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.

There is no spoon

On By AlexIn Bikes, Mountain Bike Riding, Photography5 Comments
That’ll buff out

Although the difference from Keanu’s experience is there was at least once a spoon. The remains of that saddle once sat proudly displayed in a bike shop gleaming all new and shiny under the brand name ‘Charge Spoon‘. After Martin finished with it, what we have here is something rather less spoon like. I accept it didn’t look much like a traditional spoon in the first place. But now the closest cookery-based cipher we came up with was ‘the cruet’

Industrial Design is a complicated and difficult thing requiring much in the way of creative individuals, mood rooms, coloured plastics and crayons. I know this to be true because many designers have told me so. It’s not just web plagiarising, a quick email exchange with a Chinese factory followed by a decent lunch while the junior designer knocks out some stoner graphics.

For balance though, that’s how every non designer has described the process. Nobody has every tried to convince me that the simple way to repurpose one thing to another is by throwing it at the Malvern Hills through the power of crashing. And yet the camera doesn’t lie – this is exactly how Martin took a solid if unspectacular product and imbued it with something of his own. Possibly a bit of thigh.

If you weren’t there it probably doesn’t make any sense. It didn’t make much sense to me either and I was there. For the bit where Martin was sheepishly mudsting* himself down in front of a few random MTBr’s who were clearly pissing themselves laughing. While Martin was unharmed other than further blows to his dignity, the saddle was not so fortunate. The entire weight of Martin’s Orange 5 – which for mathematical calculations can be considered similar to that of a small moon – had piledriven the poor perch directly into unforgiving ground. From a quite spectacular height as well.

Martin had missed a ditch you see. Only not really, he’d hit it quite hard having found it inconveniently positioned below a hidden drop. His attempt to ride it out soon became an attempt to escape the accident completely by rolling off the side and then gently down the hill. The 5 – now unencumbered by any pilot input ** – reared up before plunging into the hillside saddle side down.

I’m surprised we didn’t have to dig it out with a JCB.

It was one of those ‘take it easy rides’ because we’re off to Spain in a week, so the entire hills are a ‘no mong zone’. I’d missed that memo demonstrated by falling off on a flat bit of trail for reasons best thought of as ‘there is no talent’. I’d then ridden a nasty rock step I’ve been avoiding for about three yearsand desperately hung onto the back of a Orange-Powered Martin on most of the descents.

Both of us were quite relieved to return to the cars without any further incident. I blame Martin’s bike. It’s like bloody Carrie. And now it’s coming to Spain next week. I’m not leaving it in the same shed as my lovely PYGA. There would be nothing left but Swarf and some slightly fatter tubes.

* the well known MTB process of scraping slick mud from clothing, shoes and ears.

** which on a five is generally to point it downhill and wait for a) the end of the trail or b) the arrival of the ambulance.

The startled turbot

On By AlexIn Bikes, Mountain Bike Riding, Photography2 Comments
That’s not the muddy bit. But it was the cold bit. And some.

Racers. You know the type. Defined by an engorged competitive gland fused with unbreachable self belief. Scarily focused and endlessly driven. Success boxed by results and targets. Sure, you know the type. I’m not that type at all as my blotted copybook of event based ineptitude confirms.

Which doesn’t stop a Wolverine like snap of pointy elbows under entirely appropriate contextual circumstances. To whit the temerity of a good mate believing there’s a line his pace and skill can lace between me and that tree. Oh there’s a line alright and he just crossed it. Catching is one thing, passing quite something else.

We’re not talking rock hard race courses here, buttressed by striped tape and peopled by those who’ve confused pain with pleasure. Nor seasonally race-boarded chubby weekend warriors gurning out mid pack mediocracy. No this is something entirely different and rather more configured for fun. It’s a cheeky singletrack nestling below the much travelled ridges of the Malvern hills. It was first an animal track and latterly exactly a minute of tree carving joy in the summer months.

Which have been and gone leaving us with sheep trampled mud, a moistness of dirt running infinitely deep and grip occasionally found but mostly lost. Martin built most of this trail and claims first-down blagging rights in conditions from dusty to disastrous. Except tonight when the tyres were slicked with a mud pack, and direction was 5{45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2} rider input and 95{45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2} the current direction of travel.

I slipped by as he slipped off and gently pointed my slithering steed in the direction of any local geography not entirely filled with hurty trees. Luckily – and I use this word with some charity – the sheer volume of mud ensured velocity was restrained almost sufficiently for brakes not to be required. Careful use of the word ‘almost‘ there as a brief caress of the rear* slowed me only as a direct consequence of the tyre breaking away and attempting to overtake the front.

Probably best not to try that again. Instead hip steer the sliding bike onto a perpendicular bearing to a phalanx of glassy roots, take a deep breadth, unweight the now rather portly mud-transporter and breathe again as success is briefly declared when considering the alternative. I’ve always been a big advocate of the maxim that if ‘at first you don’t succeed, redefine exactly WHAT you mean by success’

All this dithering and procrastination has Martin line astern on my weaving tyre. In commentators parlance he’s ‘all over me like a rash’ and looking ‘fast and racy’. In my language he’s clearly cheating and that’s my speciality. All that separates us from trails end and bragging rights are two ninety degree bends that reward bravery and balance back in those halcyon summer days.

Try that now and earn a free mud pack with added twigs, stumps and surprised rabbits. I’m not really prepared to let Martin by, nor am I keen to splatter various important but squiggly body parts against a tree. So rather than make a decision, I curl my toes, worry a bit, run out of time and push oh-so-gently on the bar. Somehow we’re though the first and setting up for the second but Martin is now ‘all over me like a cheap suit’

Grr. Testosterone. Stupidity. Chuck it’ll in, it’ll be fine. Of course it will. Of course it wasn’t. Rear wheel slides are fun, front wheel slides are scary, both wheel slides are essentiality a finite period of time before brave face hits the dirt. This was a proper two wheel slide enacted at the exact time Martin made his dive for the inside line. Good luck with that.

