Author: Alex

Back to the Future

On By AlexIn Bikes, Mountain Bike RidingLeave a comment

Reduced to stealing Movie titles, basic politeness dictates a cursory summary of the franchise; first one amusing and clever, second one tired and rubbish, third one somewhere in between. Although Doc naming his kids Jules and Vern was a stroke of genius. I do recall struggling to separate Marty’s girlfriend from the patio she was standing on* in terms of acting prowess. On reflection, you’d have to conclude the deck was slightly less wooden.

Still talking titles, my last two posts could’ve been better named ‘navel‘ and ‘gazing‘ or conjoined to declare ‘you’ve suffered enough‘, so this week we’re back to the Hedgehog Heartland of bikes and bollocks. The first being campaigned through a tranche of proper winter, with the second merely being frozen.

Tuesday is ride night. No excuses. No neshing out. No complaining of tiredness or rain or darkness or it just not being summer. The Flipperati** ride out astride their mighty steeds in haughty defiance of inclement weather and endless grim’n’slop which best define the joy of a four-season outdoor sport. Well two of us do, with the third musketeer – Portos, Ambros and Deadloss, I don’t like to ask which one I am – still crocked from launching himself onto a fist sized pointy rock back in Tenerife.

So off we set and I’d rather wished we hadn’t. Riding parameters defined in the first ten seconds. To your left sloppy mud piled on road margins, to your right trees devoid of foliage but still holding a depressing volume of wet. And in the middle cracking ice – gunshot loud as fat tyres crept by. Nights like this force a re-evaluation of Gym misery amongst the grim sweatiness of fading resolutions. But not for long as warmth – gestated by elven-magic’d technical clothing – spreads from your core to unfeeling fingers.

I’d chosen a raffish seasonal outlook sporting ancient ski knee socks plus-fouring a set of roadie bib tights themselves accesorised by a pair of baggy shorts of indeterminate age and fit. Up top it was the buff carefully arranged for the folically challenged, with everything in the middle being expensive and ready to repel wind, cold, sleet and – if required – borders.

Soon we were climbing into the hills at the slightly uncomfortable pace of a man winching 30lbs of fantastic trail bike all the time attempting to coat-tail a younger and somewhat fitter rider sprinting away. 30 minutes later we’d abandoned any thoughts of dropping back under trees branch lined with the mental scars of last weeks two hour mud slide. No, wiser and significantly less splattered we headed high onto the frozen Tundra of the lower Worcestershire Alps marvelling at the world’s first planetarium exhibited above, and tucked up houses steaming welcoming smoke in the valley.

First time down brought with it the inevitable descent into carnage. And, if Jez’s shout of ‘fuuuuuuccck’ hadn’t synapsed some lethargic nerve endings, possibly Australia such was the bottomless black hole I barely wrenched around. ‘Where the hell did that come from’ predictably whined I ‘it wasn’t there the last time we were up here‘. That’d be about a few months ago, before the Malverns were twinned withSodom and Gomorrah . Fair point well made.

Points still to be made, we dropped into an organic halfpipe crafted by ancient Britons and now ridden sketchily by us. Ice is funny stuff especially on grass ***, feeling cold but sounding fiery as wheels crackled in zero degree pyromania, while those on top cackled with uncomplicated mirth at the silliness of it all. Laughter cut short after a natural table top ended abruptly in a puddle. Except it was -4 by this time, so that puddle was ice and I was all tank-slappery for more moments that a man of my age should be subjected too.

Creeping down a steep fireroad, brakes modulated to the max and feeling for grip that’s on-off-off-off-off-ohshityes-on, the valley floor said hello and pointed us back ever upwards. We slavishly followed contours on now white grass until the trails turned back to brown and, for the first time in approximately ever, rock hard. Released from months of slogging, we let rip abandoning the very safety margins much needed when tree covered tracks threw winter right back at us.

Weird conditions. One minute, summer hard from the axles down, the next a sloppy mess swishing rear wheels in thirty degree arcs. Fast then slow with a transition best labelled fairly terrifying. Good dirty fun, proper life stuff, sensation overload on feet, hands, legs and arms. The tiredness and ‘is it worth all the ball-ache’ of an hour ago now completely banished. Let me bottle this and mainline a hit once a day to get through a shitty week.

A fast rocky blast off the top had me loving the pain of hauling big bikes up steep climbs. A little later I was doubly glad of all that talent compensation as the GPS recorded well over 50kph during a somewhat unplanned plummet – lights bouncing and fingers twitching for the brakes – from a not oft descended hill. There’s talk of close calls and the over-use of the phrase ‘fuck me, that was a bit lively‘ as we wearily traversed a final summit opening up the chance to chase the North Star home. Line astern, summer fast, wheels locking up, apex’s going one way and line choice the other.

I read this and it sounds like nonsense. There’s nothing here I can hammer out as a word-searching wordsmith to make any kind of sense. Instead let me try and explain something far more important; when we ride mountain bikes with star-y skies above and frozen trails below, it is not some kind of leisure activity. It is instead an absolute privilege.

We’d do well to remember that.

* Read on, read on, it’s not what you might be thinking you filthy rapscallions.

