Normally after a minute of watching small children pulling incredible stunts in urban locations, I tend to get a bit bored. It’s amazing, but leaves me a bit cold.
This however is unbelievable. Never seen riding so smooth, big and brave.
Enjoy 🙂
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.
Waiting for the bus
You can keep your fancy GPS’s, chuck your heart rate monitors in the hedge and worry away at your statistics spreadsheet, because while you are working out where you lost that time, I am waiting for a bus. I know it was only last month my witterings on targets had me chasing virtual training partners all the way to work, and then spending the remainder of the day lying down.
But it became clear I must apply Al’s rule of achievement* to my heavy legged pursuit of stupidity. So now I’m measuring my progress by playing chicken with the “Bromsgrove Omnibus”. The first time I met this bus was nearly the last, as it aurally indicated a desire to pass on a road that I’d always assumed was adequately sized for only single file cows and possibly a MP3 driven bicycle.
He passed with inches to spare and a “I’ll get you butler” gesture expression which I deigned unworthy of a reply** and gave it scant thought until it became obvious this wasn’t just any bus, this was my PACE BUS. And if I could squeeze in front before a singletrack road some five miles from home, I could keep the miserable bugger behind me for a good couple of minutes. Now that’s sport right there.
So now I’m off the Hereford train at 18:37 clipped in and heading out via the squashy slalom of random pedestrianisation, immediately looking for ways to cheat the God of Time. First up is a cheeky trail through ledbury, much wooded, significantly dog walked and offering lippy roots to straight line difficult line choices.
Then out of the town and chasing nothing but my hedge painted shadow, gagging a bit on dusty clay vectored off busy tractor ploughs, loving the sunshine, feeling way stronger in my knee and lungs that three virtually bike free weeks could possibly allow.
But this is merely a pleasant aperitif before a meaty main course of Omnibus and tarmac that’s coming up in four miles if I can turn these pedals a bit harder. That’s the distilled and beautiful clarity of riding a bike – it’s the simple joy of smooth circles driving you on, the grin of sweeping bends, the whum of hard tyres on baking tarmac, the just-bloody-nobody-gets-why-bikes-are-so-fucking-fantastic that justifies an obsession.
And that bus that’s going to be hitting that junction at 19:01, so I need to be there first. By a quirk of geography, the cross in the road is visible from 45 seconds upstream, meaning if I’m not hitting that crest at seven o’clock or better, the bus ain’t waiting for me. So it’s back to standing up and clicking a gear combination that shoots staccato breath from an open mouth, burns muscles from ankles to hip and strains arms dumping sweat onto the bars.
6:58, big sodding river bridge coming up, can’t slow down, feel the tyre squirm into the tarmac, feel legs slowing down, feel lungs desperately screaming for more air, feel… feel… feel, this is the stuff of life isn’t it? This is why we do this, this is what makes us different to the bloke next door with his paintbrush and his paunch. This is what makes us a little smug, a little bonkers, a little more obsessed. Because this feeling needs bottling and selling.
I can see the junction, and I can see the bus lumbering up the hill heading for the turn and I can’t see anything else. Now it’s a straight run – slightly downhill – four clicks on the shifter, big gear, out of the saddle, ignore the cacophony of body complaint and charge down the tunnel of vision that displays just a short tarmac ribbon, an onrushing junction and a big red bus.
Briefly considering – and calculating it’s a reward that far outstrips the risk – that traffic may be steaming past the junction, I slow not even a little bit, swerve right as the bus turns left and give it a few final desperate pedal stamps to nip in front.
And then – pretty well spent – have a nice minute or two finding some breath for my lungs and oxygen for my legs while a frustrated man in a dodgy cap impotently guns his engine behind my serene form. There is a perfect symmetry there – people wait for a bus, and now the bus waits for me.
Look I know what you’re thinking. But honestly with my legendary limbo boredom threshold, I need something to keep me amused on the commute. It’s that or getting off the bike and jumping in with all those lovely lambs 🙂
* If at first you don’t succeed, redefine exactly what you mean by the word “Success”
** Mainly because I was having a rather trying time extricating myself from a drainage ditch much inconvinienced by a bicycle.
Kneed For Speed
The rehabitilitation of the knee was fully tested by three rides in four days over the Easter weekend. After which my real holiday and the rain started, and much of the fun stopped. I am now a man tediously schooled in the art of plasterboarding. A skill normally abrogated to those with limitless boredom thresholds and ‘ave your arm off powertools. Sadly, the budget spreadsheet said no, and I inadvertently said yes.