I’d stopped worrying about being overtaken because any such thoughts were overtaken by hanging onto a bike that was rebounding between one axis and the next. The front and rear clearly had a proper strop with a refusal to agree on a common direction. Corner of one wide eye saw a bar to my left but by this time I was a passenger somewhere between ‘riding it out through awesome bike handling’ and ‘bracing for impact‘.

After a few more fishtails we regained control of the bucking bronco and stuffed it happily into the stile** declaring to almost nobody who was interested ‘that my friends is an entirely new race move. Forget that nonsense around tactics, strategy and pointy elbows. No, what we have here is a Nigel-Mansell-esque approach to trail ownership. You’ve just been privileged to witness is ‘the startled Turbot’

It only works if you’re riding with like minded individuals who really should be doing something rather more productive with their Friday nights, a trail at least tyre deep in tractionless mud, a configuration of perfect corners and a view that racing is really rather less serious than some will insist it is.

Lucky for us then that’s exactly what riding with your mates in November brings forth on every night ride. Don’t get me wrong, I’m already pining for Spring but until then I shall be ‘doing the Turbot’. It’s al whole load of fun and I’m fairly sure it’s legal 😉

* the brake in case you’ve lost the thread. And certainly not the front because that’s the hydraulic equivalent of penning a suicide note.

** Honestly, you’d never get a horse over there. I shall be writing to the footpaths officer 😉

Kneed to know.

On By AlexIn Bikes, Mountain Bike Riding, Pretentious nonsense10 Comments
Thank Christ for low res phone cams in 2006

All of us believe there’s certain light conditions*, camera angles, heroic stances, etc which firmly represent our ‘best side’. That’s my knee in July 2006 after an impromptu slice and dice involving Chiltern Flint, over-confidence and stupidity. It’s not the my best side, it’s not even my best knee. Some seven years later a neat scar scribes a line between something that aches in damp conditions and a few mm from leaving hospital in a wheelchair.

Sobering stuff. But not terribly statistically significant. Since 2002, a conservative calculation suggests more than a thousand rides in all sorts of dangerous places have been completed without major injury**. Crashes aplenty, occasional hospitalisation and many, many morning afters where the the memory of the crash is vivid except for the bit where you’ve clearly been hit by an articulated lorry. Because falling off your bike can’t possibly hurt that much.

Transitory for the most part although a body inventory counterweight suggests lasting damage has been done. A shoulder that creaks, clicks but fails to properly articulate after a hand out/hard stop in Swinley forest many years ago. And an ankle that’s a funny if not amusing shape having been reforged on a spiky anvil of rock. A wobbly nose remodelled on a not-so-handy tree stump, a thumb tattooed by a bar end and full of broken bits, and a little finger that fails the tea drinking Debretts test on the grounds of extreme crookedness.

All of which tediously triggers the ‘price of entry‘ defence. A means tested ends justification argument that is espoused by wheelchair bound protagonists and the rest of us siding with Dylan Thomas and his raging against the dying of the light. And behind that lies a dirty secret; it isn’t that the price we pay for throwing ourselves in pointy geography is more than compensated by the ‘if you have to ask, you’ll never understand’ reward. Because that’s just pub talk hiding the rather less heroic mindset that it’ll never happen to me.

I am too skilled/too careful/to calculated/too clever to make that kind of catastrophic mistake. The line between endorphins and endings is well known to be. The difference between a little bit brave and quite a lot stupid needs no explanation. I’ve paid my dues and earned my stripes. I’ll back off a long time before I fall off. Crashing fits with my risk envelope but serious injury doesn’t.

Which is a paragraph of delusion, Embracing and accepting risk is the difference between living and being alive. Mountain biking is a sport of many variables of which we are in control of very few. You can hurt yourself by trying too hard or not trying hard enough. By committing or not committing. By being brave or considering cowardice. By peer pressure or testing yourself. There’s no ‘risk management’ strategy here: a situation where braking may send you over the bars is perfectly balanced by riding an obstacle at full speed which may end better, worse or the same.

We make our choices but we barely influence the outcomes. I smashed my knee up on a familiar trail in perfect conditions at middling speeds. 99 times out of a 100, it’d been nothing more than a few grazes and some piss taking. The next three days were spent with a ‘stupid stupid stupid’ mantra racing around my head while my body was static in a hospital bed. But with the benefit of hindsight that entirely misses the point; 99 times out of 100 I had somehow got away with it already.

Looking at that picture socially network’d to my inbox earlier today, it’s flooded memory banks with long forgotten anxieties. Physically it took a while to recover, mentally it probably never will. At least I can turn left now, which wasn’t the case for the next two years when I nearly tossed the whole thing in as being too damn hard and nowhere near as much fun as before the accident.

Seven years later tho, I’m still riding mountain bikes two or three times a week. I worry less about losing a summer through a nasty crash and more about how many summers are left. I strap my knee pads on and make cowardly choices when faced with danger. Occasionally tho I’ll surprise myself with an act of bravery conquering some obstacle that even in, what’s laughably known as, my prime would have given me pause for thought.

Now that thought is something pretentious like ‘if not now when?‘. And that’s probably the only question that has any relevance in this extended navel gazing. An inch either way and my mountain biking future would have been limited to observing as a limping voyeur. And that feels pretty terminal for a man whose life is far too defined by wondering when he can next ride a bike.

Thanks Andy. You reminded me of the futility of trying to work this stuff out. Tomorrow I’ll pedal my bike, take some inappropriate risks and lie to myself about the possible consequences. That feels like a pretty sound way of running your life 😉

* although in many cases, this is of course ‘pitch black‘

** Unless my liver is included in the ‘book of damage’. In which case, I’d suggest the knee got off lightly.

The wrong way round

On By AlexIn Bikes, Mountain Bike RidingLeave a comment

A phrase conjuring many amusing anecdotes from mechanical engineering to spousal navigation passing through confused copulation, frustrating flat-pack building and – if my experience has any statistical significance – the configuration of any electrical magical devices*

I am lucky – nay blessed – to have parked our life smack bang in the middle of some bloody fantastic riding. To your left a muscly ridge built on porous glaciation and to my right a 100 kilometres of forest. Both packed full of legal and cheeky trails most likely to make any MTB rider whoop and holler. And occasionally whimper. But while these trails – on first sight – feel too numerous to count and too extensive to map, a certain groove is carved first by most fun trail selection, then by habit and finally by apathy.

