us’, but it’s also rationally obtuse to suggest Paragliders, Mountain Bikers, Model Flyers, etc somehow have less ‘rights‘ because the walkers were here first.

So we knew that departing the busiest part of the hills at 10:30 was going to be one of those smile/nod/don’t get irritated experiences. The sheer number of people wasn’t really our prime concern – no it was more the total lack of any grip that had my full attention. Conditions were a cross between riding in the world’s biggest Teflon pan and a re-imaging** of Rollerball. Both Martin and I experienced awesome tail slides – the back end breaking away and heading sideways that is always fun if a) it doesn’t plant you face first in the mud and b) the front wheel doesn’t decide to get involved in the action.

Martin did have an off which he considered a ‘dab‘. The Dab committee ruled that lying supine in the dirt and in no way connected to the bike does not constitute a dab! We also felt need to investigate the Tank Quarry for amusement/terror/pre A&E action. This descent represents the steepest and rockiest trail in the hills. Rocks that initially poke up between slick grass before monstering the whole trail with increasing size and jaggedness.

It was bloody terrifying. Never ridden it so cautiously or with such a high heart rate. Sufficient speed to carry the rock garden felt way too fast, but the thought of sacrificing grip through brake application countermanded any idea of slowing down. A washed out bottom section surfaced rocks like little gravestones, and a fetid step section nearly claimed me close to the end. Even my favourite jump was slick with flowing water, but encouragement from two walkers who clearly enjoy bloodsports saw me take a deep breath and get it done.

Mainly as Martin had already flown off it thereby fulfilling his role of ‘grip tester‘. Back at the pointy end of the hills, the hoards were fully sandwiched and adjusting focal lengths by walking blindly backwards. We did our best to nod and smile although Martin’s response to my pleading ‘what now‘ query as we faced a flange of walkers on the trail was ‘Charge‘. We didn’t really although a few rounds of ‘Rambler-Polo‘ may have been played, and the final steps were negotiated through a Tour De France like lined route, but nobody appeared to be aggrieved.

Not that we hung about to ask. So he hills may be alive with the sound of whinging. Though not from us. Conditions may be grim, our favourite trails unrecognisable and theforecasted weather has no real winter in it, but we’re outside in the sunshine and more than half way out of the dark. For a man of limited ambitions, that’ll do.

* Unless it’s dark. In which case the ‘evening bridleway’ clause comes into full effect.

** As I believe remakes are called now. That’s a terrible thing to do to a verb.

Slithering Darkly

On By AlexIn Bikes, Mountain Bike Riding, PhotographyLeave a comment
Drudgery neverending

An awesome moniker for the villain in a fantasy extravagancer, and if one substitutes ‘villain‘ for ‘idiot‘ and ‘fantasy‘ for ‘mud-slick‘ you’ve matched a simile to my riding experience over the last few days. Back the world up one rotation, and the anything north of Madrid is ice locked and cheerlessly cold. The trails were rock hard whilst the roads were endless slippy death. A reversal of what we have right now. And that’s a problem.

Winter Mountain biking has a rhythm. A heartbeat marking out Wednesday and Sundays as riding pulses whatever the prevailing weather conditions. Come summer it’s all a bit fibrolated with endless light and easy rainchecks with sun promised the next day. The dark season offers none of this – the weather will either be wet, cold, snowy or icy. If you’re extremely lucky possibly all 4. That’s a good number heralding the drawing of the darkness curtain, when the tedium of multiple layers and on time charging become part of our cylical world.

As do military style logistics mitigating dirty protests being campaigned through clean kitchens. Spare clothes and towels for the rider, bedsheets and seat covers for the transport, hosepipe readiness and preparations for draining the European lube mountain. Weekly brake pads and monthly pivot services. Transmission whittled by day and bank accounts by night. Such activities can be considered as a three month trauma clinic or a sacrifice to the goddess of Spring.