Ride one was with my not-ridden-with-much-lately pal Ian who runs, walks and cycles in the Forest of Dean. Not all at the same time because a) that would be silly and b) I was already doing it. On my third unscheduled dismount, I lamented my choice of rubbish tyres, soggy fork and threadbare brakepads. This verbal lambastation went unheard by Ian, who had cleared off into the distance with his ten year old alu frame, one gear, venerable forks, v-brakes and a set of Panaracer Suicides*
We returned muddy but happy, and I’d committed to memory a choice selection of fantastic trails for an Easter ride with some friends who were scheduled to eat our food, drink the beer, ride some bikes and build a plasterboard ceiling. Obviously I was instantly lost on our return to the forest and never found ANY of the trails so carefully mentally waymarked.
But the great thing about this huge area of woodland is finding buff singletrack is akin to throwing a hedgehog at a dartboard**. This – and the happy navigational wild guess that deposited us back at the cafe – not only saved my bacon but made sure we were ready for some on returning home. Having ridden Jason’s fat almost-downhill bike most of the day, while watching him zoom off on my lovely light hardtail, made my need for food sit slightly behind that of a strong desire to lie down and not be disturbed for many hours.
The following day the boys then ceiling’d the big shed in double quick time, while I played to my strengths fetching tea and pointing our where things could be done better. As this wasn’t really adding much to “Team Plasterboard“, I dispatched myself to Morrison’s to clear the shelves of anything remotely BBQ’able. On my return, the roof was done, and the fellas were demanding more riding under sunny skies.
A quick mooch up to Haugh woods had us up to giggly armpits in rooty woodland singletrack. We rode everything I knew and found quite a lot more, all of which was dry, fast and extremely twisty. Again I was shorn of my proper bike, and instead rode the fully rigid Kona. A decision that had immediate consequences of loosening a brake pad, most of my teeth and a full re-organisation of my internal organs.
But sunshine, a working knee and a bit more speed brought the experience round to extremely satisfying. The prospect of finding the other 30k of Singletrack in these woods through a hot, dry summer could make even a trip to the FoD seem a bit pointless.
We returned and approached the shrine of the sizzling BBQ with revered silence. Before falling upon it and devouring the lot, much to the disappointment of an under the table based disposal unit. Murf looked particularly miffed at Al “three burger” Leigh who couldn’t find it in his stoney heart to even allow the smallest grain of sizzled beef to fall to nose height.
Top weekend. Fantastic weather. Non hurty knee. And because Yang must follow Ying, I am now putting the bored into plasterboard.
* The “Trailblaster” – a tyre that has as it’s unique selling point, a complete lack of grip in any conditions. Damp Roots?-certain death. Mud – uncontrolled slide into something pointy. Hardpack – from vertical to horizontal in all the time it takes to ask “any warning when these tyres go?”
** You know you’ll score big, just not quite sure what.
Jumps’n’Bumps
The feeling of mental limbo never really left me this weekend. There was this great big HONC sized hole into which I kept throwing stuff; yet while my body was amusing itself with adequate distractions, my mind was still wheeling away in the Cotswolds.
And while I did consider a 48 hour full on sulk and grump, it seemed a shame to waste two days of fine weather, and a family that’s not seen me as much as it probably should lately. Although on Saturday I abandoned them again to wind out mental tension in big hills while crashing small gliders.
I even manged to fly the new, fast one which, being German designed, had a perfectly logical build process as long as one remembered to adopt the correct “installation position“. Being English, I’d wandered off the precise instructions to practice the art of wingtip painting. Practice being what I needed, as everyone within a five mile blast radius of the spray tin is now calling me “Mr Overspray“.
The tail – especially bad – looks as if I’ve spatchcocked a gerbil, such was the red splatter effect of the over enthusiastic paint dribbler. It still flew very well – even if I didn’t – although the last landing crash ripped the nose off. An arrival I am now thinking of as “The Michael Jackson”
The obstacle course I built for the kids on Sunday lasted all the time it took for them to become bored with it. So ten minutes later, I harvested some wood for my now insulated timbered erection*, and built an eight inch lip for the pair of them to roll over.
Which they both did rather well although Verbal decided – as she is nearly 10 and therefore knows everything – that she’d ignore my patient instruction to stand up, pedals level as she dropped off. Still at the end of an hour, it was her with the sore bottom and me with the knowing smile. Random just nicked her sisters’ bike and mosied on over with a look of not oft seen concentration.
I had to have a go. Obviously. Normally any photo of me riding clashes terribly with my own internal image of trail God. This one bucks the trend in no way whatsoever, but at least I’m looking quite thin. And that’s not just on top.
Whether that will continue after the scary Physio tells me off this evening, I’ll let you know. I’m so desperate to ride right now, I’m even considering commuting in the pissing rain tomorrow. One year, I’ll get injured in the Winter and not feel as if another summer will be lost to encroaching fat and decreasing fitness. I am very much hoping it will be this year.
* I am unlikely to get bored of this joke. Sorry.