When you can roll out a mental map between where you are right now and the pub some three hour distant, it’s time to kick back, break out of that groove, ride the trails less travelled and go exploring. Get in touch with your inner eleven year old who is desperate to know ‘what’s down there?’. Last week we rode for bloody ages looking for a trail that just about rewarded the effort to find it, but the absolute best bit was getting a bit lost on the way there.

Today the spirit of the navigational optimist was imbued by my good friend Martin who decided we’d ignore the tracks of our years, and instead head off in an entirely new direction. Being the Malverns this still involved climbing to a windy ridge before dropping behind on a much ignored doubletrack which proved itself rather fast and feisty – hanging off as it was the side of a bloody big drop.

Then descending something climbed a hundred times. Again vertiginously configured in a way to ensure you were fully involved in a plummet/brakes/hairpin/plummet again dance with loose rocks, tight single-track and occasional lumpy sections which are a bind as a climb but bloody brilliant bouncing down them the other way.

Then we got a bit lost which was entirely expected. Finding some new routes just above Malvern, one had a rather tempting wall drop Martin felt I should be sent down first. His reasoning was that my clown wheels were more likely to stay any possible disaster, which is fine rationale until one considers the skills-free idiot plonked on top. I menaced it with sufficient briskness for the drop to be absolutely no problem although the runout very nearly was. More run off than run out. Or run into a tree. Anyway, flight pass stamped, I happily goaded Martin into having a go explaining exactly how slick and loose it all was.

He rode it fine. Which was, frankly, a bit disappointing. Never mind we continued to ride around the problem of familiarity with all sorts of ‘oh that bit comes out there does it/we’re here, right I thought we were over there‘** Under the hills, autumn colours shone slickly in weak sunlight making skidding through thick piles almost compulsory. The buff and dry trails may have gone, but we’re not quite into winter yet ably demonstrated by the orange and gold trailscape carpeting our route and whispering breathlessly under fast tyres.

We manoeuvred ourselves onto a track ridden only once before. It was jauntily off camber, barely hanging onto a steep hillside with the a whole load of bugger all to the left. A lovely view into the valley encumbered not at all by any other geography which might break your fall. Speeds may be down, but fun, fulfilment and the occasional adrenaline shot of terror are all still fully present. It’s not muddy enough to be a slog yet, but the grip is at best variable and occasionally non existent.

So we slid about for a couple of hours before finding ourselves 200 feet above the cars under threatening but awesome looking skies. This weather keeps 90{45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2} of the walkers off the Malverns and we’d had some slalom free runs all afternoon. Inevitably a family photograph was held up by the camera holder adjusting the focal length by stepping onto a trail we were bombing down. Her blissful ignorance may have been shattered by my squeaking brakes, but no letters to the Malvern gazette were triggered by our back to front production.

Back at the cars, we congratulated ourselves on a lost well found. So the wrong way around would appear to be the right way round after all. There’s probably an important message there.

* still one of my all-time favourite phrases was uttered by a proper engineer ‘if it doesn’t work, hit it with a hammer. If that doesn’t work, bind it up with duct tape. If it’s still being an awkward bastard, what you have there is an electrical problem. Call the sparky. He’ll probably be in hospital having set himself on fire. Useless arseholes‘ 🙂

** Mostly from me. Who we’ve established has a fully working internal compass. Unfortunately it’s permanently pointing to ‘lost‘

About that book…

On By AlexIn Pretentious nonsense5 Comments

Reminds me of a vaguely amusing anecdote. An author was being all a bit luvvie and woe-is-me on writing her new book so announcing ‘well I’ve had to move to Cannes to try and get this book finished, it’s been three months now‘ which was superbly riposted by ‘Yes, it takes me a while to read a book as well‘

I’ve been talking about writing a book for multiple decades now. Ideas are not short but actual chapters are. On earlier efforts, the only comment is to congratulate my pretentious younger self on password protecting the terribly self indulgent pap, so thereby saving innocent browsers from extended therapy. Even as a man with dignity long stripped by endless pratfalls, there’s nothing here I’m prepared to share other than the THIRD sentence which included the ohgod-please-remove-my-spleen-with-a-blunt-spoon phrase ‘my world was ill tuned to the discordant harmony of others‘.

And I’ve never touched hard drugs. Really, there’s no excuse.

Then there was a rather slick plot device which I felt very clever about right up until the point of someone far more capable actually turning into a proper book, and making a shitload of cash. Pass the matches, might as well create a bit of warmth in the funeral pyre of that idea.

Clearly actually creating something other than a few lines and a vague direction of travel was not going to make a book make. So instead I looked at a million* words on this blog chronologically sequenced from 2006 and honestly believed there might be 100,000 which’d make people laugh. And more to the point, pay. This was not so much an idea more of a total rip off from my mate Dave Barter who had successfully e-published something similar albeit it with proper grammar and better jokes.

Desultory would be the honest way to describe my efforts to mirror Dave’s success. I wrote a great intro, chopped a million words by a thousand and sweated over linking paragraphs. But while the stuff made me smile, it wasn’t a book about cycling. It wasn’t a book at all if we’re being honest. I do think a few people would have bought it** but it failed to actually answer a rather more simple question.

Not is it going to make me any money, but is it the book I wanted to write? Ah well. Here’s the thing. It’s easy to take stuff you know that makes the odd person laugh and throw it out there apologetically. Live off a few favourable reviews and worry not the elephant is still in the room. And sat squatting over fading manuscripts all terribly worthy and failing to answer the question that does really quite matter to me. Can I write something for an audience other than a bunch of bike geeks who will buy MBUK so clearly are right in the slot for the shit I produce. Courage of convictions and all that.

