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.
Some people clearly have too much time on their hands. I’m not one of them so instead I’m recycling something from my friend Dave – Quite clever Video.
I’m feeling a bit better thanks for asking. Now on a gruel and water diet. Having not had a proper drink for four days, this has to be the reason I still feel rubbish.
No, this is an excuse for the size, or otherwise, of certain manly parts. Although having ridden my little ol’ jump bike on some not really trails at all today, I believe I may be searching the Internet for some bigger ones anyway,
Those of you not on the strongest of medication may have noticed that photo is composed to a skewed horizon. I’d like to say that’s exactly how I planned the shot, and it has much to do with accentuating the angle of the bike, the verticality of the little rock, the bigness of the sky. It’d be an artistic untruth though because iit is the result of an photographic technique known as “desperately trying to fit everything in”.
Size again you see. Maybe it does matter. Certainly did on this wall.
I looked at that in a very manly fashion, while some random XC whippets embarrassed the entire MTB genre by repeatedly riding down a couple of steps in a manner that’d mince you straight onto Strictly Come Dancing. Anyway after a few looks and a run in, I ran out of bottle and went to look for less scary things.
None of which were on offer on the final run of the day. On the upside, it was all downhill which – after much winching up the ol’ DMR on flats and a rear axle pedalling position – was a relief. Also in need of relief was my arse, ruined by a cheap saddle I never expected to sit on much, so standing up on wobbly muscles trumped lowering the throbbing chaffed appendage back onto that torturous perch.
The trail down was barely discernible, dropping steeply between still high bracket and gorse. When it did finally open out to something that might once have been a path, the improvement in visibility was mitigated by the loose yet fat rock garden that created an experience best thought of as a pinball game caught in a washing machine.
The DMR was a lot of fun though. Easy to get the scarred buttocks way over the back wheel, the small frame giving it fantastic maneuverability and the big forks ploughing through when my fear based dithering threatened to pop us into the undergrowth. It’s so unlike the Cove – more brutal, more direct, sharp angles forcing weight over the fork, pushing elbows out and grins higher.
All the parts on it are old or second hand or cheap, the frame cost buttons and it’s entirely the wrong bike for – well – most things really. But it has one feature that cannot be fashioned from fancy metals or accessorised bling. It made me feel about 12 years old again.
And that’s becoming important. More important than supposed progression or fitness or riding in new places. Because it’s become apparent to me that flying gliders on a slope – obsessive and much fun as it is – seems to be a an old mans’ game.
I’m not ready for that yet. I want to be twelve again. Best reason to ride a bike? You becha.
.. not when it’s raining it doesn’t. Nor am I postulating on the stuff that used to keep me exercised both mentally and physically. What I’m talking about here are the hard, inflexible rules hammered into any cyclist whose spent time on the road and in the rain. The kind of thing you get wrong just once, before it’s hard-wired into your cycling psyche.
Except when your daily commute becomes a weekly or bi monthly event. Then you forget and bad stuff happens.
It gets dark. Check your lights. Long day, shorter daylight demands some form of get-me-home illumination. Of the four lights generally festering in my bag, two didn’t work at all, one flashed briefly before a spectacular – if brief – fizzling death while the fourth offered a dim flashing facsimile of something that may prevent a tractor squashing you flat.
Carry spares of everything. Including batteries. It’s worth thinking of them as fitness ballast to cushion the disappointment of these also being flat. The day I removed one of my two spare tubes, guess how many punctures I ended up with? My MP3 player was then added to the ever increasing pile of non working electronic stuff. It felt like I was riding directly under my own personal Electro-Magnetic Pulse.
Ensure you always carry a waterproof. Oh how smug was I with my trusty Gortex pal nestling amongst all the other crap I cannot bring myself to jettison. That smugness lasted exactly the time it took to remember I’d failed to re-proof though laziness and meteorological delusion* The result was a small lake pooling at the elbows and wrists that gradually – but persistently – drained through to create a feeling of clammy damp.
Mudguards look a bit gay, but… they are a marked improvement on – say – flappy wet shorts rythmically slapping your thighs with each pedal stroke. It put me in mind of sharing a small, cold bath with a Bavarian Laderhosen fetishist who’d just done a line of speed. My shoes have the same porous qualities as string creating a small watersports park for Lemmings in my socks.