HONC’d off.
It’s official. The left knee of an aging Al is going to require all sorts of external help, with the worrying possibility of being holed below the water line by a man with a drill. Deploying a displacement approach of “not asking a question you don’t want the answer to”, I’ve been avoiding doing anything about the increasing soreness for a few months now.
It’s always been a bit wonky. Made more so by that high speed impact with Chiltern flint, and a somewhat slower speed impact with a surgeon’s knife and much stitching. From then on, there was a low level background twinge, occasionally upgraded to a sharp “arrrghhh“.
Ironically, as my fitness has gone one way, the knee’s gone the other. And after a gentle commute home last night, I was pretty sure that any sort of riding was at the mercy of someone else’s diagnosis. Right now, that’s just the Physio and a bikey curfew which I am going to break. Unless it doesn’t improve, in which case it’ll be balancing a need to ride with the increasing likelihood of the aforementioned scary drill.
I’m understandably pissed off about it. Missing HONC after working so damn hard over the winter is one thing, the prospect of not being able to ride for … well … let’s not go there eh, has subdued even my normally optimistic – if naive – view of the world.
The only good to come out of this, is it has allowed someone else to participate who was desperate for a HONC entry, and he was good enough to chuck some cash at the CLIC-24 fund. That event is six weeks away, which doesn’t feel long enough.No way I’m missing that though. Even if I have to hop round.
If you’ll excuse me I’m going to go and drown my sorrows 🙁
Does my arse look..
Okay it does. Right moving on, a couple more pictures taken by Tim “the lucky bugger with a new camera” Beresford. And for those of you pointing at the screen and beckoning over complete strangers for a laugh at ‘dwarf-leg-man“, I think you will find that I am riding in the new-school style of “crouching badger, hidden terror”
Indeed, this is a style that is well displayed here.
The smell of fear was wafting up from my ample behind I can tell you*, and I was very happy to have the big unit all the way back there. An over the bars exit would have been rewarded by a spiky meeting with some pointy ground and some optional groaning.
I did have a number of attempts at not riding that, and only managed to roll over the drop when bottling out became the more dangerous alternative. Quite pleased that I’ve not become a complete wuss, although those 2.1 tyres are perilously close to lycra in the wardrobe.
They’ll be off after HONC, as will I probably. My post HONC warm down regime is currently based around setting fire to every bicycle I own and buying a motorbike.
Anyway, in a break from Hedgehog tradition, here’s a picture of a proper rider. I quite like the way Tim appears to have gone all Praying Mantis over his handlebars.
* even if you probably didn’t want to know.
Spring rocks
Asking whether the Malvern Hills can be a bit congested on a sunny Spring day, is a little like wondering if Tesco can get a little crowded the day before Christmas. It’s a small set of hills with a big catchment area – all policed by a bunch of people who seem to enjoy getting up on a Sunday and putting a tie on.
The hills are shared not only by walkers and mountain bikers, but paragliders, model gliders, sheep, protected woodland and more SSSI’s that you can shake a rural White Paper at. The result is 90{45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2} tolerance and 10{45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2} confusion.
Take this mad example; the Malverns are split in half by the county boundary between Worcestershire and Herefordshire. Apparently the Worcestershire council designated all their paths as Bridleways, but Herefordshire chose footpaths. This is even more bonkers when a scan of the OS map shows virtually none of either. The paths are just that, and I’m much more interested in good trail manners than I am with someone telling me where I can ride my bike.
Despite a bit of car park centric congestion, Tim and I had a fantastic morning in the further reaches of the hills. Tim finally cleaned this nasty rocky outcrop near the Wyche, and I managed the same on a decent down from the Worcester Beacon. We knocked off two thousands plus feet of vertical, and finished up in the pub, catching those early spring rays.
The trails are bone dry, the bikes are dusty and the speeds are starting to come up a bit. Obviously this is all too good to be true, which seems a good time to point you to next weeks’ weather forecast.
Ah well, I’m “tapering” for HONC anyway and if that isn’t a good enough excuse, my poorly knee certainly is.
Targets
I’m not sure what is more stupid, racing against yourself or being unhappy when you lose. Commuting in London was also about targets – but only because you were one, and my idea of a result was arriving at work with the same number of limbs as I’d started out with.
Commuting here is different for many reasons. It’s hillier, safer and longer. Finishing via the Ledbury cycleway takes it to a tad under eleven miles, with 570 feet of vertical to get over. On the roadrat, it was a 50 minute pootle through pleasantly deserted roads, dispatched without getting too much of a sweat on.
The Jake is different, it may be from an older generation of race bikes, but a race bike it still is. It seems to falter and lose speed so quickly when you coast – becoming turgid and heavy. But crank it up and it flies, stiff and fast, needing just a nudge to change direction and super composed sweeping through bends.