Comfort zone is now a bed of nails. Stop being narrow and try being wide. if it’s not about making money – which it absolutely isn’t, however self obsessed I am even I can see this isn’t a career change, it’s an indulgencey – so don’t bloody well die wondering. I have these conversations with myself all the time. Mainly because – quite rightly – no one else gives even the tiniest micro-gramme of a shit. But suddenly it’s important because a spark lit some paper talk and I lost hours writing stuff that made me laugh and made me realise there’s a whole book there desperate to get out.

For the first time in many, many months I started writing stuff because I wanted to, not because the blog felt lonely. It could still be total shit of course. But it’s going to get done. And done in less than twenty years. Mainly because each spare minute is spent desperately tapping to capture the giggling insanity of what passes for real life. I am blessed by intersections of awesome comedic merit almost every single day. Once you tap into into the reach narrative seam, this stuff writes itself. In my head anyway.

I’ll be asking for a few kind souls to gently remind me that not everyone sees the world as I do. Especially when it comes to apostrophe’s. But before anyone assumes proofreading duties, I can at least share the title: “Shooting Horses“. Which is at least the one laugh out loud idea in the book. I stole it from somewhat at work. Some things never change.

*really. there is. Thank God for the Internet. Not a single tree died in the making of this production. I may have lost a liver tho.

** because i have pictures of them doing stuff with goats that really isn’t appropriate for polite society.

Back to the future

On By AlexIn Bikes, Mountain Bike Riding, Pretentious nonsenseLeave a comment

 

 

 

If the Welsh Tourist Board had a brief flirt with accuracy, the slogan’d pretty much write itself: “Come to Wales, bring a waterproof. And a mountain bike“. While accepting this may reduce the size of western charging cohort, it perfectly fits my view of this rather brilliant if incessantly moist country.

Key attributes of any ride in Wales; a) you will get wet b) you will carry your bike c) your tyres/shoes/eyeballs will be full of sheep shit d) you will get amusingly lost and e) outside of the poo creators, you’ll see no other mammals for the entire day. Obviously these rules apply only to proper riding, not that FC ghetto Scalextric nonsense harvesting a bumper crop of sheepy sign-post followers.

Unexpected early October sunshine had three of us piling into Matt’s rather natty demo van* and heading into the wilds of mid Wales where the hills are steep, the views inspiring and the people few. Such was our keenness, even the traction beam of an early morning pig ‘n’ chicken butty was mightily resisted as we assembled three bikes representing all the current wheel sizes currently being hawked by evil MTB marketeers.

Assuming you’ve taken my previous advice not to read the bottom half of the Internet, here’s a summary of where such idiocy takes us; the tallest of us rides at 26 inch bike, the shortest a 650b and the middling one a 29er. We all use to ride 26s, and Matt (tall) was the fastest downhill, Dave (shortest) was second with me bringing up the rear. After spending *ahem* a few pounds on lovely new builds, our slavish adherence to our own ‘best‘ standard has changed absolutely nothing in the pecking order. Other than opening up entire new motherlodes to be mined by rich piss-taking.

So having efficiently arrived at our start location in the lovely town of Rhayader, our attempt on a classic old school XC loop was put on pause while some similarly classic dithering over if a certain individual needed a wee took a while to resolve. Prostrates satisfied, off we span on leaf splattered trails in sight of the River Elan. Synaptic resonance reminded me of the last time we’d tackled this route in a snowstorm. And the time before than in a thunderstorm. I couldn’t help but glance warily at blue sky and wonder what precipitation lay in wait for us this time? Maybe a falling satellite?

3 kilometres in and we were lost. Not exactly lost, as the three of us could confidently identify our current location. Which was at river level when the route called for some proper climbing into brooding hills mocking us from our lowly position. Double back and double up on a steep climb surfaced by first a worn out road and latterly by a rocky track which provided a Welsh warm up of gaining a couple of hundred metres in not much distance.

The already dog eared guide notes** suggested the next section might be a carry. Optimism in print there as we shouldered bikes and discovered exactly why this stunning pocket of densely packed hills was picked to provide clean water for the brummies. Even after a dry summer, it was still boggy underfoot with little used trails packed full of stingy vegetation. We’d picked a route from a guide book some fifteen years hence which enthusiastically catalogued a ride of endless awesomeness with two of the best descents Wales could offer.

And fifteen years ago, you could imagine mesh helmeted riders clad in purple spandex poking themselves with bar ends and bouncing uncontrollably down rocky descents by the hundred. Not so now with all sorts of magpie shinyness attracting the contemporary mountain biker to the path of least resistance. We shouldered bikes and un-glooped ankles from un-gentrified bog, while they bought macchiatos and compared carbon composites. Their loss.

We topped out close to the stunning view at the start of this post. Opening up a a gully of rocky steepness requiring 100{45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2} focus entirely lacking due to an eyeball dragging juxtaposition blending man made reservoirs with lines of endless hills. I had to stop and take pictures giving me ample time to arrive at the crux already cleaned by Matt. He shouted that my line was all wrong – no change there – before hiking back up to show me the way. I decided ‘the way‘ was way above my pay grade and walked down mocked by those ghostly hardcases of old who’d made up for their lack of bike by a dollop of skills.

No matter, fun all the same which wasn’t quite the case on the climb out of the valley mostly completed with a nose on the stem, arse giving you the full ‘D-wing in the showers, reaching for the soap‘ experience. Lungs on fire, legs weakening by the pedal stroke, massive vistas putting the boot in your self-worth, this feels like proper mountain biking. Hard, uncompromising, potentially unrewarding but God what a privilege to have this to ourselves on a perfect day.

Back on top at 500m above sea level, we abandoned the route guide and headed for a half-remembered plunge down the ridge on a trail nothing like singletrack but everything like giggly fun. Fast, open and apparently without danger right up until the point a deep bog nearly ended it for me. Lost now, we pushed quietly through a dilapidated farm yard clearly modelled on Deliverance, and dropped onto the old train track built to take hard men into the mountains to build the stupendous engineering masterpieces of the Elan dams.

