Category: Bikes

Tens of thousands of words and the odd blurred picture of fast moving vegetation rehashing one of two tenuous threads. Spliced together using random punctuation and alcohol.

Mind The Gap

On By AlexIn Bikes, Mountain Bike Riding, Photography, Pretentious nonsense17 Comments
It’s not a very big gap. But then again I’m not very brave

We are are all scared of something. Or many things. Or fear itself. It’s part of that human self awareness conundrum. Cards on the table, for me it’s impostor syndrome, mortality fear and gap jumps. Obviously for a man who collects neurosis’s as a hobby, there are many more, but at no point did I say ALL cards on the table 😉

So let’s summarise the driving forces here; deep concerns about being found out, being found lacking, being diagnosed mostly dead, and being in possession of a mountain bike approaching an obstacle where some bastard has hollowed out the middle of it. The epicentre of this personal blast radius is neatly metamorphosised through a rain soaked tractionless trail neon pointing at a bunch of slick logs, barely cresting a gravity sucking hole clearly ending in Australia.

I exaggerate. Generally, but specifically in this case as it’s not even a proper gap jump. The entry isn’t even higher the exit. No that particular pleasure was saved for the next scythe-waving grim reaper located a little further down the trail. First tho, we’d best deal with gettingover eight feet of A&E potential. Until this weekend, my entire gap jumping back catalogue represented a single unitary entry. Yes, exactly one. I know this is right as I’ve counted it a number of times. It’s neither big nor clever, but it claimed a riding buddy who spent significant drinking time supine on a spinal board awaiting a diagnosis offering him a vertical future.

Tonight it’s four. An emergency addition came via a desperate ‘make the bike longer’ thrust on Saturday, after being assured an unridden trail had neither gaps nor doubles. Except, as was explained during my tourettes tirade come unlikely survival, ‘that one’. Two more managedtoday,inspite ofdisplacement activity mostly coalescing around mental images of crisp sheets and cool nurses. The problem I have with gaps are – somewhat unremarkably – the bloody big gap masquerading as a gaping maw to chew up uncommitted mountain bikers.

Table tops are by their very definition entirely devoid of gaps. You might look rubbish failing to hit the downslope but that’ll be looking rubbish without troubling the emergency services. Jumps defined by trail wedges pointing vaguely into space are right in the slot for my meagre skills – pick a point onthe far horizon, compress the suspension somewhere close to the lip, deep breath, close eyes, stick Newton in the driving seat and wait for the firma to become a little less terra.

Big, scary jumps aren’t a problem either. Just ride round them and present your ‘whist drive’ card to the youngsters laughing at your brittle bones. Gaps tho – entirely doable in terms of bike, muscles, skills and vague aptitude. The issue is the counterbalancing vegetable up top – kaleidoscope heavywith broken images and crammed full of endless doubt. Most of mountain biking at the level I do is about managing your head. Everything is a battle, a fight against intuitiveness, a war with the inner coward against a creeping barrage of unmitigated fear.

This is not some testosterone fuelledmasochism- because chucking yourself off stuff ignitesthe adrenalin compressor and fires raw dopamine into waiting veins. Chasing the Dragon without dealers and needles. Dropping the bike and high five-ing a mate before some very British embarrassment around being forty six years old and not really comfortable with that level of emotional vulgarity. Firm handshake next time okay?

And that bloody bike is going to either going to buttress my fragile bravery gland or send me to an early grave. Or possibly both. And maybe at the same time. But it’s still not enough to bridging the gap between ‘that’s doable‘ and ‘I’m doing that’. No for that I need Matt to lead me in at a speed entirely missing from my own jumping repertoire. And for all the elevated heart rate, wobbly armsand screaming head-thoughts, the actual event is blanked bymuscle memory and mental censorship. In the same way I envy those who dream in colour, I’d love to describe how getting it done actually feels. But I’ve no idea, it fades rapidly to black before the impact of tortured suspension bleeds colour back into my world.

The next gap was bigger. Sliding straight into it was an exercisein quelling the cacophony in my head. The bike saved my arse and other bits as we landed a bit short, and my brain saved me trying the next one on the not unreasonable grounds that a working flange of limbs at this point was a bonus not to be risked.

