“We’d recommend you take the body armour, it’s included” worried the bike shop man as I pretended to test suspension settings on a downhill monster so far removed from my riding world it may as well have been delivered by aliens.

Trail lid, t-shirt, wimpy knee pads, delusional view of competence, second language: ‘I’ll be fine with these I think“. Some fevered Slovene muttering suggested otherwise so I took the hint and armoured up with body suit, elbow pads and a stinky full face. I refused hard-shell knee pads though on the grounds I’d transported these ones 1500 miles and they only reeked of me.

Proper DH bikes pedal badly especially configured with a short rear cassette. So I pushed to the lift and hefted it onto a hook clearly welded by the lowest cost bidder. Watching it swing behind me displaced dark thoughts of imminently being shit and poo-ing the bed on steep trails cut through the forest passing under my feet.

Slow chairlifts are not happy bedfellows for the imaginative ensuringfifteen minutes later hadme wrestling the beomoth from the hook like a man only recently acquainted with any kind of motor control. The lift fellalooked a bit contemptuous as the next car smacked me up the arse. A fine start to what could be a long day.

A day really that should be spent with my lovely family who I dragged to Slovenia promising mountain views, no hiking, no boring museums and no mountain biking. Two out of three ain’t bad, but when you’re an ancient fucker like me and the balcony view showcasestrails bakedinto amountain side simply accessed by a summer chairlift, selfishness will out.

I rather wish it hadn’t as I careered down a scree slope entirely bereft of anything back in the UK we call ‘grip‘. Or indeed ‘ability‘. Strange bike, bit worried, encased in unfamiliar plastic – as a start it was inauspicious. Being stupid I felt things would improve if I ignored the easy trailand plunged instead into a rooty horror soaked fromthe previous weeks endless downpours.

I can ride wet roots. I live in a place where it pisses down almost endlessly. I have transferable skills here. Oh. Fuck. No. I. Don’t. Tree anchors the size of my arms pitched on a slope best thought of mostly vertical. I tripod’ddown bouncing off arboreal trail markers and travelling sideways any time I felt touching the brakes might be a fine idea*

Couple of minor offs. A bit of walking. Surfing the last chute on my arse while vaguely connected to a mountain bike. Checked the trail markers. That’s a red. Blimey. I diverted to the blue which pitched me into 20 linked berms superbly built but barely maintained. Stray off the line and it was all cracked earth filled with marbles and upside down mountain bikers.

Finally a set of well constructed table tops over whichI was universally shit. A little bit of this was the unfamiliar bike and the effort/speed needed to make it work butmost of it was me – despite the armour – tensing up and slowing down.

Groundhog day. Top of the lift but this time go leftto a barely distinguishable trail marker promising another ‘hard‘ trail through the woods. What was I thinking? It was essentially a walkers path with all the easy bits circumvented by desperate plunges into the valley. Steep enough to suggestwalking it would result ina broken ankle with a side order of no phone signal. No one else riding it – surprisingly – so I minced down often using the bike as a fence. Near the bottom an lengthy off camber root section looked too hard for feet so I just closed my eyes and went for it. Went well until I crashed.

Right give myself a talking too. Threemore uplifts things improving, drops being dropped, jumps being jumped, big stuff being ignored. Making use of the insane grip of a DH bike. Picking some harder lines off the brakes. Popped back into the shop to reduce fork preload clearly set for a man who had eaten only pies and pasties for the last ten years ‘if you’re struggling with the roots, you must go faster‘ said the clearly skilled mechanic. Sounded counter intuitive. Went for lunch with the family instead.

Five more runs. Mostly together with occasional terror as learned lines were nothing of the sort. Rode a few more scary things but waitingabovethe final tabletops wasa ladder drop higher than my shoulder. Rolled into a few times. Rolled back everytime. Knew I could ride it, really didn’t want to. Looked for excuses, found none.

Last run. Mind frazzled, arms floppy, calves aching. Chatting with a lovely Slovene on the chairlift. Explained my angst. Easy he said, follow me. I tried but he was gone in 10 seconds leaving me with the hope he’d have forgotten who the hell I was onfinally turning up. No such luck.