Dave – much broken from a horrible road crash last year – lobbied for the flat way home around the mountain. We talked him out of it promising only one more climb and a fantastic descent to finish. Selling job complete, we skirted the reservoir and pitched upwards onto a climb I remembered as being fairly lumpy but reasonably short. I was half right with the soft grass under-tyre adding pain to an overdose of lactic acid. Ten minutes later it was done leaving me on a bleak summit surrounded by 360 views and bugger all else.

I dumped the bike and stood there for a while. As close to being at peace as I ever get with none of the daily compromises foisted by life in general and work in particular. For a second or so, as a chill wind whistled through what’s left of my hair, I was tempted to use the word ‘spiritual’ at which point a tanker rumbled into view on an unseen road putting paid to that pretentious nonsense. Dave and Matt then put up with my insistence to ride through ‘that bog again‘ for the digital soul stealer before a final road climb topped us out on a double track full of puddles and anticipation.

The first kilometre was flat but fun dropping wheels into ‘how bloody deep is that going to be’ small lakes before gradient triggered dropped seat posts and grin inducing velocity. Nothing on this track was scary but it was fast and steppy so perfectly suited to popping off drops and drilling rock gardens. Modern mountain bikes may flatter the lightly skilled but by Christ they are stupidly good fun on tracks like this. And it was a track that went on for approximately ever. Time was marked by Dave’s freewheel right up my chuff and the chain slapping the swing arm as lumps turned to jumps.

Done if not dusty, we rolled back into town and straight into the pub. Where we talked about bikes, things we’d done and things we were going to do. We didn’t talk about wheel sizes or shock configurations or tyre pressures. We didn’t talk about how our lined complexions suggested a raging against the dying of the light. We didn’t talk about what happens when this all stops.

And that’s not just displacement blindness. It’s a recognition that while we can drag our ageing bodies into high places, the reward will be a million times greater than the effort required to do so.

Go to Wales, you get to see this kind of stuff

* which – if I was tended to the selfish – he’d best buy for our trip to the alps next year. Short of adding a drinks cabinet, it’s damn close to chauffeured mountain biking.

** Navigation via my GPS was discounted on the not unreasonable grounds that – despite it’s obvious efficacy in all things finding places – it was in gloved hands of an idiot.

Be the ball

On By AlexIn Bikes, Mountain Bike Riding, PhotographyLeave a comment
Jessie’s new Turner Burner

Recently there’s been much in my life around the ball, specifically being it. Mostly while external events fetch ever bigger bats and punt me to ever more ridiculous locations; some physical but mostly mental. A year ago similar things were happening which has me considering if a better life tactic would be to retreat under a blanket at the end of August, and refuse to be roused until – let’s say – the following May.

The sporting analogy is of course exhorting you to become at one with the incoming spheric in order for the impact be it with bat/foot or something more American*. In mountain biking terms, lately I’ve been more the ‘trail‘ which sounds great until we unpick it a little to understand my connection with the trail was indeed a merger between man and land. Because of course it was man stuffed face down in the land.

None of these have been particularly painful unless one considers ‘dignity‘ a body hosted organ. Except for the last one which strongly suggested I was exactly one second from a proper ‘oooh that’s nasty, call an ambulance, I’ll fetch the spatula‘ when attempting a tricky and steep obstacle for the first time on my hardtail. ‘Be the Ball’ I thought, turn off the targetting computer, use the bloody force, whatever just don’t fuck it up”. Just downstram of fucking up is essentially a headlong plunge towards terminal velocity broken only by concrete fireroad.

I wasn’t the ball. I was instead the idiot missing the grooved line completely so travelling rather too briskly into a rocky steep that had the bike behaving in a manner suggesting it’d be far happier if I exited at any time of my choosing. I chose instead to close my eyes, hang on, somehow ride out a crossed wheel highside through the power of sheer terror to arrive at the bottom more than mildly perturbed.

“wooah that was a big one Al, we thought you were off there’ was the sweary-edited summary from my aghast riding pals. ‘Really, did you think so, completely had it under control, you should try that line, it’s gnarlllly…duuuuude’ / ‘Really they asked?’ / ‘No of course not fucking really. I’m never doing that again, not because I’m scared or anything – just don’t want you to have the trauma of you collecting my teeth and maybe a few stray but unidentifiable body parts while we wait for the blood wagon‘

My non ball like status has extended into vocational life with a far more appropriate similie being ‘be the inbox’ or ‘be the volunteered’. Somehow I’ve mostly managed to ‘be the eyeball‘ after Herefordshire county hospital finally dispatched me homeward without insisting on my company for a few weeks. The eyeball in question is mostly healthy and occasionally useful for seeing things, so on balance a better result than a few sleepless nights suggested.

In all of this, I felt being a parent might be a good thing. Jessie has outgrown that very bike we bought exactly a year ago. There’s definitely some beanstalk behaviour going on seeding the inevitable search for something a bit bigger. No sooner had the sad decision been made that the ‘Franken-Turner’ had to go, another one turned up on that vast Internet thing.

2004 Turner Burner. God I so wanted one of these. Just as I was about to buy one they stopped making them. But we have one now, after a ride on the rather splendid Yer Diz trail in Bristol where we met previous owner and all round nice fella Dave. The plan was only to buy if Jessie liked it, and if she really wanted to carry on riding and if it wasn’t an old nag, and, and, and… And since she threw it roughly to the ground about 300 yards in, this because a discussion full of moot.

It was pretty much perfect other than the scars foisted upon its innocent frame by my second-born. Money was exchanged and hands were shaken. The only issue – as defined by someone who is 12 and therefore pretty much unimpeachable in terms of breadth and depth of knowledge – was the rather dull frame colour and obvious lack of pink.

Fixed that today with the help of my friend Matt who did all the hard work while I attempted to find stuff in his garage. To say it’s messy does absolutely no justice to the word where one would walk into – say – a child’s bedroom and declare ‘pick up your clothes, put that stuff away, pass than sandwich to whatever branch of medical science deals with fungus, etc’. No what Matt has created is basically walled landfill. If you move anything, anything at all, there’s a better than evens chance the entire south of Herefordshire would be flattened in the ensuing rubbish tsunami.