** Similar to the Twitterati but more douche bags than hash tags. And, in a departure from many mountain bikers, actually undertaking the activity outside rather than being awesome behind a keyboard

*** If you have a particularly perverted sense of humour.

Targets

On By AlexIn Pretentious nonsense4 Comments

First goals and now targets. This smacks nastily of play mirroring work. Let’s take that and exercise it a little through a weary narrative jog. Last summer*, most of my targets were viscerally augmented to the broad suit backs of my temporary employer. Such was my calamitous state of work/life balance that the opportunity of ‘clearing angsty thirty foot hungry alligators from a Florida swamp‘ would have been met with a cost/benefit analysis something like ‘so similar work in a warmer climate with more reasonable clients, where do I sign?’

Targets are terrible things. Especially if you’re a civil engineer. As you’re merely building them as incentives for the defence industry. In the mostly pointless world of what I do, they represent a meaty slice of a vocational pizza topped with KPIs, CoEs, SoWs and YHTBFJs**. Not that I’m complaining because through no obvious effort on my part, stuff that many people seem to find difficult is scarily easy for me. Of course I have to work hard, but not because this stuff is actually difficult to do. There’s just a lot of it.

You may have noticed that, at no time, has any effort been made to articulate exactly what that is. This isn’t me being coy or clever – it is genuinely because there’s no easy way to explain it. Even to myself. I know what it’s called but that’s not the same as what is it. Many moons ago, when we first moved out here, my efforts at school-gate communication elicited the knowledge that almost everyone had a proper job be that fireman, farmer or farrier. My best response was essentially a hand waving generic – speaking of great deeds evoked mainly by shouting at people.

So we’ve established what it isn’t. Only not really because what it is isn’t is how I see me spending the rest of my ever diminishing days. There’s a beautiful phrase about middle age which essentially talks of “Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way” (point for artist and title). Let me share what this target fixation isn’t one more time, and that’s a middle aged crisis because such angst would suggest one has ever pupated from mental puberty.

Any time I’ve ever felt secure in a job is the trigger for boredom followed by extremely bad mannered disruptive behaviour. Get out before being thrown out. And I have absolutely no fucking interest at all in the kind of career plan where some Apprentice-meme mutates into ‘in two years I shall be world dictator, but first: this filing‘. God if you want to be disappointed, look out of the window or into the mirror. Don’t set yourself up for failure; we are already over-burdened by a society explaining we’re wholly inadequate in terms of what we buy, the way we bring up our children, the house we live in and the car we drive.

So if we’re going to have some kind of target, let’s at least make it something we might actually enjoy doing. It’s not riding bikes – strange as that may sound, because riding is a dirt filler which papers over the cracks on an ordinary life. It’s not a way of life, it’s an escape from it. And there’s no target that gets hit by punting myself out as a gun for hire until old age or cynicism or hitting some mythical number cries that enough is really enough.

It’s finishing a book. If we were looking at a left-to-right sequential view, it’s about starting it. Or even working out what it might be. But in four months time this contract ends and something will start. For four weeks, everything that pays the bills and provides some gossamer wisp of self worth shall be cast aside. To see if there’s anything in my head that might make sense on paper.

Let’s save ourselves some tedious rhetoric and assume the answer to all of these questions is ‘you’ve got to be fucking joking‘ 1: have you any idea what kind of book that might be? 2: will it be finished? 3: will it make you any money? 4: do you have the mental discipline to sit in front of an empty screen every day and 5: will you have an enviable set of excuses of why the lack of any discernible output shall be considered a wild success? Oh sorry the answer to the last one is, of course, absolutely.

My mate Dave has written two books; an electronic one he’s published himself, and a second that a proper company is currently making out of real paper. For which he appears to have gainstayed any actual paying employment for the thick end of two years. Although this is simply explained by some supposed ‘research‘ that had him gallivanting to all corners of this sceptred isle to go ride his bike. But ballsy as hell – of that there is no doubt.

Google tells us that an average book is 60,000 words. That’s 2000 a day then. Creating thousands of words isn’t the problem, they might even be good words but navigable sentences is clearly going to be a big issue. And that’s before there’s any proper writing thing around plot, research, structure, narrative, etc. Still I’ve started a few so eventually I’ll have to finish one, because we all know that everyone has a book inside them. And frankly that’s probably where it should stay.

To be honest, writing this down and publishing it to an uncaring Internet is merely a device to keep me honest. It’s nothing more than a public admission of failing to follow convictions that make perfect sense until eating becomes a priority. I’m at an age were forgetting difficult words such as large woody handled objects separating inside and outside become finger clicking, its-coming-to-me, arrrghh-you-know-the-THING daily trial. If I don’t get my shit vaguely together, I’ll be left with nothing more than electronic spittle.

Worse case I can find my muse in dusty summer singletrack*** and revel in a world where alarms happen to other people and emails are something to be welcomed.

There I’ve said it now. No idea what happens next.

* Chronological. In no way meteorologically differentiated from winter by anything other than a slightly elevated rain temperature.

** Don’t ask. I only made one of those up. If was the one with F in it.

*** Which may involve a move to Spain.

Open Goal

On By AlexIn Other stuff4 Comments

For the statistically unfulfilled, there’s a whole demographic of fun* trapped in the Mountain Biking bell curve. Mostly – if the bottom half of the Internet is to be believed** peopled by tubby middle-aged IT middle managers tediously offsetting a lack of talent and self awareness with expensive wheeled trinkets and DEFCON 1 keyboard warfare.