He’s a coach. Cool. Of the Slovenian DH team. Not so cool. Conversation went ‘you have the bike‘ POINT AT DH RIG ‘you have the protection‘ POINT AT HEAD TO TOE BODY ARMOUR ‘what is your problem?‘ me: POINT TO ME ‘this?‘. He laughed and dragged my elderly arse through a section that’d had me off earlier. Somehow I stuck with him with any brain activity entirely focussed on the biggest drop I’d ever attempted. One that’d recently skewered the spleen of a MTB journo.

We flew over the ‘qualifier‘ and fuck me it was brilliant. ‘See he said, even old guyslike you can ride this stuff’. Thanks. ‘Come on, follow, follow‘ came next with a big arm movement and a velocity suggesting rocket propulsion. Arriving sweaty and scared before the drop I was ready with my excuses, but he** was having no truck with that.

‘Follow, Follow’ beckoning me on at a speed entirely inappropriate for a man a week short of his 48th birthday. Hitting the ramp all I could think of was ‘How important is a spleen? Will I miss it?’ Then a moment of gorgeous silence punctuated by a spinning freehub, then some ground rush, then 8 inches of suspension compensating for my shit technique, then endorphin rush and high fives.

‘Follow Follow, let’s do it again‘ my mentor grinned at me. But I declined. He looked disappointed and in retrospect so am I. But nothing could better how I felt right then, plus the factI was fucked physically and mentally. Pushing back up for photos required determination for which I had no courage left. Every last drop had been eeked out on that drop. I was spent.

I’m not a great mountain biker. Especially when faced with bike park obstacles. But it is in the mountains is where I feel most at home. And at peace. I felt the fear and did it anyway. Then sat watching proper riders boost off those tabletops while I drank beer in the sunshine.

Is that enough? Oh fuck yes. More than enough. Nothing else feels like this. When I’m properly old and broken I’ll remember days like this. But right now I feel like I’m the luckiest bloke on the planet.

* Feel free to translate to Klingon if that’s your thing.

** thankfully I was running UK brakes after refusing a bike configured the other way round. Glad I stuck out for that one otherwise I’d be writing this from hospital while drinking through a straw.

*** told me his name. Forgot it instantly. I do owe him a beer or two tho.

You know the story. Father bear’s bed was too hard, mother bear too soft and baby bear just right. It’s a bloody terrible fable for two reasons; 1- there’s no qualitative metrics for exactly what you mean by ‘soft‘* and 2-at some point in your near future some smartarse will rally this in their non sequitur rebuttal of your N+1 position.

Second one first ever heard this ‘why do you need so many bikes, that’s like saying you need five different cars?‘**. Because dick-spot, for us flirting with the line between a hobby and a mental illness, these are not simple transport, they are gateway drugs to a utopian portal your dusty, rusty Halfords special cannot access.

Sounds snobby? Rather a reversal of the societal norm where only impoverished individuals transport themselves by bicycle because car ownership is beyond their means. Cycling is losing, piloting two tons of marketing’s pinnacle is more than just a win. You even get to squash the losers.

Until about 1980 anyway. Then bikes became cool again. And profitable. And worth evolving. Into lots of different niches for which a different tool was very much required. Even if that tool was the man getting his wallet out. The crushing irony was twenty years later, the very same people performed a ‘did that just really fucking happen?‘ U-Turn spawning the ‘quiver killer‘***

You have to admire the chutzpah and while you’re at it marvel at the built in obsolescence demanding the ‘QK‘ must be changed every year. Hey it might look exactly the same, but now it’s a BETTER colour.

What the hell has this got to do with bears I hear you ask. Glad you did, it’s pretty simple really. Since April this year, I’ve been almost exclusively riding my on-trend, appropriately slack and low ‘gnarpoon‘**** and it’s been as fantastic as one would expect, after chucking a shit-load of cash at something hoping it’d make up for your many inadequacies.