Apparently Matt once threw something away. For this there is absolutely no corroborating evidence. You could get bloody Time Team in there. Well no actually you couldn’t unless a) they were all very small and b) didn’t mind hanging like bats off the ceiling.

Anyway regardless of his layered view of the world, this is a man who knows how to wield a powertool in a way I can only dream about – ‘right then we’ll just drill out these cable guides, should be fine‘. And it was. If I’d attempted that, it’d have been akin to aluminium mining. I did get to play with the impact driver tho which makes met think actually I’d quite like to ‘be the drill’.

So bike built. Daughter overjoyed. Considers it ‘just about pink enough’. We’ll go ride it when she wants to do that. But not before. She has many things going on in her life when compared to her rather mountain bike obsessed dad. And that’s absolutely fine. As long as she stops growing soon. Otherwise we’ll have to get the lintels raised.

Be the ball? Maybe not. Be the fall? Really try not to be. I’m good with getting through the day and having a giggle. Be the fool? Yeah, that works 😉

* I am happy with baseball. I really am. It goes on a bit but that isn’t my real problem with it. All would be good if they’d just ‘fess up and call it rounders.

Evil Eye*

On By AlexIn Other stuff, Pretentious nonsenseLeave a comment

“it’s about more eyeballs” was the passionate refrain from a man with a ‘digital vision‘ and a poor choice in ties earlier in my week. Somebody, who shall spent an eternity in hell, had furnished this ‘digital native‘ with noveltyneck wear, a copy of powerpoint and an hour of my time to expound barely-baked theories on exactly how the world was going to work and – if we took his breathless advice – our place within in.

Two problems. He was twenty years plus a bit past those who have an understanding of any of this shit – so therefore entirely irrelevant, and I wasn’t listening. Not because i wasn’t interested** but rather my attention was on the blurry audio visual experience which was more modern hieroglyphics than any discernible text. Still ever cloud and all that, I didn’t actually have to read it. Sadly my ears still worked.

This wasn’t the surprise that a man waking up missing 10{45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2} of his vision would suggest. Earlier that week I was put very much in mind of one my favourite Pete and Dud sketcheswhere Cook interviews a one legged Moore for the role of Tarzan and declares ‘I have nothing against your right leg Mr Spiggot, nothing at all. The problem is neither do you‘. I tell you this because my appointment with the head eye poker at Hereford hospital followed a similar script. Only it wasn’t quite as amusing.

Visual assessment predates any proper medical advice. I rocked up with clean looking eyeballs and an air of confidence. Which rapidly eroded when the right eye delivered a chart reading performance in line with a man last seen with a harnessed labrador. Top Doc wheeled me in and shook my hand in the manner of a professional having recently been forced to attend a ‘customer interaction‘ seminar.

Awkwardness passed, soon I was seated – chin on rest, lights dimmed, bright lights and barked instructions on where to point the eyeballs before a frankly worryingly extended examination where the full gamut of humming, tutting and teeth clicking left me in no doubt the breezy ‘you’re all good, vision of a twenty year old, darken not our towels again‘ of my optimistic construction wasn’t actually going to occur.

“I like your left eye, your left eye is very good, your right eye however...’ – a scan of the notes suggested a new infection was stalking my already ravaged eyeball. Although this was a matter for some dispute as the 21st Century cutting edge diagnostic history manifested itself as a wobbly circle with a dot randomly pencilled in. It was like a fucking wombles naming ceremony.

Having seen three different masters of eyeball in my three previous visits, some confusion about exactly where this dot might actually be took a while to resolve. And quite a few people. I’m here to tell you there is no shortage of doctors and nurses in the NHS. Really just when the last management consultant*** performed a headcount, they were all in a room with me. Not that I could see them of course – glasses off it’s an impressionistic blur hiding concerned expressions. Suits me, that’s my kind of displacement activity, shame I hadn’t smuggled in a hipflask.

So many people were eyeballing my eyeball I began to feel a bit like a medical experiment. Half expected a copywriter to come in with a camera and the outline of a textbook entry marked ‘if it looks like that, best recommend some audio books‘. Eventually the entire medical cohort for all of Herefordshire were shooed out and I was left with a man who gave me half a smile and about the same level of explanation.

‘There’s is an infection still there. It’s very close to the area of prime vision. The loss of clarity might be scarring because you are healing too quickly. Still it might also be too much coffee, lack of sleep or feeling tense. Are you feeling tense?’‘. Since I was arranging my face into a heroic/stoic fascimilie of a bloke who could ‘take it’ when it came to bad news I entirely missed the opportunity to shout ‘what do you fucking think? I’ve spent the last twenty minutes being prodded by a pantheon of increasingly worried looking people with doctor in their title‘

I am beginning to form an indelible impression that the medical branch of Ophthalmology is more of an art than a science. Let me furnish you with a representative example. The doc again ‘ your eyes are healing really well. But too fast. The body has only one way of dealing with cuts and thats scaring. So your lack of vision may be scoring of the cornea. We can treat that with steroids but I don’t want to prescribe too much’ / ‘oh why’s that, more is better, just give me something I can inject with a piping bag’ / ‘Ah well no we can’t because there is a side effect of steroids. And that side effect is scaring’.

While I was trying to find a some rationale or logic to work that out, he followed with ‘so are you feeling more reassured’ / ‘that what? being told I’ve lost a chunk of vision and it might be permanent or it might be because I’ve just swigged a latte? Not really or – to speak from the heart – not. at. fucking. all.’ He wondered if I had any questions, most of which would have started ‘can we start again but this time without the crowds‘. But there are times when not knowing the wrong answer is all about not asking the right question. So I didn’t. That’s how cowardice works.

Anyway they clearly like me because they keep asking me back. In fact they actively encouraged me to return before the next appointment should I feel any discomfort or concern. I’ve passed so far on the grounds that self medication with a decent Merlot is a far better approach. Come Monday tho, I’ll be back amongst the sick people memorising the eye chart and pretending all is well.