So now I’m ‘Four Gaps Al’ which is an excellent moniker for a red-neck band, but a rather paltry return for a man who has been riding mountain bikes for more than a decade. The counterpoint of that rather sorry statistic is the immutabletruth that bravery is not merely a lack of imagination and excellent medical insurance. Rather It is feeling the fear and doing it anyway. There’s something about standing on the edge of things and wondering if you can fly. Almost every instinct and experience would suggest not.

Bravery is launching yourself into the gap. There is much to recommend it. And not much point dying wondering.

I really must write up that visit to the Penis Museum. It’ll be slightly less self-referential and have far more knob gags in it. And I think we can all agree, that represents a massive improvement in the content of this blog.

There’s something in the air

On By AlexIn Bikes, Mountain Bike Riding, PhotographyLeave a comment
Although not very high

Which wise old sage once foretold ‘before you can truly appreciate Spring, you must first suffer heroically through the bleak winter’? That wise old sage was me, and I proclaimed it yesterday while basking under the sun’s rays and burning my thin bits. Not that wise then. But quite old before you feel the need to chip in and remind me of that.

We’ve suffered alright. As have the bikes. Heroically might be a stretch unless shivering by a pub fire, pint in hand whilst bleating about the misery of endless cold and rain counts. Which in Al’s book of winter fables, it bloody well does. So it is most welcome that signs of spring are everywhere – increasing ground cover, decreasing mud, flashes of leafy trees, endless birdsong and the blissful silence of Matt’s new drive train.

Somehow he’s eeked out vaguely cog shaped swarf through the grit’n’shit of winter, before the inevitable collapse of key components forced fitment of bright and shiny new stuff. So no longer are we accompanied by the discordant cacophony of slipping chains, grinding cogs* and associated whines, groans and hisses of disintegrating transmission. There may be many meteorological and horticultural markers to herald the arrival of Spring, but for the Forest Of Dean Mountain Biking Community, it’s when Matt fits a new chainring AND replaces his bald rear tyre.

So three hardy perennials sprouted short sleeve tops and dark sunglasses at a rather un-springlike 9am, where a cold wind was more than a match for a peeping sun. And anticipation of spring conditions were tempered by a night ride some three days back where the trails were winter-wet, from which me and the bike returned much in homage to a dirty protest. I don’t mind that kind of thing in Jan, but it’s getting pretty old come BST and April.

12km on road on off road tyres at 25 PSI** warbles on a bit as a 2.5 inch contact patch attempts to rip up the tarmac. But riding out means an extra pub stop on the way home ,and that’s worth a 20km return trip to the drinking hardcore of our little group. Such were the solar powered high spirits, my navigational numptiness was ignored as I promised some fantastic trails ‘on the other side of the river‘. Where there may be monsters – probably a better chance of meeting those than me finding a track I’d ridden once, a month ago, in the company of many others.

No monsters were harmed in the making of this post; no instead after the tiniest location error – okay I missed the trail completely – we found not one but two perfectly loamy trails – dark earth shouldered by emerging bluebells and twisting perfectly through a green screen of burgeoning fauna that is almost as good to look at as to ride. Almost, but not quite.

Mountain Bikers categorise the dirt under their tyres into sub groups and niches; grip, sloppiness, colour, slippiness, smell, likelihood to punt you into a waiting tree, that kind of thing. And while summer dirt is a light, dusty brown with a crumbly surface marbled by cracks, that’s brilliant only if you like dust motes over grip, but dirt aficionados search for Spring Loam where the ground has a bit more give, a lot more grip, the ability to hold a tyre at almost any angle and – if you are righteous – harvest mini clods to flick at the bloke behind.

It’s perfect dirt. It’s the dirt you see in Mountain bike videos. It was the dirt we rode on Sunday. And we rode an awful lot of it pretty damn briskly. Seven ups, seven downs divided – as ever – for me between ‘before‘ and ‘after‘ the infamous ‘double drop‘ which is a moderately vertical drop onto a concrete fire road. On a bike with oodles of travel, it should be nothing more than a point, relax, close eyes, brake when it flattens out – but having nearly claimed me a while back, I’m bloody glad to get it done. Without having to send anyone back up the trail to locate missing teeth.