Then, in what can only be described as a moment of temporary insanity, I invested in the world’s most expensive cardboard box cunningly disguised as a poo coloured hardtail. Rode that a couple of times and that was brilliant as well. So – to test all bears – earlier this week, the previous object of my metallic affection – the eager Pyga – was hauled off the wall and thrown at the trails.

You may be unsurprised to hear that was bloody great as well. Harvesting the raw data from my digital ego repository, it would seem the difference between these very different approaches to two wheels hung from a few tubes wasn’t quite as much as I expected. One trail, three times: 1:28, 1:31, 1:32.

I think we can probably identify the common denominator here. Sure the Aeris was brilliant in the Peaks last weekend in a way the Trek hardtail wouldn’t have been. And the Pyga yomped through the forest dispatching big distances under bigger wheels. Yet shifting turns in fast singletrack demonstrates how the simple kinematics of a sorted hardtail easily makes it the quickest.

The numbers tell you everything and nothing at all. Creeping into the shedofdreams, I’m nowhere near as confident as the golden one to pick the right bear. 90{45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2} of the time the differences are perceptible to me but imperceptible in terms of making progress.

I’d almost convinced myself the super slack Aeris wasn’t much good in the super-tight and switchback-y local woods above Ross. Until we skived off today and – at my request – massively backed off the pace so I could remember what entering a corner not hard on the brakes might feel like.

Then the bike felt fantastic. The big bear was doing just fine thanks very much. The little bear might have been faster, the middle bear generally has been but you cannot correlate speed with fun. I rode a gap jump much avoided because it wasn’t approached mostly out of control, cleared a table top with technique not desperate pedalling, dropped slowly into two steep gulleys safely because chasing those faster people wasn’t top of my agenda.

When you ride as much as I do, boredom is always a shadow threat. Even when the trails are dry, the sun is warm and you’re riding with your friends. Just this justifies having a shed-full of different bikes. They’re all brilliant. Riding mountain bikes is always brilliant. Having mates to share it with is – of course – endlessly brilliant.

You, however, will be resolutely average. It’s not about the bike and it’s absolutely about the bike. It certainly isn’t about the numbers. But if it was somehow my slow-is-the-new-slow was somehow two seconds quicker than every previous effort.

I didn’t care. Goldilocks had it wrong. Nothing is ever perfect. But – if you stop obsessing about what perfect might be – it can be very, very good indeed.

* I appreciate this may be a specific position, but when you’ve attempted to mediate between learned academics – on the point of punching each other – debating the precise semantic definition of ‘course‘, this stuff feels quite important.

** This is the straw man argument. I don’t have the space to explain my hatred of it here but once you recognise it, the ONLY proportional response is – for the sake of all those around you – to instantly kill the perpetrator with fire.

*** I assume a significant quantity of coke and hookers were involved: ‘hear me out Jeremy, we’ll tell ’em and sell ’em the idea that all their bikes are shit now and they can have this new one shiny thing. Make it red. They’ll go for it. They’re idiots’ Snort……

**** Once this post is complete. I’ll take myself outside to be shot for the use of that word. It’d be a kindness.

That phrase and this picture are only going to appeal to readers of a certain age. That age is mostly forgotten – sandwiched between basement sized, punched card munching transactional monoliths, and the birth of the Internet which swept in a digital generation to whom an App is a nicely rendered icon of usefulness accessed with a cursory swipe.

Kids today eh? Back in what was laughingly referred to as the ‘information age‘, the pioneers of micro-computing had broken out of crusty data processing rooms – largely filled with massive multi-million pound suites of humming electronics knocking out the power of todays $200 smartphone. We’d swapped lab coats for mullets, terrible jumpers and trainee moustaches. Nothing worked. Everything was custom built. Soldering irons were mandatory. The vanguard of personal computing in the late ’70s and early ’80s was not a place for the faint hearted.

Or the fashionable. Or the slick and smooth. Or anyone who might at some point consider members of the opposite sex more interesting than motherboards*. No staying abreast of emerging technology was of course more important that, well, breasts. There’s a whole other post on ‘what pubescent boys did for porn before the Internet‘, but for another day I think.