If you can stay their delusion for long enough to understand their motivation, there will be the trumpeting of how – this year – peaks of awesomeness will be scaled, journeys of a thousand miles shall start with a decent Pinot, and anyway they’ve barely time to waste their time with you because riding bikes is far more important. As soon as they’ve shut down this browser and levered their hippopotamus arse off the sofa.. My good mate and proper writer Dave Barter injects a healthy dose of realism into such aspirations by declaring a strong desire to be ‘a little bit less shit’

For all my predictable digs at fat people who wear Rapha XXL without a hint of irony, this is more than a little displacement activity. And I’ve quite a bit to displace with six months of nightly self medication poorly mixed with zero motivation to ride in the rain. Anyone spending summer in the UK would simply translate that to not riding very much at all. My daily diet of stress, angst, bacon sandwiches, lunchtime pizza and evening wine decimation had the predictable effect of adding a chunk of midriff that has become sentient in its’ fear of mirrors and scales.

No matter, New Year is a perfect time for resolutions or ‘goal setting’ as we IT middle managers pretentiously label it. We’ve all been on those courses where some failed hippy in a suit encourages us to visualise our goals and find expression for our dreams. When asked to ‘share my progress with the group’ I tend to go all Yorkshire and declare my dream is this fucking toe curling embarrassment is going to end soon so my goal of being the first in the bar can be enacted.

Apparently I’m missing the point. But so are they; goal setting for the genealogically lazy scores a similar success profile to slamming open the door, pointing accusingly at the sky and screaming ‘will you stop bloody raining?‘. The only way the insufficiently motivated amongst us can get anything done is to breezily declare, to those responsible for paying wages, that great things of a somewhat nebulous (but great don’t forget that bit) shall be brought forth through a maelstrom of fervent creation Monday week.

Which gives us ample time to stare out of the window, ponder blank documents, consult with our colleagues in an off-site location that may serve something stronger than horrible coffee before sitting on our hands until Sunday Night. At which point the terror-of-being-found-out fires up the crucible of dubious content and the thing hits the deadline still steamingly warm from the printer.

So faced with suffering nonsense of modified lifestyles, hurty no-fun exercise and moderation of everything which staves off the grim in the pursuit of some fanciful outcome many months away, I toast it with a large glass and instead get back to my alchematic research transforming lettuce into bacon. And that’s worked superbly well right upon to the point when – through half closed eyes behind steepled hands – the they-cannot-lie digital scales punched a blow in my flabby solar plexus that read 83.5 kg.

It may have added ‘one at at time‘ as well – I knownot having stumbled off the scales in search of a some reassurance. Maybe in the form of a chocolate biscuit. In old money that’s 3/4 of a stone of fat when compared to my Pre-Mayhem fighting weight. This clearly calls for action even for a man with a mission to single handedly ensure the financial health of Herefordshire’s finest fish’n’chip emporiums.

I’ve not really had a love handle to grab hold of – should you be in the perilous predicament of being asked to do so – in 45 bloody years and I’ll be buggered*** if such horrors shall be dragged about for the remains of my existence. So we need a plan which is like a goal but without committing to anything. Before we decide what’s in, let’s be clear what’s out; body Nazism in some sweaty exercise room with misery for company. My current place of employment has a fantastic Gym on site, entirely without cost but heavily laden with guilt. Honestly, just No. I’d rather run up and down the stairs or beat my head against repeatedly the desk both of which are available activities on my employers time.

I could ride to work. Except it is 100k. A. Day. In winter. I’m nowhere near enough nails for that. Come BST I’ll give it a crack, but 9 hours in the office and 5 more on the bike makes me reconsider the calorific value of buggery. Sure I’ll ride my bikes a bit more but that isn’t going to shift a chunk of chunk. So if we’re not going to be throwing more out, we’d best stop stuffing it in. I’ve moved on from buggery by the way in case that sentence was in any way ambivalent.

Technology offers a solution through the hateful App cheerfully named ‘myfitnesspal‘. Really the developers missed a trick here not calling it somewhat more truthfully ‘get the fuck away from the pie you fat bastard’. The genius of this on screen demon is doubling up your guilt when eating something vaguely pleasurable by insisting you record its calorific value. At the end of which, claxons sound, alarms bray and colours flash to explain you’re exactly one doughnut from certain heart disease and trousers sown from a pair of windsocks.

It’s free of course. Because only a fucking masochistic mentalist would pay real money for it. I suppose 1800 calories day is doable if you’ve no interest in joy entering your life for a few months. Assuming you don’t wish to drink anything other than the stuff fish shag in. So it’s back to no beer in the week, salad not sausages, counting calories not cakes. And deciding twice the misery could halve the time to endure it, three proper sporting events loom worryingly large in the diary; the wentwood 50, the illegally painful FoD Spring Classic, and to start the Dyfi Winter Warmer. Winter warmer my arse, more chance of drowning or frostbite. Fairly sure all competitors will be forced to dress like Captain Oats.

So if you notice a darkening tone to the hedgehog and a few clicks on the grumpiness ratchet be not surprised. Not tonight tho, because Friday night is the weekend and I’ve broken out the grape based therapy. I’m sure the App will have something to say about that, but this is not an issue I have to deal with right now as – due to hunger pangs – I’ve eaten the phone.

* for a given value of fun

** if I have one new years resolution, it is to PUT THE COMPUTER DOWN and walk away from the Internet. You’d have thought 8 hours sat in front of the bloody thing would have sated my desire to attempt communication with those rocking ‘the dummies guide to grammar and logic‘.