Throw a GPS into the mix which shows your pace against a previous best time, and beepily nags at you to try harder. And try you do, staying on the drops, refusing to drop a gear and going for the gurn. I used to hate drop bars, but now they make sense – cutting through the wind and providing a stable platform so you can just pedal and go faster.
It’s not enjoyable cycling. There is no time to watch the rising sun slant stunningly through the orchards, you don’t wonder at the joy of being out of the car and into the rural air. At no point does your mind wander to great thoughts or pointless introspection. Because the bastard GPS is beeping out your weakness, and you’re more interested in looking for ten seconds than looking at the view.
Maybe you coasted a bit here last time, did I get off the drops, was it a gear down? No time to remember, just get the hammer down, accept it’s going to hurt, let rasping lungs and burning thighs fight over who gives up first. Chase buses, chafe at traffic, swear at wandering pedestrians – don’t they know I’m on for my BEST TIME?
It’s idiocy. And you can’t win. You can die by a thousand cuts. Weighted down tomorrow by drizzle, tired legs and excuses, I’ll get bested by my virtual self. And it’ll bother me.
Somewhere in this world of lunacy, I might be getting a little bit fit. More likely it’s a tailwind 😉
Splinter Groups
There is a cost per use issue here that I need to air. My cheap’n’cheerful glider has seen a few hours flying – intespersed with spectacular but non debiliating crashing – for a lump sum of sixy quid. The two planes with proper noisy engines have amassed a cost about six times that for, oh let me see, six minutes flying.
This ratio has not been any way balanced by the sad splintery remains for the Boomerang which suffered a mid air collision at the hands of my instructor. Hardly ever happens apparently, and while that’s a comfort of sorts*, it failed to prevent a furtive scoot into Hereford with a scribbled list of the exotic wood and glues that may fashion a repair.
And so into the model shop, which is mainly configured for those lonely souls who have failed to put away their childish things. A point much demonstrated by two men – showing no external evidence of a recent escape from a high security loony bin – rifling vigorously through the model train accessories bucket searching for two matching sheep.**
This is under the fond gaze of the three proprietors clearly plucked from the all Herefordshire final of “Least chance of ever getting laid” competition. This surreal pastiche of badly skewed humanity was enhanced by an extremely venerable old lady, laden down with a tea tray, hobbling carefully from kitchen to till in a time period best measured using the term “epoch”
I hurried out before being Borg’d by cardigan, and hid the geeky balsa under my coat. Honestly, I’d rather be caught reading “Hardcore Poodle Sex” by my mum that trying to explain to anyone I’ve ever met why I’ve been shopping in a place where strange, unwashed men get excited when discussing train gauges.
Which was pretty much my experience of climbing a big Welsh hill last weekend after bagging up the remains of my Boomerang that ended yet another unfulfilling flying experience. I stuck the Wildthing under my arm and made slow progress up half a mile of vertical hill to be met with a view that had CGI written all over it.
And a bunch of men – although as they were all dressed by their mum and sporting bobble hats and goggles, I’m making a bit of an assumption here – who could be best described as somehow positioning the Hereford Model Shop misfits as sexually charged Brad Pitt lookalikes. They ignored me, on the grounds that I wasn’t sporting food in a beard or my own carefully cultivated selection of warts, and I ignored them right back while trying to work out how to fly a light glider in 35 MPH winds.
Unless flipping upside down before firing it off behind you like an unguided missile, and then burying itself in soft peat counts, I’m not sure I quite got it. I went back to riding bikes which feels familiar, safe and really not that stupid. Which tells you everything you need to know about the shadowy world of the Aero Modeller.
Love the flying, really do especially the glider which is a mere 5 minute drive away from being chucked off a decent slope. It’s mentally quite absorbing, technically interesting but peopled with a group of aliens who somehow tuck Mountain Bikers in the middle of the sanity bell curve.
Bit of a worry if I’m honest.
* Not really.
** Full size, that’s fine.
We’re back!
The Hedgehog is offline, originally uploaded by Alex Leigh.
My state of the art diagnostic system picked up the hosting failure about 12 hours after the site went off line. Yes an email complaining bitterly that the sender had already expended their “looking out of the window time” because the hedgehog was in “deep burrow”
I’ll not bore you with the details although Andy Armstrong, who is all things webhost to a few of us vanity publishers, was heard to say something like “booseless shucking phosting pompany“.
Make of that what you can.
Much to tell including my first bin bag experience, a nasty lurgey which I’m thinking of as a “seven chapter experience” and – this is the REALLY exciting bit – the ordering of the new structure to house the beer fridge.
Might be a while, much going on in the day job. Until then, feast your eyes on something that would define lunacy in a picture dictionary.