Ah we may have missed many things, but what a time to be a geek. Nose pressed to Tandy’s windows** excitingly pointing out the cutting edge of mobile computing. In a historic marketing event, Osborne honestlydescribedtheir suitcase sized solution to small data a luggable rather than a portable. And every month a new funny shaped keyboard appeared, running some operating system knocked up in a bedroom just like ours.

No big vendor owned the market. There wasn’t really a market to own. All sorts of weird stuff made it into production, and of course none of them would talk to each other. Turf wars were rife, were you a ‘BBC Man‘ or one of those ‘Plastic Spectrum kids’? Which led to some of the most pathetic fights ever ‘Ooooh that ruler REALLY HURT‘.

Anyway I digress. Up there in that tiny little screen,almost hidden behind a massive keyboard, was the seminal micro computing game. It represents many things; an amazing technical breakthrough creating endless worlds in bugger all memory; real graphics of the vector variety drawing you into that tiny VDU,and about a year of my life.

Elite was a truly amazing bit of software. Not that we called it that back in the day. It was a game you spent about 20 minutes loading off a disc drive with as much storage as a single contemporary message thread, and in no time at all you were deeply immersed in deep space trading your way across an infinite galaxy.

None of this linear gameplay which pretty much defined 99{45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2} of what passed as passing time with rubbish computers. Smuggling, bounty hunting, smart trading – all of these roles were yours to choose. And with it being an entirely internet free decade, the concept of on-line gaming was more having a few mates round taking turns on the keyboard.

It looks rubbish tho doesn’t it? Well it is 30 years old, and we should all reflect how much better we presented ourselves back then. Having encountered this National Computer Museum working exhibit at a dull trade show, I was desperately keen to reacquaint myself with my lost youth.

I didn’t tho. We all know what happens when you meet your heroes. After a year of frustration attempting to earn my ‘elite‘ rating, the early thrills of mere survival were long behind me, and my ship had more upgrades than the bikes now hanging in the shedofdreams. Eventually I drifted off to other pleasures which has never really included playing games of any vintage.

Apparently gaming now is an older persons pastime. Mid 30s is the sweet spot, or – as I think of it – still pretty much in short trousers. And while I’m happy to piss countless hours away on Internet forums. the prospect of a virtual shoot ’em up doesn’t hold much interest. Even the brand new – and apparently epic – version of Elite isn’t something I want to be involved in.

Heady days my early teenage years. Messing about with acoustic couplers and teletype terminals. Put me on a path I’ve never managed quite to fall off. It’s all a bit easy and yet somehow hellishly complicated now – ensuring myapproach of treating all technology as essentially elven magic serving me well.

Still wish I’d had a go tho. I’d have happily spent a few desperatehours to earnthatlow resolution message flashing on a rubbish screen praising my piracy prowess. “Right on Commander” indeed.

It was no Angry Birds. For which I’m rather sentimentally grateful 😉

* and it was all men. Well boys really. But no woman. Strange really considering that cohort of young gentlemen fiddling with their ram packs.

** not a euphemism. More an electronics emporium,

Rememberthose makeover programs? Rammed the TV schedules before Britain discovered baking. Lawrence pretentious-git-twat stencilling Tigers arses on lime green walls thendeclaring it ‘modern and zesty with an undercurrent of primal longing’ or some such shit? I do, and not much has changed in 20 years other than a ever lengtheninglist of in house projects which have gone horribly wrong.

Previously on the hedgehog, my inability to engage with how other believe Sundays should be wasted has been put down to guileful rubbish-ness and a somewhat more basic laziness. More recently, it’s become apparent my missing DIY gene is not a displacement tactic – no it’s just that I’m really shit at it.

Picture a Venn diagram with circles representing cack handed, clumsy, impatient and clueless, andfind me maroonedat the intersect point. Spitting out screws,whileabsent-mindedly emulsioning the dog.