*** Maybe not that. Even a spinning class would be preferable.

Well that’s an hour I won’t get back.

On By AlexIn Site StuffLeave a comment

Or two in fact after the entire house of url-linked cards collapsed under the weight of WordPress’s shitty editor.

Anyway for what it’s worth*, I’ve updated the ‘best bits’ page, picking out pages with the most hits over the last couple of years. There’s really nothing to add other than the strange corner of the Internet occupied by Skoda Forums clearly have a higher boredom threshold than the rest of my readers.

I’ll leave you alone now 😉

* which I think we can all agree is ‘not a lot’

been there, rinsed it out

On By AlexIn Bikes2 Comments
Deeper than it looks. And it LOOKS deep

Curmudgeonly as my last post may have been, some slack must be cut for the on-the-ground*conditions under which it was written. Under skies full of endless rain and on a ground floating on once apparently exhausted aquifers. Best to get out for a ride then to cheer myself up.

Five of those this holiday; three on the only appropriate bike for the conditions. A clever hybrid of road and dirt rolling fast enough to hold sway over boredom until the rocky bits begin. Proper brakes and anorexic MTB tyres makes it a fine mud plugger, if the mince-pie encumbered wheezy engine can make enough power for momentum to overcome sludgery.

These thin tyres part the mud rather than spread it. Irresponsible trail use right now will create metre wide motorways from sinewy singletrack come the dry season. Even the Malverns’ with their legendary colander like qualities are backed up with surface water on top, and unseen-until-this-year mud underneath.

Three options are presented to the cabin-fevered cycle obsessive; ride flooded roads, potholed and washed away, play at trail centres with their armoured runs and car park warriors, or find pleasure in slithering about on a confused bicycle that’s not quite sure what it is.

Fun is what it is. More fun than sitting inside. Less fun than – say – dusty trails under sunny skies. But keeps one in touch with the inner-11 year old as old trails are splashily navigated, and new ones found through never ending exploring. In the case of the photo, a river stopped play where before was just a easy to ride through puddle. Once the bike disappeared beyond the hub, I decided while fun a fording might be, trenchfoot would not.

So that’s 2012 then. From not much going on workwise to a period of total insanity recently followed by something pleasantly in between. Bikes have been ridden 2600 kilometres over 64000 metres of lumpy hills in a tad over 200 hours. Stats wise that’s about right, but entirely fails to capture all the really good stuff, much of which was unsullied by GPS technology being mostly carried out in the pub afterwards.

Three new bikes, three leaving the premises, a new one for Jess, exactly one road ride that left me so traumatised I sold the bloody thing. No major crashes due mainly to on-trail mortality fear, the best month of the year unridden with mouse-lung and no obvious prospect of stopping because one is ‘getting a bit old for this sort of thing‘.

2013 – like the start of every year – has so much potential. Riding with some old pals at Afan a few days ago reminded us all of fantastic trips to foreign shores before we all became distracted with stuff that looked important. We’re going to put that right next year, older for sure but certainly not wiser. So many trails I want to ride, so many skills I still want to learn, so desperate to pack it all in before I really must think about packing it in.

Plenty of time to think about that in 2014. Or 2015. Or…

* soggy. moist. flooded. Insert adjective of wet despair here.

Winter, it’s the new spring

On By AlexIn Pretentious nonsenseLeave a comment

Not so much spring, more raging torrent. But before that, this.

There’s many, many things serially broken about Christmas. Not least because it’s become less of an excuse for your righteous atheist to tediously explain to anyone who isn’t interested how we’ve hijacked a pagan festival, and more because we’ve replaced any token interest in the birth of Christ with a full on worship of the great god Capitalism.

The shit we buy. The guilt we feel. The booze we drink. The food we stuff down our throats. It’s a gluttony love in swiftly followed by an orgy of self pity when we open the credit card bill, or stare through frightened fingers at the new digital scales some bastard relative thought we might find useful.

As a mast-nailedunbeliever, there’s somethingbeautifullyironic when to the God of Marketing the spoils, and to the being once held absolute the scraps. There’s a million people that do this argument better than I, and that’s fine because right now it’s missing the point by about 3 days.

21st December. Wintersolstice. Half way out of the dark. Sure our little storm tossed island is still mostly underwater andmeteorologicalevents suggesting the season handle has not yet been cranked over. Snow and ice have been replaced by wet and floods but – horrible as it is for those who have a holiday full of nothing but sandbags and insurance call centres – it’s atemporarything.

But before we feel even the suggestion of the season after this, there’s the brutal horror of January with its storms, new years resolutions, disappointments and reversions to the status quo, followed swiftly by the hardest monthbefore pre-summer arrives with the promise of dry and warm but generally delivers more of the endless damp. Especially if some media prick goes wild with the ‘hosepipe ban‘ angle. Cue Ark Building.

Christmas is a brutal prism on emotion; from joy to sadness, from rhapsody to dysphoria, from can’t get enough to can’t wait for it to end. All suffered under rain clamped skies,coopedup with those you love and those you really wish would just fuck off home. Don’t misunderstand ne here, it’s not a bad thing – spending time with your loved ones and quaffing guilt free booze never is – but save me from the bonhommie and banality.

Instead let’s look beyond Jan the First and accelerate from there. Because care as I don’t about some made up day when we we all go mad with ripping wrapping paper for ten minutes, I am deeply consumed by the chronological certainty that what we’re looking at here is not the onset of winter. Oh no, ladies and gentlemen let me welcome youfulsomelyto the countdown to spring.