Don’t go offroad because it’ll be drier under the trees. It isn’t. Rather than a wet arse, I ended up with a sandy, wet arse and crazy pebble dashing from ankle to eyebrow. And a shouty bruise delivered by that tractionless combination of thin tyre and thick mud. I’m writing to the Forestry commission to demand satisfaction on the issue of who put that tree there as well.
Keep your tyres inflated. Because while there is a certain manly pleasure in rotating squashy rubber**, the downside is a tarmac faceplant caused by rapid deflation or geographical differences between tyre and rim.
All obvious stuff you would think. No more than common sense for the serious cyclist. And I too was thinking just that as spiteful rain lashed my unprotected form, my arse became increasingly exfoliated by a localised sandstorm, and my feet exhibited the first symptoms of trenchfoot.
Right at the point when I was considering lobbing the bike under a passing lorry and hitching home, the descending sun backlit hill hugging clouds and transformed the world into something Turner-Esque and rather splendid.
Deciding I could get no wetter, I headed upwards into the lightening gloom to find myself high above the house, close to twilight with no power in my lights, not much pressure in my tyres, and every inch of skin on the aquatic side of extremely soaked. The plunge home took in grass covered roads, slick, shale corners, blind bends and an immense amount of blinking.
Arrived alive, declared to disbelieving family how much I love bikes. Swapped cold water for warm and wetness outside for wine inside. Slackness on the riding front has happened again this August, and I had begun to worry that my long affair with all things two wheeled was coming to an end.
It seems not.
* It’s never rain that hard. It’s summer for Christ’s sake.
** It’s that mental image of the Bavarian. It’s got me thinking…
… and in every other orifice as well. Think about that for a moment, while I confirm it was EVERY orifice be it covered with clothing or not. A festival of mud laid out the sloppy stuff front, centre, up, down, in and out of every bodily crevice I had inadvertently placed in the line of fire. This was not – as some of my more pervy* readers may hope – an introduction to the Malvern Hills Dogging Experience**
No the reason for my homage to a swamp monster was a ride in Haugh woods that left me 75{45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2} man, 25{45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2} slurry. Reasons abound for such muckiness ranging from a month of rain where summer should have been, and some careful harvesting of trees using nothing more than multi tracked twenty ton earth movers.
Tim – a recent innocent comet gravitationally pulled into the slightly bizarre, often drunk orbit of Planet Hedgehog – was regaling us with stories of how, under this foot of oozing nastiness, fantastic singletrack was desperate to get out. After two hours, so were we having destroyed my legs, a very expensive wheel and most of a previously pristine drivetrain.
On the upside, it wasn’t my wheel and the “Chiltern Experience” was rapidly put behind us as an old friend turned up with an even older bottle of Brandy. That ended as well as expected, and put paid to a navigationally challenged attack on the Long Mynd planned for the following day.
My riding pals have known me long enough to interpret “fellas, one thing, I’ve no idea where the fuck the start point is, never mind the route, my GPS is merely LCD candy ,and the only available map marks this region as ‘here be dragons‘” as a cry for help. In that vein they helped themselves to more alcohol and a drunken plan hatched a slightly less epic Malvern Hill Romp.
Which was – and I’m going to appeal to the common man here – fucking fantastic. It didn’t start well with hangovers, faffing and car parks full of red socks. But once 10 minutes away from the sour faced, ski-pole*** mountain bike haters, we bagged a large number of peaks stopping only to inhale vast quantities of cake and the occasional funny turn.
Some of these were my rubbish route finding, some my friends’ need to have a little lie down until Fantasia stopped playing behind his eyes. He’s not been riding much, but I was in awe of his riding approach which was to start slow and maintain that same pace for four hours plus. Not for him some ego straining push for the front – well not until I outed the cake from my Camelbak anyway.
It was ace though, still winter muddy but warm and not the Flanders experience suffered the day before. So impressed was I with the utter bloody joy of bicycles, I rocketed out of bed at 6am this morning to ride another one to work. The rain didn’t stop me, although an absence of four weeks’ commuting nearly did. So disappointed with my energy levels on the way back, I decided the best thing would be to extend the ride up the huge sodding hill summiting at the radio mast.