Yet even knowing the result of even a smidgen of home improvement action will result in either calling out the fire brigade or the bomb squad, I’m always ready* to have another go.

We’re not talking artisan furniture creation here; beard stroking craftsmanship whittling this and shaping that before a wardrobe – imbued with such rustic authenticity it comes supplied with the original tree – emerges triumphant from a flurry of shavings.

What we have insteadis something a little simpler; one plank of pre-drilled wood to be attached to one flat wall. Supplied complete with screws, raw plugs and, because I was intricately involved, an idiot.

This woody ordering of chaotic coats required three drilled holes to receive what I believe is known as the ‘mounting equipment’**.Instantly I dispatched myself to the shedofdreams(tm) to dust off terrifying power tools, each accessorised with whirly-death-metal evisceratorsstraight out of the Mad Max props department.

Encouraged by having the tools for the job, I even broke out the spirit level to reinforce my tool handling proficiency.The first hole was a triumph, almost round and ready to receive a stiff rawplug to its diameter. A fine start barely diminished by it occupying a location some 50 millimetres from the optimal position.

Easy mistake to make. Drilled three more in quick succession, whichfrom a distance (say space) had horizontal alignment written all over them. Believingthe worst was over, I was stuffing rawplugs like a man desperate to discover if the giblets had been left in a dead chicken. The difference being what went in refused to come back out.

Professionalism now out of the window and accelerating fast from the scene of the crime, the prospect of understanding why this might be never got close to usurping some light hammer action attempting to rectify the problem.Leaving me with three rawplugs which still didn’t fit, but were now nicely splayed across some freshly cracked plaster.

Not being one to give up when the odds are against me, I scuttled back to the shed in search of a big sodding knife to hack them flat. This was – to my mind – the perfect solution until, some days later, the whole edifice crashed from the wall creating a localised coat tsunami.

Luckily, and before I accidentally hacked my own head off, Carol came to the rescue removing them using some kind of arcane magic. Smoking newts the lot. No way there was a simple solution that didn’t involve – for want of an example – manly warnings of ‘fire in the hole’

Determined to reassert my DIY authority, I cleverly repurposed the drill as a custom ‘hole enlarger’ which, while triggering a ‘Beavis and Butthead’ snigger, didn’t really solve the problem.

Well it did in that the plugs-of-bastard now fitted into the enlarged aperture for a given value of ‘fitting’. Fitted in, fell straight out. Like throwing sticks down the Mersey Tunnel (I might at some point get bored of crude sexual references but we’re 500+ words in, and it’s not looking likely)

Still pleased with my work, we offered up this ‘simple to fit coat-rack’ which went well tothe point wherethe last screw failed to engage with that tossing raw plug, and instead inserted itself insidiously into the rather wider hole I’d made to get the bloody thing to fit in the first place.

With a heartfelt ‘OH FUCK THIS’, I sulked off back to the shed and instead attempted to fix only mildly broken things on my bicycles. I think we can all guess how well that went.

The only conclusion that can be drawn from all this is some people are born with a generic ability to bevel, while the rest of us are left to frustrating muddle through in impotent useless-ness.

The solution is staring us in the trades directory; get a man in whose easy competence and balletic power tool operation leaves me both in awe and irritated.

I console myself with the thought that I’m quite good at doing the stuff that makes me money, even if nobody can actually identify what that might be***. I can even write stuff that desperate content seekers will pay real cash for.But put a screwdriver in my hand, and it’s just going to be disasters wrapped up in chaos until someone loses an eye.

So I’m giving up. Accepting I am just shit at this kind of stuff, and admittingit’s not going to get any better. Buying more tools or taking more time is merely throwing good cash and time at bad technique and stupidity. Even paintbrushes are probably an implement well beyond my meagre ability.

So I’m off the mow the lawn instead. Assuming I don’t set myself on fire starting the lawnmower. 50/50 chance I reckon.

* Assuming it’s raining, there nothing on the Internet, and I’ve failed to escape the questioning glare of the house’s only proper adult.

** had to check the instructions quite carefully at this point. Expected them to be rated 18. Some disappointment followed especially when reviewing the diagrams.