And just to show I’m not a total Christmas Clampit, let me add this; for seven years I’ve been writing this shit. I used to think it was for the few people who took time to read it, but really it isn’t. If that was any motivation, I’d have stopped bloody ages ago. It’s for me to keep in practice. Because one day I’ll finally finish something started back in the era when hair, optimism, self belief, that kind of shit was common currency in my world.

Until then you’ll have to put up my random streams ofconsciousnessand lop eyed view on what’s important. Which I suppose means, for those long serving hangers on and occasional readers, I shall raise the predictable glass and wish you all Merry Christmas.

Best of luck with that 😉

A bolt from the screw

On By AlexIn Bikes, Mountain Bike RidingLeave a comment
Soon the peaceful post ride beer is to be shattered

Long suffering hedgehogger’s are tediously reminded of my mechanical incompetence, faced evenwith seemingly simple tasks. In my simple world-view, the universe is a binary split between those genetically blessed with the ability to bevel and the rest of us. Based firmly in the second camp, every problem is generally hit quite hard with various percussive tools before being declared an electrical issue.

And that’s for stuff clearly already broken. The concept of preventative maintenance is merely a meaningless pantheon of interesting letters without much of a meaning. I assumed it was something to do with birth control and moved swiftly on. So while many may consider my pre-trip regime of kicking the tyres* and counting the brakes lackadaisically inadequate, it’s actually a well honed strategy of not creating a non working component from a working one by the simple application of Mad Spanners’ Al.

On reflection this may have been a mistake. An oversight certainly when you consider Cy’s lovely Rocket is more than a bit of an engineering tour-de-force with significant linkages, bolts and pivots that demand something other than giving them an occasional friendly pat. Jump forward to the end of a first day where dusty bikes were being eulogised through a beery lens, which would have been absolutely fine, were I not suddenly struck with an almost alien-abduction desire to ‘fix something’

That something was an occasionally lumpy pedal stroke impeded by a catchy rasp. Beer in hand, I confidently approached the patient patting it comfortingly on the saddle ‘nothing to worry about, just having a quick look, didn’t even bring a hammer, all shall be fine‘. But it wasn’t. Not at all. The main pivot bolt** had unwound sufficient revolutions to be uncomfortably nestling against the inner chain ring. Which had me rushing round the other side to see what the fuck the bolt at the end of that axle was playing at.

Whatever it was playing at I couldn’t ascertain with it having derelicted its duty and spun off to lie unseen in some handy ditch. Mechanically as we’ve established I’m bloody useless, but put me in front of a head scratching problem and straight away stuff starts to happen. Buying bikes from a friendly bloke in Derbyshire rather than some faceless corporation means I get an answer to my ‘right Cy broken this bit, what’s next‘ call right now, followed by good advice.

This being that a duplicate bolt from the linkage would need to tap into the empty thread leaving me with the job of finding something M14 shaped to complete the ‘can go riding tomorrow‘ jigsaw. Turning what into how is a challenge with nothing but multitools, and the hotel owner proffering a box of spares clearly hoarded since the last war. Problem solver remember? First assemble the team; what we have here is my good mate Martin who can fix anything on 30 ton combine harvesters with spanners than make me feel I’m living in Lilliput. And Augustin the lovely proprietor who had little English but a superb collection of what – on closer examination – appeared to be a collection of bathroom furniture from the 1950s.

Cue ‘A Team‘ music and another beer. Through the shared language of mechanical savagery we removed the cranks dispensing with the not-available special tool inserting instead a screwdriver and hitting it with a rock. Cranks off, bathroom spanner close enough to gain purchase on the donor bolt. That’s out, but now we’re struggling as the lovingly crafted cowled housing hosting the axle bolt means we can get any purchase to tighten the bolt.

Plan B. Jam in a multitool and measure success on exactly how much paint is removed as it graunches through 90 degrees during the tightening process. No matter, it’s on and we’re one standard bolt short of getting it done. On a Spanish Bank Holiday. Out of season. At 6pm. Tomorrow is another day, and one which the one bolt shop on the island might be open. If not it’s one of Lavatrax’s hire Marin’s which are fine and everything but have the meme of the Top Gear Beetle malevolently rumbling behind the talent***

Darran turns up with bolts and spanners of which the latter fits but the former is still maddeningly out of reach. Augustin still feels we’re missing a trick and insists on attempting to affix a shower attachment clearly nicked from the film set of ‘The Graduate‘. We wave him away, load up and head the down the mountain away from awesome riding and towards the city of the grockels where – if I’ve led a righteous life – man with bolt shall be waiting.

His shop certainly was. Open and busy immediately leading to losing Martin into the middle-aged porn of the power tool aisle. Leaving him to check out “Spanish Drillers Monthly”, Darran and I presented ourselves, and most of my bike, at the till making M14 gestures until the nice man tapped furiously into a terminal and disappeared into some vast stock room. He returned triumphant with the MTB equivalent of the Cullinan diamond and a matching washer.

I fell upon this shiny thing with the pathos of a man saved from a terrible future involving bikes mostly associated with map boards, beards and Ron Hill Tracksters. While Darran got busy with his big wrench I handed over the not very substantial sub of .76 cents to the poor assistant who couldn’t quite understand while a repressed English bloke felt the urge to give him a proper manly hug.