Nearly needed that to signal for help and possibly an ambulance. Eight minutes out of the saddle with a few hundred feet of sweaty grind, before switching gradients to a bonkers flat out descent into the valley bottom on a bike with shit brakes, thin tyres skidding over damp mud and a pilot wondering what the hell he might do for kicks when he can’t do this.
Got home. Got dog. Got kids who wanted to ride their bikes. Got another bike out and rode that with them. Well you would wouldn’t you? First day back at work was rubbish but sandwiched between wheels, I think I’ll do it again tomorrow.
* Based on what I know, that’s all of you. Except for my mum who is currently disconnected from the Internet due to youngest son’s complete failure to remotely troubleshoot a broken wireless connection. I shall be sending her up my special hammer in short course to remedy the problem once and for all.
** Which is the second highest search vector to this site. The first being “sex with hedgehogs“. I wish I were making that up.
*** “Are these the lower slopes of the Alps?” / “No” / “Then WTF?“
… is usurping “stiction” as my favourite bridged bit of alliteration. This mix of “Stay” and “Vacation” is a timely reminder of what it means to be a Yorkshireman. “Ah well, tha knows, could’ve got to foreign parts, but they’ll speak funny and there’s nowt to be found of basic staples such as burnt-whippet-surprise*. Anyroad up, God’s country is right tha, so why would you want to risk bloody frenchies y’soft lad?”
So this week, surrounded as we are by sparkies, plumbers and the like – serious men sporting eared pencils under beetling brows – we’re holidaying right here at ground zero of the previously cherished budget. So far this has involved much the same activity as one would undertake somewhere rather more expensive, although I’ll concede with more floors, foreign parts
Swimming, cakes, exploring muddy forests, cake, swapping depressing rain for amusing films**, eating out, eating more cake, wine, sofa and TV following tired kids heading bedwards, and much more of the same tomorrow.
Which in a further cost cutting move, I’ve decided that£50+ for four of us to drown in the fast running Wye is money for nothing. I’ll merely re-cast one of the old baths into a makeshift kayak, and head off downstream onto what used to be the road outside. Stunning idea I thought, typically British man with own shed thinking outside the tub, and providing decent, low cost family entertainment.
Three pairs of rolling eyes tells me I am alone in my love of the idea – even the dog looked sceptical and he’ll try anything once. Honestly it’s not until you’ve seen a Labrador eat a spider – with apparent relish – that you realise quite how hungry they must be ALL THE TIME. He’s even had a nibble of one of my biking socks of doom which are essentially lethal to any land going mammal from ten feet or less.
Talking of bikes, of course there has to be some of that later in the week. Parental care morphs to parental abandonment as I attempt to impress a man I’ve never met with my riding skills. That’ll not take long then – probably all the time a crash-bang-wallop plunge down the vertical trails recently discovered on the scary side of the forest.
Assuming any sort of multi limbed survival, the next day is all mine to lead a glorious day long ride over the Long Mynd bathed in summer sunshine. Let’s examine that last sentence shall we for possible inaccuracies; basically it’s all of it – more likely I’ll be getting a few old friends lost in the rain for hours on end before a random trail source shall lead us to a pub. Where we shall stay.
Sounds good to me. The way things are going, we might rent out the garden to tourists 🙂
* in times of hardship, rat or ferret was substituted. The surprise wasn’t that it tasted like chicken, more it tasted like shit.
** Ice Age 3. Fully expected it to be a tired re-run of an exhausted franchise, but found myself giggling along with the kids. But the nut gag has really been done to death now.
I have one hour. Exactly sixty minutes to switch life modes, exchange drudgery and bug eyed stress for stolen pleasure. It doesn’t matter why or when – only that the clock is ticking, and I need to feel fast air in my lungs, dirt under my tyres, joy in my heart. I have to go and ride my bike.
First of too many problems is the dearth of any proper good muddy stuff from our door. Sure with the Malverns on one side, and the Forest of Dean on the other, I am only a short drive from stonking trails, and not much further to the wilds of Wales. But there isn’t time for trailers, parking and faffing when you’re a mere hour from needing to be back here.