The rhythmic harmony of the Flipperati has suffered a discord this winter. One member* has largely abandoned ‘playing outside’ with a fetish for indoor training be that mating with the unholy Turbo, or racing round banked tracks in heated velodromes. The other two have been slacking off in admirable style; firstly to ride in an entirely different country and then stealing daytime rides when their vocational calling wasn’t looking.

Wednesday last though the Flipperati rode out again. For the first time in over a month – for which we were appropriately punished. My early arrival under threatening but dry skies gave me ample time to search the ride-bag, the car and my fading memory for an essential clothing component. Sadly drew a zero on all counts leaving me with a PE ‘playing in your pants’ approach to lycra shorts. Delivery of gritty arse crack to the terminally forgetful? Sure, where do I sign.

Faffing done, the rain came, stayed and hardened. Specifically at the point when Martin declared confidently ‘it’s slowing down’ which triggered the inevitable downpour. This felt like proper mountain biking as we used to do before getting soft and weather apps. Slogging through uphill mud, sliding sideways through downhill mud, exiting the trail in comedic fashion and wondering if there would be some kind of medal ceremony for any survivors.

Mud-Mesiter Martin was in his element. Or elements – those being slick mud, a cheating front tyre and a lack of imagination concerning tree based impact analysis. Jez and I were more sensible/conservative/nesh chowing down on mud cocktails and wondering whether to crash now to avoid the rush later. The aftermath was interesting; a ‘bucket of doom’ has been introduced in the Leigh Household where exterior MTB clothing must first pass before being stamped approved for the washing machine. The inside of my car appears to have been the victim of a flood event, and my unpadded arse had another feeling – that of having spent the evening in D wing bending over in the shower.

Any sport where the consequences double the time of the actual activity is clearly bonkers, as was I for repeating it two days later in the Forest. Which the previous week had been fantastic fun mainly because I had one of those bike-plus-rider-as-one epiphanies. Not last night. Oh fuck no. It’d have been quicker/safer/far less embarrassing/about the same speed to leave the bike boot-bound and run around the trails.

No one else appeared to be having similar problems. As their lights danced in the increasing distance, I was bouncing off trees, braking inappropriately and just generally riding like a twat. Every time I tried to anti-twat myself, Bad Things Happened. Be that a sashay off a jump leaving me with the option of ‘braking by fencepost‘ or slide into tree, or ‘root-grinding‘ a front wheel which is six inches of compressed terror followed by fetching oneself out of moist shrubbery.

20k of that was more than enough. From about 2k my entire thought process was mainly on staying alive at any speed and wondering – out loud – if it was time for beer yet. If you ride like a chump, ensure you drink like a champ. You’ll be unsurprised to hear I hit both those marks with equal committment.

Today there was much to rinse, wash and clean. And this brief period of unsulliment shall last exactly four seconds into the next ride. Which of course will be tomorrow in line with the winter heartbeat. Come Spring we’ll be Gods of the trail, winter hardened, sideways skilled and seasonally adjusted.

Until then, it’s snorkel, credit card and washing machine research. And wondering how hard it would be to learn Spanish.

* I love the English language. The nuances of a single word are there for everyone to snigger at.

That’s awkward

On By AlexIn Bikes, Photography6 Comments
Should put some parking sensors in there.

The onlyreal constant in my endless quest for a settled shed of dreams – other than the rubbish rider of course – has been the trusty bike trailer. Bought about 2006 and ritually abused ever since. Living outside in all conditions, heated under the odd baking sky, rained on far more frequently, often covered in sleet and snow and bounced onto the tow bar atleast twice a week.

Blameless it was. And now it’sdead. Or close to dead – the bent and twisted remains shall be reverently placed on Thor’s Anvil* tomorrow while the guilty watch on shuffle-footed, expecting the worse: ‘Sorry, we did all we could be it was too far gone. Might be worth a tenner in scrap value’.

It deserved better. Coming clean, the enumeration of smashing it into other innocent stuff is greater than one. At least two further incidents need to be accounted for; firstly backing it into a wall that was essentially the same colour as the road, just more vertical. Could have happened to anyone. An excuse which entirely fails to cover the other incident where extreme rammage** was inflicted on a grassy knoll which had a similar mythical status of that one in Dallas.