After that, pretty much floor-to-sky bliss. Mainly because there’s so much more speed without the associated risk of the front end washing out. Swinging bikes left-right-left between trees on this perfect dirt is as close to the Jedi Speeder chase you can get to without CGI and Cary Fisher. And having dragged out the Purple Minion, the bag of excuses for not riding all the jumps and drops (within reason, there’s some stuff I’d need a crane and a trampoline to even attempt) was pretty much empty. And that’s fine, because they disappeared under wheel before I could even form my normal whimper.

And then Matt fell off on the easiest trail of the day. Which was funny enough to displace the thought of tired legs with ‘Ice Cold in Alex’ type Beer Hallucination. Thankfully we only had to cross a couple of kilometres of family-walker-slalom before attaining the rather splendid locale of the Saracens Head. Beer was drunk, bullshit was legion, fish type trail reconstructions were made, sunglasses were worn, smiles were baked.

Arriving home some 8 hours after sneaking out, my thoughts sadly turned to a day in the office. A day spent wistfully gazing out of the window wondering when I can go outside and play on my bike with my friends. I appreciate this presents a mental age of about 12.

I’m good with that.

* No not that kind of grinding cog. I’ll get round to the Penis Museum very soon. Until then we’re on a Fnar moratorium.

** Except for H who cheekily pumped his up to 50PSI for the ride into the Forest. That’s fine, we let him take the wind as punishment.

Size doesn’t matter

On By AlexIn Bikes, Mountain Bike RidingLeave a comment
Pick a size, any size

Well it might depending on context. So when sufficient time and therapy has passed, I’ll test that hypothesis through a full disclosure from the Reykjavik Penis Museum, but today let’s firm up on how different widths perform when wiggled about in the moist stuff*

In fact let’s not. Because that bottom half of the Internet inhabited by those who confused marketing with progress have already bored me almost to death by taking extreme positions on the margins of the argument. So let me spare you the dubious pleasure of a debate over the difference an inch or two may actually make, and instead make time for a proper discussion on friendship and community.

Those bikes have different sized wheels. What’s way more important is they are piloted by different riders. One of which was – and I’m not tending to the melodramatic here – lucky to survive a horrific crash with an onrushing car. An accident that left him with some injuries that will never properly heal, and an understandable lack of motivation to get back on the very thing which nearly did for him.

Not being terribly clever or sophisticated, the rest of that close knit wheeled obsessives, who are lucky enough to count him as a good mate, have been gently encouraging him to venture out and ride bikes, have a laugh, drink beer and bump the release on the stress valve. We felt that’d be pretty good rehabilitation therapy since it’s a group with an almost fundamentalist belief that anything involving bikes is about infinite to the power of a lot better than doing anything else.

So we’ve been bringing the fella back into the fold which hasn’t been easy with a winter than promised snow but delivered floods, and trails which have been on the shitty side of mostly unridable for way more than a few weeks. Today hardly represented the zenith of improving conditions with the rain and clouds of this past week being our welcome for an early start into an inevitable headwind.

Not riding for a bit makes riding right now a lot harder. But we got the climbs done in a kind of sociable spin which represented normality before the advent of Strava. And while it certainly wasn’t hard and dusty under-tyre, it wasn’t that mud sucking drudge of even a few weeks ago. Mud’s okay when it’s warm and interspersed with sections of ‘wooah to me..to you.. ‘ sashaying on technical singletrack.

Rolling on, we found ourselves entering a favourite descent which opens up with a little gap jump. It’s claimed a few victims over the years one of whom was with us today. I nearly added another one having failed to generate sufficient speed through the clag before hitting the take off. For clarity, I was fine, it was the poor bugger behind me who had to ‘find some moves‘ in order to land on a bit of trail not predicated to exit him out the front door. Talk about adding injury to injury.

I did apologise at trails end, but was cut off by a big grin and the look of a man who might be remembering why we chuck our middle aged bodies at trees in the hope we may miss them. We rode quite a bit and laughed a lot more before making a break for the pub where various offspring appear to have the cycling community pretty much grid locked for at least another generation. Whether that is rapid and nerveless downhilling aged about 11, or ripping up the Newport velodrome aged not much more, it really doesn’t matter.