Twice in the first kilometre I checked the bolt was present and correct determined to ensure that any future breaks for freedom would be stalled by my keenly observed quality control. And then promptly forgot about it. Which worked well as the bike performed impeccably for the next three days without – or probably because – I did nothing other than brush the dust off it.

Packing it back up I couldn’t help noticing a couple of things. Firstly the once shiny frame now had the appearance of a ground zero event during a fragmentation grenade attack, and secondly the rear tyre was describing an orbit best thought of as a washing machine being pulled into a black hole. The first was due to the extreme rockiness of the terrain, the second to my inability to solve the equation ‘tyre rim requirement – tyre rim > 0‘.

You almost have to feel sorry for the bike. I did. On returning home it never even made it out of the bag before being dispatched to Nic @ the bike shop with a list of things I’d broken. It was – and is – utterly fab though, and I just want to ride it every day even when those days are dreary and grey and flooded.

If there’s a point to this, then it is this: every bike I own – and have every owned – seems to malfunction in strange and unheard of ways. I’m starting to think it might be me.

* there’s a story even here. Most tyres fit on most rims. Some don’t. However hard you pretend they actually do.

** for the tiny segment reading this nonsense who are not obsessed by mountain bikes, let me demystify that last statement: it’s the chunk of steel that stops the front and back heading off in different directions. Remember those films where cars are cut in half and the rear overtakes the front? Bit like that, only with less laughs and more hospital.

*** this my TV producing pal tells me is what the presenters are called. I’ve been in touch with the OED on your behalf.

Testing 1-2

On By AlexIn Bikes, Mountain Bike Riding, Photography3 Comments
Long way down. Best not to look really.

I missed a trick here. Soundcheck Wednesday – wuntu/wuntu/wuntu passed a couple of days ago while I was busy immersing myself in a version of reality that pays the bills but falls well short for a purpose of existence. But testing I have been, mainly of myself, occasionally of the patience of friends and rarely of my bike.

Tenerife is many things; grockalery and horrid at the beach, architecturally inconsistent in the mountains, friendly everywhere, often on fire and living off a geological event so cataclysmic that no amount of biped evolution can even begin to mask it. Basically it’s a volcano with some nice beaches. Dominated by a classic caldera’d Mount Tide at over 3000m, this is a little island with big ideas. Even our hotel in the foothills of the big boy were at a height that’d have most Ben Nevis Ramblers sated at what is considered a proper summit.

First off, let’s get something straight in a world of turns, I absolutely fucking loved it. For many reasons; let’s start with spending five days in the mountains with like minded people and toasting each day with ice cold beers and tales as tall as the peaks. Secondly reconciliation between how staggeringly capable mountain bikes are and how little I push their limits was finally understood in mere seconds when I got to understand what fast feels like. That was a privilege. I’ll miss it but now I know it’s not my world.

While we’re gloating about how fantastic riding dusty trails in shirt sleeves was when – say – compared to trudging through ankle deep sleep in England’s winter darkness, then consider the happy fact we threw the bikes down the thick end of 10,000 metres of descending while climbing less than tenth of that. God, I love shuttling. I feel like a fraud but if that’s what fakery is like then send me a package of it for Christmas.

Finally – aside from an ankle still weeping evil cactus thorns* – my battered body remained largely unbroken unlike my friend Martin who attempted to perform open heart surgery through a simple practical demonstration of potential energy in an environment of endless spikey rocks. So let’s talk about that. I am at an age when improving is metaphorical for managing decline in a beery delusion. Every ride is akin to a visit to bottlers anonymous “Hi I’m Alex and it’s been 100 days since I took any risks whatsoever. I have so many excuses, how long do you have?”

This is classic unsighted riding on trails designed by geology to either hurt you now or kill you later. There’s exposure in a ‘fuck me, that’s vertical and bottomless’, there’s technical in a ‘fuck me again, that’s not a line, that’s something beyond heroic and out the otherside‘, there’s steepness best ridden with an arse on the rear tyre and a hand on the insurance certificate. Four days of this and it seemed better to throw my shorts away rather than explain the state they were in.

Three days were on the limit of my ‘good day, ace bike, don’t make me look like a gutless twat’ skills. One day way beyond that in a horror of a 100 switchbacks apexed by broken rocks where momentum saved you, but speed absolutely kills. Or hitting a rock pool at 30kph having just lobbed oneself off a three foot drop and death-gripping the bars because braking will be a confirmed disaster whereas hanging on might introduce a question mark.

Every second is a decision. There is absolutely no respite. Don’t believe for a minute that downhill boys hang on and hope. Mentally dropping 2000+ metres in 25k frazzles your brain to the point where sleep is interrupted by muscle memory. Physically your shoulders are in spasm, thighs contract, calves ache. It’s room 101 forever but in a good way. It’s if it ends now then it ends but Christ what a way to go.

And that’s an important point; let the bikes run and they are everything the marketing people tell you. Two or three times I felt so far outside of my comfort zone it’d be a plane journey back, but the bike was serene, gliding over lethal rock gardens with confidence that I absolutely didn’t feel. Watching a couple of other ride like this all the time filled me briefly with envy until the realisation dawned that it’s only when you feel the fear and do it anyway do you get a dopamine hit so high it cannot be legal.