*** I’m not being enigmatic, I don’t know what it is either.

Tonight I’m back on the mat for the first time in a while. A long while in fact – while harvesting the original post for my single previous experience of what I’ve come to think of as low impact yoghurt, the date was back in 2007. I’m sure it was really about two Fridays ago, or maybe the week before that.

How can it be 2007? Anyway I expect I’ll be even more useless and quite a lot more sweaty. Attempting to stand up after the Monday spin class sometimes feels like I’m overachieving, so I expect to find myself slumped in the corner of the Gym with various joints popping and clicking after about five minutes.

Which is about all you need to read that article from 2007.

”

Anyone for Yoda?

In preparation for a date with a destiny, that I would happily have run over broken glass to break, my early evening reading was the refreshingly kaftan Mung Bean Times incorporating ˜What Lentil’. Yes, dear readers, I’m going to admit on an open blog “ or Chronicle of Angst as I’m increasingly thinking of it as “ that a relatively healthy and not totally mental bloke went to Yoga.

The vision that’s impossible to shake is made up of a room full of Cassandras’ and Skys’ clothed in tie-die shirts and leg warmers, chanting runic base lines and inserting purple painted toes into jewellery infested ears. Add a dash of dreary music easily categorised into relaxing tunes to slash your wrists by and some way out hippy imploring us to locate our inner child, and the whole foot laceration begins to look like the less painful option.

Obviously there were no blokes except me and a few of the women were certainly of the original bra burning generation. But not all of them “ one of which was my wife as I cravenly refused to go on my own. In case someone gave me a jostick and insisted on adorning my person with occult jewellery. And as for the instructor “ well let me tell about Darcie, who is supple enough to throw a leg carelessly into the next room while elegantly rotating on a single finger. And “ apparently I didn’t really notice as Carol was yoga-matted right next to me “ she was pretty damn hot too. Fellas, consider this “ extremely athletic, the perfect figure and probably susceptible to the odd recreational pharmaceutical. Quite a combination I should think, if I were thinking about it. Which I’m not but the rest of you, go fill your boots. Or something.

Anyway it was bloody hard “ stop sniggering at the back “ and while ladies who lunch stretched languid muscles with irritating ease, I was all trembling veins and slouchy posture. Twenty years of cycling has reduced my hamstrings to a length better suited to a 10 year old child. Whereas my flexibility would be better matched to an 80 year old man with arthritis. Or possibly rigour mortis.

Blokes generally like lifting big weights or sweating in a manly manner while sucking in their gut and thrusting everything pelvic in the opposite direction. But this isn’t like that at all, it’s all the pain you can handle by pitting opposing muscles in an uber bitch fight and there really aren’t any winners. Except “ and it’s not without some grudging am I writing this “ an hour later, all sorts of previously unseen rotational vistas had opened up.

Thankfully for all my stereotyping, mung bean made a late entry into proceeding when we all had a much needed lie down with the lights off. Someone even brought a blanket. I was doing my best to relax but¦ (edited for reasons of not wishing to die horribly by cheese grater) instead found myself thinking that this wasn’t quite as silly as originally envisaged.

As the great man/dwarf/Jedi may once have said Practise the art of Yoga or touch your toes you will not. I had a far better line for the old loppy eared one but the thought of the cheese grater made me reconsider.

“

There’s much to be said for order in a world of chaos, even ifyour efforts are limited to ‘one photo archive to rule them all‘. Technologically fairly straightforward, logistically rather more challenging with source material flung far and wide across hard drives, USB sticks, whining NAS’s and some proper old school CDs.

Yet when centred in this informational media tornado, a chronological romp of the past fifteen years isperfectly sequencedacrossa flickering screen. It was both uplifting and depressing. Images of a previously unknown member of the Leigh tribe flashed by – a younger, fitter and significantly less lined version of myself hamming it it up in all sorts of exotic locations. Always accompaniedwith bikes, itshouldbe recorded.