Which may explain why the electrics slid into a deranged mental state – sort of working just not in response to any driver input. And somewhat undermining the extremely German sliding arrangement providing tailgate access by dropping the bikes backwards. This fiendish feature was traditionally operated through a number of safety mechanisms nicked from a nuclear arming protocol. Once I’d smacked it around a bit, the disturbing site of a few thousand pounds of mountain bikes disappearing out of the rear view mirror became a terrifyingly frequent occurrence.

And then being a mechanical savage, I broke the similarly superbly engineered fixing attachment while testing it with a new tow bar. If sufficient violence hadn’t been wreaked on its bent frame by this time, there was still time to break a key in one of the be holding arms requiring amputation of important components, and a desperate plea to the manufacturer for some new bits.

It was in this happy state we dropped 50kg+ of expensive mountain bikes onto the remains and motored down to the alps. A journey of some 800 kilometres – most of which I spent pathologically staring out of the rear window, wondering if I should have mentioned the trailer’s party trick of disgorging its contents onto the road once the trigger speed past 80.

So yesterday, the manual over-ride hitch was carefully negotiated with the post attachment obligatory finger count passing muster. The bike was dropped into the middle carrier and strapped down like so many times before. But something was different. Normally Carol parks her car next to mine – today it was mostly abandoned near the front door. A small detail I probably should have noticed.

Because you see that’s EXACTLY the space generally used to back out of the drive. Not that I’m blaming Carol is any way – although her Honda is quite small, it’d be a bit of a stretch to maintain a line suggesting ‘well how was I meant to see it? It’s only about ten feet long, 3 feet wide and bright red?”. Traditionally one would discover such a thing by examining the lack of drivable space in the rear view mirror

But I wasn’t looking in the rear view mirror. Oh no I was looking out of the side window so I didn’t hit the fence. Which is another innocent party that’s avoided bumper swipe-age by about 2 microns over the years. The parking sensors always save you of course – you know the things you scoff at when the Car Salesmen extolls their virtues and he is rebuffed with a ‘I am a MAN, I am genetically engineered to park, go and talk to someone without a willy if you wish to flog that benefit’.

Something everyone should know. They don’t work well through a trailer. The first proximity inkling of which you are aware is an expensive thumping noise and some lightweight deceleration trauma. Followed by another sound, this time from the driver: ‘oh for fucks sake‘. Engage first gear, roll forward, open door, tread carefully over broken plastic recently attached to a much loved trailer.

We thought Carol’s car was fine until a hairline crack in the bumper triggered a chain reaction of broken stuff ending somewhere in the boot. The garage had to get the extra wide calculator out which had me reaching for the insurance details and waving a sad goodbye my no claims bonus. The very helpful man in the call centre was most apologetic that ‘no, I’m sorry sir the trailer isn’t covered‘ whilst quietly miming ‘you total numpty‘ I’m sure.

Carol was significantly more sanguine on the whole assault and battery of her car than I’d have been had the circumstances been reversed. A few hours later a bloke in a BMW soft roader thing nearly totalled me in Ledbury which – given this stuff tends to come in threes – suggests the poor old Yeti is soon to be found under a local tractor.

So the trailer is mostly buggered. It’s put in an excellent shift and suffered much abuse and neglect. If it was a dog, the RSPCA would’ve been round a long time ago. And however great it was for bike transportation, it makes a bloody useless battering ram. Having said all that, if its final act was to protect my bike and my car – both of which received not a scratch – while sacrificing itself, the ending has not been in vain.

And I shall buy another one of the same brand. Assuming it comes with parking sensors. Or a chauffeur.

* My mate Matt who is a hammer champion. He owned a Landrover once so has all the tools required to fix that engineering masterpiece. Lump hammers in eight different sizes.

** I believe this means something different to those apparently misunderstood sheep fanciers we get a lot of around here.