The very local woods offer nothing other than an excuse to lose the dog in the overgrown footpaths. Head a little further out and a huge expanse of forestry should roll out a million trails, but it doesn’t because of too many horses, to few bikes, too little traffic and my apathy based exploring routine. I’ve driven out there a few times, and come back disappointed vowing to carry on next time to stuff I know is good.
Much of this is because I’m a rubbish explorer, no sense of direction, and yet blessed with a gift to divine rubbish tracks. If you’re in the market for a six foot wide ruined trail full of horses hooves, red Herefordshire mud, viscous shrubbery and a dark heart from which there is no obvious escape, I’m your womble.*
So it’s a bit crap for mountain bikes, and I’m completely unable to find any of this mythical singletrack I’ve heard talked about. But it’s close, 3.3 miles and that’s less than 15 minutes to a man who has 3 week unridden legs, and the need to unwind a million wrongs visited upon him.
Big Ring. Stand up. Ignore wheezing lungs and unexercised muscles. Forget that road riding is dull, blot out the threatening clouds and incessant headwind – there are many things worse that this and most of them are inside.
I’m still attacking everything when I first hit the dirt, diving under the trees on a trail I’ve jealously eyed up on numerous dog walks. Which already goes against the plan of riding just 4 known tracks to the valley bottom and then sprinting home on the fireroad.
But every mountain biker has a Pavlovian attraction for snaky singletrack, and it’s not long before I’m clearing deadwood from a little used trail and thinking happy thoughts on improvements if only I’d remembered my spade. But time doesn’t stop, and neither can I – sweating a bit now – switching to a favourite rooty trail that’s way drier than expected and twice as much fun.
God I’d forgotten how great this is. And it has nothing to do with the bike. Oh sure, the Cove is perfectly balanced, razor sharp without being twitchy, taut without being painfully stiff, fast without being fragile but that’s not what matters right now. Because right now I’m not inside with a pile of work, or outside trying to make sense of ongoing house devastation.
No time to gloat, time to ride, pick another trail and spend minutes I don’t have trying to jump a rooty set. Twice I cock it up, so go for a dumb brakes off approach that ends as well as you can probably imagine. Still, since I was lying down, this seemed a perfect time to break out a lunchtime energy bar and surreptitiously check e-mail. No Signal? That’s fate. Time to go.
Not enough of that to ride a cheeky trail around the lake. Walked loads of time with dog and family, it’s root strewn, off camber, damp today and sure to be rubbish. But I ride it anyway, and it’s bloody brilliant of course – not as it offers some kind of singletrack nirvana, or great speed but because I shouldn’t be here, and nobody else is.
Flick of the wrist shows bad numbers so I quit while I’m just a little behind my rush hour schedule. But not so fast that I cannot mentally mark a myriad of possible trails which peep enticingly from behind summer growth.
My hour is nearly up and some cad has laid an extra mile of tarmac between my fading legs and the demands of being a grown up. The headwind has even strengthened** but a main road short cut deemed to be less risky than the hilly back roads*** bought me enough time to make a sub sixty possible.
Being two minutes late didn’t matter unless you’re the type of person who stokes his competitive gland every time bikes are involved. So that’s me on a final charge which brought the house into view, and a moto style entry over the frictionless pea shingle impressed exactly one person. And that person read 59:48 on their stopwatch.
Don’t get me wrong – the trails aren’t fantastic, at no point did I carve successive corners or jump some monstrous double. The bike and I are splattered with smelly mud, every exposed limb has been brutally slashed by vegetation with attitude, nothing has changed here other than an Inbox close to explosion, and it’s just started to piss it down again.
But I don’t care. Because for a while there I forgot just how bloody great mountain bikes are. That’ll not happen again.
* Remember Womble’s picked their names by blinding pinning a map. If I were really a womble my name would be “For Fuck’s sake, the map is over there, that’s my HAND”
** Out and Back on the same road. Both into a headwind. Ask any cyclist, they’ll tell you this is always the case. We don’t know why but when we find out someone is in for a bloody hard time.
*** Risk assessment went something like “may get run over by a mad trucker heading to Ross, but almost certain heart attack if I have to go up there“
Between six hours of fantastic – if endlessly moist – riding on Saturday, and some extreme chucking of gliders on Sunday, it’s been and gone in all the time needed to say “Weren’t you supposed to be painting?”.