On rediscovering Mountain Bikes at about 32, there was a slightly tragi-certainty that my best years were already behind me. What the fuck was I thinking? Jeez, there’s almost nothing I wouldn’t trade for a waybackmachine(tm), transporting me back to those innocent images where every location was jaw dropping, eachtrail was more perfect than the last, andany self-doubt mixed withpointless introspection wasburied under a thousand giggles.

Morzine 2003. First proper trip to the mountains recalibrating your view of – well – pretty much your entire mountain biking world. Because absolutely everything is amped to the mighty -the climbs, the descents, the fear, the crashes and the beer. Oh. So. Much. Beer. Most of my body is a bit ruined, but my liver must be something really special to have survived such persistent abuse.

Spain twice – once with a guide/arsehole who nearly ruined it with his needy urge to drag us above the snow line, and once with a far nicer fellow showing us what endlessly dusty feels like. Africa with a mostly broken shoulder, but fondly remembered for getting shitfaced/stoned with the Berbers in the High Atlas, and weaving bikes through the Souks in Marrakech.

A visit to the Mecca of Utah back in 2005. The rite of passage for anyone wishing to label themselves a mountain biker. Riding the insanity of Slickrock with limitlesstraction and endless skies, swishing through perfect Fruitia singetrack and bricking it on Jack’s ridge. Shuttling to nearly 10,000 feet, beforedropping most of that on a trail exactly 12 inches from a fatal drop tothe canyon floor.*

Scotland, Wales, the Lakes, back to the French Alps like moths to a flame. Or maybe a flash. Flash, flash, flash, the images keep coming – the bikes change, the riders a little more careworn, but the composition holds.Bloke holding a bike a bit self consciously, backdropped by the mountains of differing hues. Some snow capped, some tree-lined, some blasted to baserock by unimaginable winds, but always mountains, always smiling.

Digital photography has much to answer for. The selfie for a start. And pictures of some uninteresting foods you’re about to eat. And twerking. Whatever that is. Being of medium antiquity, this sort of new media fad passes me by. The day I feel the urge to ‘snapchat‘ will cross the event horizon where dignity once represented reality.

But for all of that, it’s a bloody brilliant way to reboot yourself. No casting about in a spider-webbed loft, searching out fading photo albums. No, these images bobbing around in an endless digital sea will invoke – in at least equal amounts -strong feelings of lament and loss, but also desperate urges to fly again.

I watched my youthful face flash by backlit withphyscially imposing geography , pushed into the background by a focussed epicentre of great friends absolutely living in the moment. On studyingthose faces, there’s not a single one who would rather be anywhere else. Almost every image was watermarked with’we are the luckiest people in the world‘.

In 68 days, another road trip is kicked off with nearly a thousand mile pilgrimage to warmer climbs much further south. And the excitement isjust the sameas it was all those years ago. I worry about the same stuff; will I be fit enough/brave enough/skilled enough to be anything other than the much-waited-for back marker, and I anticipate the same things as well; being in high places with my best friends, pushing the bike faster than I dare and getting away with it, arcing through dusty singletrack with the trail-pixies firing up the adrenaline compressors,then watching the sun cast long shadows on brutal mountains with a cold beer in my hand.

One day this will stop. One day it will be too hard, or I’ll be too broken or too frightened or to busy with something else. It won’t be one single day, more death by a thousand cuts. At which point those flashes of a previous life will feel as if they’ve happened to something else. It will no longer be my world.

I cannot imagine that. Try very hard not too. Right now all I’m thinking about is a monster ride tomorrow in a snowy mid-Wales, and 68 more days to endure before my best friends – slightly older, a bit more rugged, maybe a bit more introspective and pretending this isn’t the start of the end – and I load fantastic bikes into the van togo and be something that you are not.

There is nothing, absolutely nothing, whichcan beat that. I’ll look at the images of what’s been for no other reason than there is more of the same to come. And grin because I have been so bloody lucky to be part of them.

We’re not done yet. The archive remains open.

* known – according to our guides – as the ‘3 second tour‘. That’s thelength of your scream before splatting into the desert.