Between then and now, I’m beating myself up testing the eyeball to see if it’s improved. Mostly by covering the good eye and squinting at number plates to ascertain how blurry the bad eye receives that image. This isn’t a good idea both in terms of ongoing disappointment, and the simple fact there may be other road events of which I am completely fucking unaware as blurry stuff passes by at sixty miles an hour.

Still mustn’t grumble. Prescription glasses arrived which instantly triggered bikes being ridden. And that was soul food for the starving. I hardly noticed the glasses – even if they are a bit Joe 90/Bono – but God I noticed how much I miss riding my bike. I’ve been like a bear with a sore arse all week snapping at anyone with the temerity to enquire on my wellbeing. It’s all gone a bit single issue and that’s a shitty way to run your life.

So tomorrow we’re on a quest to find Jessie a bigger bike and – if that goes well – I’ll get to ride with one of my kids. Sunday I’ll find an excuse to ride again because this kind of thing is a prism of focus. There’s much that is important and none of has anything to do with nine to five.

* driving home the shuffle algorithm through up tracks of this name by both Ash and AC/DC. That’s serendipity right there. Based on what passes for my musical tastes, I feel you have got off lightly.

** there was a bit of that obviously.

*** I’d just like to clear up a peripheral point here. I am not a management consultant. Never have been, never will be. I’m just a bloke with a set of skills people buy because you;d never want to employ someone quite that arsey. I’m comfortable with interim, contractor or even mercenary. But not consultant. Thank you for listening 😉

Failure to launch

On By AlexIn Bikes, Pretentious nonsense4 Comments

For some of us mountain bikes are a thing of lust. A mistress to whom we run every Sunday. At the intersection between adrenalin and joy is a rite of passage marked by ‘I love my bike!‘. It’s a little more complex that that; sure we love the places – physically and mentally* that these people-animated objects take us, yet hardly one of us hasn’t positioned a box fresh build in our eyeline and spent a happy hour drinking in her curves.

But like everyone else born human, we lie to ourselves. We confuse cost and value, guilt of the former inflates the latter. We’ll make all the right noises in public but in our heads we’re rehearsing ‘it’s not you, it’s me’. Serial bike wranglers recognise the signs and catch the tells. They go like something like this.

First ride blues – anticipation unmatched by reality. All that research, careful component choice, increasing shiny kit piles and eventually an aesthetic masterpiece which clears the ‘looks right will ride ride‘ bar by some distance. But there’s a dark mood when old man and new bike fail to ignite, and the expected trail highlights are cast into shadow. “It’s just a matter of time” you tell yourself – invest time in the bike and it’ll rewrite that disappointing review.

But instead you invest in changes. Not to make things better really, just to make things different. For the Rocket, my strong conviction was the frames’s uber stiffness was terminally compromised by a slightly noodly fork up front. Changed those to something significantly more substantial and switched bars and stem at the same type. And tyres. Unsurprisingly it felt quite a lot different, but better? Not really. What it felt was a bit dead and what I felt was a bit over-biked.

And before eyes roll and my bike renting history is dragged out as exhibit A, this wasn’t a ‘the bike doesn’t understand‘ me flounce. I really, really wanted to like it – love it if you like – because it ticked every box in my increasingly defined bike buying criteria. Low and slack. Long and rangy. Light enough to ride all day, butch enough to be chucked down mountains. And bought from Cy who I respect completely as both a bloke and bike designer.

Which may go some way to understand why the Solaris for which I had moderately low aspirations is probably my favourite bike. Got on it, loved it, stuck some tubeless tyres on it, left it alone, rode it lots with a big grin on my face. Which doesn’t make the Rocket a bad bike. Not a bit of that; it was bloody brilliant in the alps and when the going got scary, the rocket, well, rocked. The only thing holding it back was me.

So I never loved it. But God I wanted to. I had some brilliant rides in amazing places, yet 95{45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2} of the time those rides would have been somehow even more brilliant on a different bike. The three dimensional space where that bike makes sense is rarely part of my mountain bike geography. It needs a rider who has bravery stamped long in their DNA and a insouciant attitude to personal injury. Who will ride the bike all the time and make it sing in scary places.

That rider isn’t me. Probably never was. Certainly won’t be. Three times, in the 1500 kilometres of ownership, we left these shores to find some of that terrain where the best bits of the Rocket would shine. And shine it did for a few moments when deed out-thought trepidation. A couple of endless rocky descents were met by a charging bike, surging ever forward and demanding you got your bloody act together and started riding it, rather than just hanging on.

I hung on for a couple more months. Those were the months were the PYGA was firstly faster uphill and then down which clearly tags me as the limiting factor. Strava aside tho, I was enjoying it more – the terrain we have here is steep both ways so a three minute descent will inevitably trigger a 20 minute climb. It’s a numbers game and the pluses are on the side of the bike that climbs a lot better and descends only a little slower. And I’m still having a whole load of fun.

Even with all that, next years alps trip suggested a proper ‘mountain bike’ would be an ideal accompaniment. But getting back on it after 20 rides on the PYGA felt so weird. I looked down and thought ‘where’s the front wheel and why is it so small?’. So an innocent post on a bike forum quickly morphed into a lovely fella called Olly driving down from Chesterfield with a bucket full of bike want and a virtual chequebook.

So its gone home. 20 miles or so from where Cy runs Cotic and nestled in the midst of the peak district. I’ll probably see it next week – parrot, eyepatch and wooden leg notwithstanding – as part of the Hope Valley Challenge. See it at the start-line and possibly at the end as it’s resting against a pub sign while we’re drinking hoppy refuel. And I’ll be absolutely fine with that because the worse thing about the Rocket wasn’t that it was a bad bike but that I couldn’t ride it like a good one.

So the PYGA is going to the alps next year with some stouter forks and bigger tyres. Sound familiar? Failing that if I find my wandering eye has me falling out of love of ‘the one‘, there’s always 650B to consider. One of those’d look good against the fireplace.