Well I did some of that as well, and about a million other thing. What I’ve failed to do is sit down for more than five minutes, or prepare myself for a week full of difficult stuff. Ah well, never mind.
Should time allow, I have things to share – the first of which will be a rant about a bloke with a blacked out people carrier, a personal number plate and a “South Eastern” attitude that very nearly got him punched. Honestly, it’s like the badlands down there, everyone is completely MAD.
More soon… that’s a threat, not a promise 🙂
Let’s be honest here – there is a bit of Competitive Dad inside all of us. And for some that’s because they had Competitive Dad outside for all their formative years, and never really worked out how to stop. Not for me, my old fella wasn’t so much hands off as completely disinterested. Which is something of a reason why I vacillate between total commitment and tired apathy with my own offspring.
But the parent I’ve never wanted to be is that one screaming from the sidelines, desperately striving to put the Victory into Vicarious. There’s always a positive stop between my frankly pervy love of mountain biking and forcing my kids to try and share something of that. Good reasons abound – they’re girls, they’re (still) not that big, MTB’ing is a tough sport, and they have variously preferred scooters, ex-board, walking and – well – anything else really when I’ve punted a spot of weekend dirt riding.
Today one of them mined the giggle-lode I so cherish, while the rest of the family had a damn fine go, before retiring slightly scared. Random (8, bonkers, untouched by reality) demonstrated a level of focus that made me wonder about alien abduction. She piloted her little 20inch Spesh Hardrock down trails the big boys ride, and showed a level of bravery making me wonder again – this time about adoption.
That’s not her in the photo. Verbal shares her Mum’s terror of hills and my oft repeated maxim that “your brakes control the speed, not the hill” failed to unlock tight muscle or deflate the scary gland. But she had a proper try even though it was apparent the only thing more scared in the entire forest was probably Carol.
Who – having narrowly avoided plunging into a dangerous ditch – rode bridges she hated, survived downhill trails that offered nothing but fear, and a truly, scary off camber bend that gives me the heebies before retiring with eldest daughter to the safety of the fireroads. I was properly proud of them for giving it a go without the hint of a whinge, and riding stuff that was clearly shitting-the-bed scary.
My kids don’t ride much and I don’t push them to do so. I’m always amazed how quickly they pick it up again, and while I was picking up my lovely old Kona having helped Random over a nasty log bridge, it became apparent she wasn’t going to stop. A cocktail of roots, dips and little drops were mastered with nothing more than youthful bravado and a happy chuckle.
I watched her ride it – having stopped talking since she clearly needed no coaching – with a lump in my throat. Where do they learn that shit? Even when she was properly gorse bushed at the trail end, she just picked herself up and got on with it. Well sort of, I had to push her home but she’s desperate to get out again. I may have found myself a sleeper 🙂
On returning home, the hound was walked by bicycle and suddenly these two wheeled transportation devices are the best thing since… the last great thing, but I’m happy with that. We then jumped our fence and went exploring in the stream at the bottom of the garden. Which was way more fun that it probably sounds.
There are times when kids are bloody difficult. Anyone who tells you different is on strong medication or telling lies. This was not one of those days.
One of the lesser touted joys of cycling is the minimal aural impact as you speed through the countryside. Aside from creaking knees, wheezy breathing and the occasional spittle-flecked invective*, your passage is registered merely as a soft whum of tyre on smooth tarmac. Off road of course, it’s a bloody riot of noise as chains slap stays, suspension squishes and components grind in a strange harmony only broken by the counterpoint of fleshly limb on unyielding stump.
But road riding should offer restful respite to such noise pollution, and yet this has not been the happy state of affairs visited on the Jake. Firstly it’s not really a road bike, too heavy, too soft, too compromised by tyres, angles and components. I’m fine with that because a switch to dirt and it comes alive in a way that pastes a shit eating grin on your face right up until the point when thin tyres beget zero grip. And when the groaning stops, you start smiling again.
Unless you are listening to a transmission of thrashing metal. The serial offender in this criminal approach to noise abatement was the rear mech which had fallen off the straight and narrow. I’d go as far as to say it was crooked – not only that it’d roped in “Big Charlie The Cacophonous Cassette” into attempted GBH on the rear wheel.