We all sat and talked excitedly about riding. I accepted a challenge to go ride the boards knowing my arse shall be presented to me on a plate by a lad many years from voting age. I watched another small child nick his dads bike and sprint up and down the road in a manner not becoming of his father. I chased a cheap laugh by mentioning this at some volume. I’m happy to report it got exactly the type of laugh that any crack amongst like-minded individuals will from those who have a shared love of a thing without taking themselves terribly seriously.

Today reminded me of some really quite important stuff. Riding matters, fitness matters, speed matters, improvement matters, equipment matters…. yada… meh.. whatever.. because they are massively subsumed by why these things are even slightly important. You make great memories with awesome friends, and you are privileged to have days like this when it’s pretty damn life affirming to see smiles on muddy faces which have been through far too much crap, anxiety and angst.

And that’s what I learned. The bike your ride and the size of the wheels really don’t matter at all.

Friends do.

* Since making the regrettable decision to visit that museum, the urge to go long and hard at knob gags has been largely irresistable**

** Worryingly, not that many of my close friends and colleagues have noticed any difference

That’ll do

On By AlexIn Bikes, Mountain Bike Riding, Photography1 Comment
I could do that. In my dreams.

There are days when vigorously slapping myself is the only rationale response to some lament regarding life, and how difficult it is. Only this sting of self flagellation reminds me how incredibly lucky I am compared to those poor buggers who didn’t get the breaks afforded to me. For a start, I’m a northerner and that’s already starts you ahead in any race prefixed with ‘Human‘*

For the last three weeks, we’ve been riding bikes in conditions best whispered as summer. Ironically the turning of the seasonal ratchet to Spring has brought with it somewhat more wintry conditions and the return of the rain, but it’s still about a zillion times better than it was at the start of March.

When researching trenchfoot remedies held more interest than going outside. Everything creaked – bearing, chains, brakes and knees. Two events around this time hove into view and while my winter fitness suggested I’d easily finish them, I found it far simpler not even to get started. Which is a bit rubbish when you’ve signed up with friends who put in outstanding efforts – while I was more interested in riding what was in front of me, rather than something inked in when the dark and cold was endless, and motivation needed a firm prod.

So there’s a bit of guilt but a whole lot of joy. That’s the only word that gets close to flying on trails that a month ago afforded nothing but mud sucking slog which saps your power and your will to ride in about equal amounts. Now riding is less about damage limitation and more about revelling in the efficacy of legs and lungs campaigned through a grim winter. And giggling. And pointing at dust. And drinking cold beer in the sunshine.

Until today, my last five rides have been a rediscovery of why the PYGA is such a damn fine bicycle. Once in the Malverns, the rest of the time in the Forest including a night ride which had me wondering if these were entirely different trails. I’m sure at night there must be more trees. And less obvious lines. I responded magnificently by ignoring any faint trace of a trail, instead bouncing first lights and then body parts off innocent timber. Still nothing got broken and we had beer later so honours even I think.

After weather more appropriate for this time of year, I swept the sleet of the Purple Minion and explained to anyone who was interested that a 32lb bike of extreme stoutness adorned with a tacky 2.5in front tyre would be absolutely ideal for road riding. 10km of that in cold air, and under threatening skies had us rendezvous with the hardcore trail pixies who apparently enjoy lobbing themselves into space with no thoughts of the potentially bruising effects of gravity.

I took photos while they did their stuff. My bike is perfect for that kind of thing, and I am so clearly not. This kind of difficult juxtaposition worries me not a jot nowadays. Instead I revelled in the next trail far more suitable to my pay grade – winding between trees and without any obvious 20 foot gaps where I’d expect the trail to be. We enjoyed it so much, they found us another one which dropped into a gully full of baby head rocks lightly polished with damp moss. The mega is, er, mega here. It is so composed, so suited to this terrain, so effortlessly competent regardless or rider input, I cannot wait to ride this stuff all day in the Alps.

That starts three months from today. Between now and then will hopefully be filled with much more riding like this. But for the next 10 days, it’ll take a back seat to actually reminding myself there are other things more significant than mountain bikes in my life. The most important of all shall be sat next to me on a plans heading to extremely foreign places where we’ll spend the first few hours wondering where the kids are.

At home 🙂

* this may not be a universally shared view. But I’m from Yorkshire and we not terribly interested in what those birthed in lesser counties might think.

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.

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.