The first step on any path to a cure is to admit you have a problem 😉

* I originally wrote ‘spiritually’ but the pretentious guff-meter exploded and proper Northerners threatened to take my plain speaking card away on the grounds of flowery wank and weepy metaphors.

Eyes Wrong

On By AlexIn Bikes, Pretentious nonsense14 Comments

Back in November I catalogued a journey of some enlightenment on finally summoning up the courage to cross the boundary of the local opticians.At the end of which, a public duty of care was proudly made to my non-upgradable mark-1 eyeballs. Which I’ve mostly kept through increased wearing of bookish glasses*, meticulous cleaning of super-thin lenses and the careless disposal of expensive dailys.

Which had gone rather well even while my vision was visibly declining in that horrible getting older/genial decay kind of middle aged action I’m mostly blind about. Reading mainly was becoming a bit of a close squint/nose-edged glasses/light-angled wiggling of text and a frustrated bellow at those printing black text on black backgrounds. Once I’m world dictator, no graphic artist is going to have control of final copy until they’re at least 50 years old.

Still mountain biking wise all good. Clarity and distance unhindered by puffy, red eyes or hated glasses. Until last week when the whole vision thing deteriorated from tired eyes after a long day to searing eye pain, via a sensitivity to light that I self-diagnosed as morphing into a Gremlin. Eyeball abuse has been so frequent in my life, a quick scan of the cerebral compost suggested another eye infection. That’d probably be better in the morning.

Half right in the half light, but after a night of discomfort and bathing of blood-red spherics which were only vaguely comparable with working visual optics, even a dusty fluorescent had me twisting away in pain. Still work to do and displacement to create – rather than seek the opinion of a medical professional I decamped to the home office and squinted at a big screen until common sense (or let’s be honest what the anthropomorphicpersonification of common sense is in our house: Carol) bundled me into a car and off to Hereford for a consultation with a bored out-of-hours Doctor and, if my experience of Friday night in A&E is anything to go by, a stab wound.

He packed me off with the exact same antibiotic solution we’d treated the dog with a couple of years back. Splendid result all round; no diagnosis and a good chance I’d awake half blind but with a glossy coat and engaging bark. Still placebo being what it was and not wishing to fuss** the next two days passed with a non evidential conviction that things were improving. Bored and frustrated, I went alpha-troglodyte and fixed bikes in the shed knowing riding them meant stuffing lenses into inflamed eyes, and even I am not that stupid.

So back to see Jon first thing this morning and his happy optician smile faded a bit on examining the right eye. He started well ‘the left eye, that’s healing nicely. The right eye? Not so much and the infection is close to the pupil. If it gets bigger it’ll affect your vision, probably best to go to hospital don’t you think?’. I wasn’t thinking much, just feeling. And feeling a bit bloody frightened. And a bit guilty about my previously chink free eyeball health regime. Maybe the lenses weren’t cleaned perfectly every night, yeah occasionally sore eyes didn’t get the glasses relief they should and okay the last mega dusty ride had been unertaken without any glasses, but even so surely this must be someone elses fault.

Maybe. My problem tho. And poor Carol’s who was relegated to a chauffeur role with a whinging client. Back to Hereford and some surprisingly efficient processing before being deposited on the massive eye ward. Which stretched as far as the eye could see – in my case that was about 20 yards. A quick consultation with a lovely doctor who assured me that I probably wasn’t going blind, but the infection healing process might leave a slight scar. Which could manifest itself as hazy vision in one eye. But then again it might not, whose to know eh? Well, I couldn’t help thinking, maybe you? And can I ask for my medical news to be delivered without quite so many ifs, whys and maybes.

I stiff-upper-lipped it in typical bloke style thanking her for giving it to me straight, and assuring her that I would be absolutely fine as my drinking arm was in perfect working order. She smiled – sort of – and then gave me a whole post diagnosis opinion on contact lenses, my butchered eyes and the incompatibility of the two. Glasses make me feel old I whined/at least you can still see yourself she countered.

Fair point. Well made.

More eye drops, the first application of which I tasted which suggests the application technique needs some work. And stern instructions to return in three days or before if Id gone all Ray Charles in the meantime. Oh, and as a bit of a throwaway remark, absolutely no contact lenses whatsoever for two months. AT LEAST. My initial thought – and this tells me a lot about how I’m wired up – was ‘shit no mountain biking, I’ll go bloody sitr crazy and get fat and get beaten on Strava and not go drinking with my mates and…and…and..’

So fuck that frankly. Proven approach of taking problem and throwing money at it has already procured me a set of driving sunglasses which apparently are one of a three part set including string-backed driving gloves and beige trousers. So now I can drive but I can’t ride which clearly isn’t going to fly. So I’m hunting down prescription lenses that react to light in a way I’d rather like my eyes to do again. And the second I get the all clear from my rather forbidding eye doctor, I’m back out there.

It might even begin to explain my strange line choices. It’ll certainly explain the bloody horror that a mountain biking shaped hole excavated when I was thinking too much about this. There’s something epically self centred about the prospect of having really screwed up vision for the last forty years or so of your life, but the only context that makes any sense is in the now – ‘when can I get back on my bike?‘. Honestly I’m so consumed by it I might even ride my road bike in these very glasses I’m staring at this screen with right now.

I don’t care if roadies laugh at me. They do that anyway. I blame the camelbak.

So that’s been a scary few days. And we’re not out of the woods yet. Well not as far as I can see anyway. What I have seen is that it’s probably about time I took some responsibility for fairly important organs which could convincingly sue me for corporate manslaughter. There’s been some interesting upsides as well – mostly about what’s important and what isn’t. I’ll leave that for another day, but it’s fair to say when I finally got back to my inbox, I could barely stop laughing.

Eyes Right I think from now on.

* which I’d hoped would make me look more intelligent. On reflection, a big ask considering the balance of stupidity they had to redress.

** Not quite true. I just hate hospitals. They are full of sick people. And other people in white coats with bad news. Who’d want to go there?