The last day – reunited with my wingman who was back on the bike only because donkey killing painkillers are available over the counter here – ranks somewhere in my top 5 rides ever. Every switchback we’d ridden, every pumice chute we’d surfed down, every rock garden we’d conquered were merely qualifiers for 30k of mountain biking bliss. The exposed carry over a water pipeline opened up a barely discernible singletrack which I’d happily ride every day until I die. Mainly because it flattered learned skills without attempting murder every ten yards or so.

Then a plunge down a semi-vertical ridge line. Then a moab like slickrock section, then a jagged rocky mess which claimed the lung of a previous rider. Then super drifty dirt corners against a massive drop, then a dirt bike laid trail of bermed loveliness, then..then..then.. it ended eventually because geography will catch up with you even after a monster shuttling. But it finished with me wondering if there was any more fun to be had with your clothes on.

There’s something important here. For a good part of the riding I was properly scared, feeling too nesh, too old, to clumsy, to much missing the point of riding stuff right on the edge of your ability. Seeing Martin hurt himself and stiffly declare he was missing the next day had me wondering if we were to fucking past it to waste everyone’s time pissing about and being rubbish. Watching 30 year olds go bonkers with nary a care about the shape their face might be should it go wrong raised my angst we were writing cheques our bodies couldn’t cash.

There is some of that. But there is also something else. While we’d have a couple of beers and call it a day because ‘we didn’t want to be ruined for riding tomorrow‘ we did pretty damn well for a couple of old blokes. I didn’t feel old. I just felt alive. I came back a better rider. I created a bond with my new bike that’ll take us to all sorts of interesting places. I stopped worrying and started feeling.

We left at seventy degrees and landed at zero. We packed the bikes with dust and unpacked them to mud and ice. We can forget two hour descents and relearn the wheezy raspiness of winter climbing. We can go and ride stuff that used to be scary but now has the terror factor of a small pimple. We can – and here’s the thing – carry on for a bit longer yet.

Let me at it.

If you’d like to see more, try here. It doesn’t even get close to painting the pictures in my mind.

* I hit one of these trail sentry bastards as about 25kph. On examining the damage the only rationale conclusion was an unwitting participation in a hedgehog darts contest. Except for some extremely scary purple blood that had me going a bit until it was gently pointed out I’d eviscerated a prickly pair on my unplanned romp through the undergrowth.

 

There’s got to be a better way

On By AlexIn Bikes, Mountain Bike RidingLeave a comment

Surprisingly Dry

That’s a rubbish picture. But it’s illustrative and may save a 1000 words such a picture paints. So be grateful. We’ll be back to it in a bit. But first I feel the need to talk about plans.

John Lennon said it best “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”*. It wasn’t so long ago stakes were grounded in a heartland of what’s important, and I genuinely subscribed to a short term view that Christmas would be upon us before the world of work impacted on something I’d labelled as recuperation, but felt like sloth.

Lazy I can do. Slobbing about is pretty much a core skill. Tinkering in a fettling manner worries me not a jot. Until the room housed elephant trumpets a noise like guilt. Got to make ends meet, got to prove something, got to give in to the notion that working somehow has more value than everything else. Too many of us have the meme of the breadwinner and it’s a hard habit to shake.

Even so, distanced from the world of work by four hours, many miles and a different culture, our holiday was rooted in a strong desire to concentrate on stuff I’d missed not stuff I might be missing. Which worked well until TurkCell fired up the iPhone SMS feed and an offer of possible work hit the screen. I vacillated a while before replying in a non committal way and expecting – as is the way of these things – any vacancy to be long filled before I arrived back on rainy UK tarmac.

It didn’t. I ended up filling it. Two long interviews, the second conducted in a rather unbalanced Al v a panel of five. So my proposed rest was usurped by something properly interesting, but basically rewarding behaviour I was trying to shake. Next year, I’ll sort that out. Important to keep telling yourself that.

Mitigation of a sort was to run away from all things vocational and see if my new bike works with dust on it. Yes, I did indeed use that very rationale for why a very long weekend to Tenerife was more than required. Known as the ‘land of eternal spring‘ I care not if this is marketing nonsense, as I’m desperately keen to get away from the ‘land of the eternal flood‘

Since arriving back from warm and sunny Turkey, I have been enveloped in weather that could summarily be described as ‘more than a bit shit’. Accepting November is perilously close to real winter, it still seems more than a little unfair that it’s done nothing but piss water onto saturated ground on a daily basis. Surprisingly I’ve ridden loads and more surprisingly I’ve managed to do so without serially nutting local flora an fauna. But it’s been close, especially with the Rocket sporting a tyre selection that has the rear desperate to instigate a conference with the front every time the trail turns sideways.

Superb selection I keep telling myself for dry and dusty rocks come a week Wednesday. There’s a counter argument suggesting I’ll never get there, if the God Of Survivable Slides looks in another direction. Two recent rides provide context; the first was back on the carbon hardtail as it wouldn’t rust after bonkers rain. Shod with mud tyres, it performed superbly in the cheeky woody trails under the Malverns. One descent I was elevated from back to front by sheer dint of beingthe only man left riding. My buddies were in various hedges and ditches having gone with a rubber selection marked certain death. Back on the rocks tho, those fantastic tyres came close to fetching me a face full of wet granite.

Next ride, grab the full-suss and hope for the best. Which hill clamping fog and sideways rain clearly wasn’t. One of those rides where getting to the end without a major blood injury tastes like success. It’s still fun, but Christ I’m bored of slogging through the mud. I was bored of it in August and now it feels as if it’ll never end.