So armed with a big chain, these two made light work of a heavy metal noise even the MP3 player couldn’t quite drown out. Recently I’ve adopted a radical approach to bike maintenance in that I’ve not done any. It’s not just laziness – more a realisation that after spending time and money fitting new parts, the problem would be as bad or worse or maybe different, I was always poorer and some poor bike shop owner had again suffered at the hand of my unending stupidity**
Sadly the reverse isn’t true either, and no amount of giving it a stern look was going to kick start some kind of self healing process. A closer examination showed the seven year old components were really badly worn which was rather disappointing. Talk about built in obsolescence – seven years? I’ve got children older than that.
Cash was relunctantly exchanged for things shiny and a mere three hours later, all sorts of precise – yet quiet – clicking noises sold me a belief I’d actually fixed something. It would have been about ninety minutes had I not gone exploring in the dark recesses of the cunning shared brake/gear lever. My random prodding released a tightly wound spring from deep inside the component, and only an outstanding piece of fielding by the dog handily placed at third slip saved me from buying a new one of those.
I’m thinking of putting him up for the upcoming Ashes series. Anything he can’t catch, he’ll retrieve, always happy, positive and a keen team member, can’t bat for shit but that doesn’t seem to be much of a requirement nowadays. And – an added bonus this you’re not going to get from Ian Bell – he’ll have a good chew of the opposing bowlers legs before making off with his sandwiches.
So a happy silence accompanied me on a sweaty ride to the station through weather best described as “hot, damp flannel”. I could barely contain my smugness as a single click of the shifter would instruct the spankers new mech to serve up the next cog. Which was better than good when compared to last week, where the first two shifts did nothing before a third would slew the chain across multiple sprockets without bothering to clamp any of them.
A result then? Yes and, because it’s me on the spanners, no. Firstly I’d unknowingly created the sub-niche sport of “hardcore commuting” having failed to reset the brakes and leaving them lightly gripping the wheel. I thought progress was proving mightily difficult, but was so pre-occupied with my silent transmission I’d failed to investigate.
If I had, I may have noticed the mech was still on the piss. Closer inspection proved this to be simply because I’d bent the mech hanger during on of my many traction-lite moments in the woods. It’s easily fixed at a cost of£4.20. That’s approximately one twentieth of the cost of all those new parts I’d identified as the root cause of the problem.
Maybe I’ll go back to doing nothing.
* generally brought on by a bloke in a BMW/AUDI/Generic Cockmobile attempts absent mindedly attempts to kill. Some of them do it on purpose as well. But only once, and I’m safe until they find the bodies.
** “Did you fit it with the 14mm spanner as I explained” / “Yes, and far from it be from me to tell you your job, it was RUBBISH for hitting it with. I went back to a hammer, and now it’s broken“
We don’t do requests on the ‘hog. Mainly because we don’t get any. But, if we did, we wouldn’t because we put the Hedgey into Edgy. Clear? Good.
However, a shout out needs to go to all round good eggs, riding pals and confirmed 24 hour nutters Jezz and Ian who are competing in this years Mountain Mayhem. It’s just round the corner at Eastnor Castle and I shall be playing to me strengths, by pitching up with a pitcher of beer tomorrow night, and applying some liquid therapy to those riding in ever decreasing circles.
I popped up there pre-race start and it’s a) a bloody huge event and b) bone dry with a good forecast. Which is a bit of a relief after last year*, when the best way to complete a lap was by helicopter.
Ian is riding a very light race bike he has RUINED by removing all but one gear and any vestiges of suspension. Jezz has foolishly packed mud tyres, and therefore inadvertently invoked “Hailstorm’s Law”. Honestly I don’t know why he didn’t just travel to Chile with a butterfly and let it flap it’s wings. Next thing, tornados in Swindon**
Anyway, best of British to the pair of them. Nutters they may be, but they are hedgehog reading nutters. And – as we’ve said before – that’s a SPECIAL type of nutter.
* and almost every one before that. The term “European Monsoon” seems lost on race organisers.
** Inspired piece of Meterological urban planning that.