Except it will. On December 5th. When me and my pal Martin will land on an island that’s basically an African archipelago. Four days of sunny and dusty riding await. Along with four days of tall tails told over cold beers, while sitting outside watching the sun go down. That’s what that picture is all about. Riding mountain bikes is absolutely a four season sport, but don’t delude yourself that endless muddy death marches are the only way to get through the crappy ones.

* He may have said it better in the Beatles Back Catalogue. Possibly in Yellow Submarine. But you’d probably have to be amp’d off your head to be sure.

The eyes have it

On By AlexIn Other stuffLeave a comment

It’s been a long time since I visited the opticians. How long enquired the serious looking optometrist*. Oh, you know, a while, few years, about seven, ish. I looked at him in the hope this wasn’t going to extend his frown. He looked right back somehow expressing surprise I could see anything at all.

Seven Years? Yep. Contact Lenses every day? Yep. These? – he offered up the brand I’d been sticking in my eyes with nary a concern for 2000+ days. Oh Yes. Hmm – he then carefully placed the lens packet on a nearby table with the care of a UXB professional faced with something from the ‘Properly Evil Warlords Thermonuclear Catalogue‘

Following that worrying sign were a bunch of vision related issues, asking me to confirm or otherwise how many applied to my rheumy eyeballs. Sticky? Yes. Red? Yes. Painful? Yes. Streaming? Yes. I saved him time and me trauma by concluding there would be no ‘otherwise‘ on my diagnosis form.

I’d only crossed the bloody threshold** because Carol had rightly bullied me to make an appointment after an incautious remark re: ‘you see those big matrix signs on the motorway? You do? Excellent, can you tell me what they say“. Now it seemed I’d be lucky to leave with anything other than a prescription for a white stick and a guide dog.

Jon – said optometrist, lovely man especially when confronted by idiots in denial – proceeded to tut and frown his way through a bewildering number of tests involving the traditional ‘what can you read on the board” / “what board would that be?”, stuff with lights, stuff with dye, stuff where air was blasted into your eyeball, before finishing on a peripheral test which put me in mind of the shittest ever game of space invaders.

At the end of this trial by eyeball, Jon cheered me up with some good news ‘you don’t have a brain tumour and your eyes have actually improved since your last eye test’. Awesome news that had me ready to leap from the mastermind shaped chair and make a run for the exit. Not to be, I was pinned to that chair for a while while the horrors of blood vessels growing into the cornea were explained to me along with the retina damage from oxygen starvation, and what exactly happens to a happy eyeball when it’s deprived of moisture.

My shock was so total that I failed to register the additional wonderful nugget that, being an officially old bugger, I’d best get use to the word bifocal in my immediate glasses wearing future. Not that I ever wore my glasses, but we’ll get to that humiliation later. First more upsides; veins not grown into your pupil so you’re not going blind. It can be made a lot better but the damage is done so when you’re really old, cataracts are going to be jolly, but, BEST OF ALL, you can carry on wearing lenses. Not the UXB lenses obviously but something new, clever and – crucially – unblinding.

This is a big thing for me. No lenses, no mountain biking. Hate riding in glasses. Hate glasses really. Not because I’m vain but because they’re just – well – bloody annoying. And, this being a throwback from my 11 year old self turning up at big school with a fresh set of National Health Horrors, I’m mentally unable to admit I need to wear them***

So Jon then offered me a deal where I could wear lenses whenever I wanted – even with some special ones for riding weeks away that gave away the non dominant eye reading prescription for trail laser vision – and a further opportunity not to fuck up what was left of my vision plus some glasses I could wear in public without having people assume I was already blind.

There was a monthly cost of course. Which I immediately signed up for. Sure my inner Yorkshireman was screaming ‘setup’, but then I went home and googled the symptoms. And decided£30 a month was better than having to ever look at those web sites again.

Choosing glasses was somewhere between fun and toe-curlingly embarrassing. Firstly I had to grudgingly hand over my only remaining pair bought some fifteen years ago when – I can’t remember but there can be no other explanation – I was leg wobblingly drunk. True professionals none of the staff actually laughed out loud, although one had to be excused, hand in mouth, to the back of the shop where lung emptying guffaws were audible.

The new pair were branded “Jaguar” which I assume is some car tie up rather than being the choice of the short sighted large cat predator. Enough Inner Yorkshireman remained to rebuff incremental selling on hooky lens benefits and unobtanium materials. The very fact I have purchased glasses with a bifocal lens gave me a depressing sense of managing decline. I’d be buggered if I was going to pay further for the privilege.

I left the shop more than a little chastened. You’ve damaged your eyes not your vision was Jon’s happy parting shot. Entirely avoidable of course, but in the three weeks of new super oxygenating lenses and even occasional glasses wearing, no longer am I ruining what’s left of my vision by chucking two or three new crappy lenses at protesting eyeballs every day.

But reading glasses. Flipping hell. I can’t decide if to give up reading or investigate the possibility of longer arms.

* entire first year of study must focus on ‘how to spell what you’re training to be‘

*** Doctors. Sick People. Hospitals. Very sick People. Dentists: People with teeth falling out. Opticians: People going blind. These establishments do not play well with a man deeply affected by a mortality fear.

*** choice of ‘oi specky four eyes‘ or not being able to see the board. Or spend most of your first year fighting. All three toughen you up a bit.