I’m forever advocating a long campaigned truth, to the mostly disinterested offspring*, that experiences trump things.  Materialism I grandly declare is nothing more than status anxiety drowning in marketing poison. They point mutely to the ShedOfDreams(tm), and the contents within, as a take-it-to-the-bank example of saying one thing and doing something else entirely.

Yes, but that’s different. Of course it is. Bikes are not things. They are so much more than that**. Things are merely noun placeholders for stuff not important enough to have a proper name, whereas MTBs ride over that semantic boundary into something far more mystical

Yeah, whatever Al, Same shit different day. Heard it all before. Excuses repurposed as rationale. Deflection tactics loftily abstracted from the rather more dirty reality that shiny things bite hard. The money invested*** in that bike should be sat in our savings account. For things both known and unknown. Because that’s what sensible people do – and that person in our family is Carol.

She’s suffered my twisted logic for more than twenty years. She’ll listen politely when I talk of bank accounts offering more than fiscal security. Memories and adventures I flappy-hand in a parody of a real justification. My supposition that I’m saving those instead is met with an expression I’ve come to associate with “Whatever. We can pay the bills, no one is going to have to eat the wrapping of your latest nonsense. Get on with it”

I got on with it. In a roundabout way mostly not going through corners with any kind of velocity on a bike I was pre-disposed to love. Didn’t happen. Instead, in what can only be considered a last-hurrah to any kind of fading talent, I bought a bike proudly associated with the Enduro zeitgeist. 160mm forks matched with 145mm out the back, the combination of which was mostly Internet captured by blokes lobbing it off stuff that make me go a bit squishy inside.

Still it has a sibling in the ShedOfDreams(tm) which is officially ‘the best bike I’ve ever owned’ which considering my extensive pantheon of the next big thing is quite an accolade. It’s so achingly on trend I may need to order some beard oil and a wood-burning stove. Still all the standards and all the latest angles have created something that – let’s be honest here – isn’t much of a looker. Like the worlds most expensive carbon gatepost.

Matt built it of course. I turned up with a box full of parts, a crate of beer and a curated collection of mildly amusing asides. Before it was properly finished I ragged it round the local car park giggling in a way that’s a venn intersection of hope and desire, before handing it over to Matt. Who turned up 10 minutes later extolling its virtues at handling multiple step sets. I’m never lending him anything again!

I rode the same steps this morning. In the rain. But rain doesn’t adequately describe the apocalyptic thunder and lightening rolling through the county. At times it was merely extremely moist, the rest of the time I wondered idly if anyone had ever drowned on a bicycle.

No matter, the trails held up pretty well other than the sniper roots – polished, slick and waiting. I’m not a fan of conditions like this. It feeds my inner screamer. ‘Arrrrghhhh going to slide, Eeeeeeek going to crash going to hit that tree’. but today I was located in Nirvana, Newbikesville and all was good.

More than good. First descent after a climb, under stair-rods of warm rain, I exited a jump with unusual calm and pushed my apparently perfect new bike into the first corner. Where it slid sideways on raked out roots aiming off to a trunk in a ‘do not collect £200, go straight to A&E’ kind of way.

Here’s what normally happens next. I grab a shitload of front brake, stand the bike up, plough into said trunk or its leafy environs and exit out the front or back with all the grace of a Wild West extra shot from his horse. Today tho I distinctly remember thinking ‘that slide’s absolutely fine, we’ll go with that’.

I never say that. It was as if I’d been adopted by a better rider. Who – while I was still agog with not actually crashing – flicked the bike back into line and suggested a little more velocity might be quite entertaining. Whoever he is, he’s onto something as we mined the adrenaline twinned motherlode of ‘amazing grip’ and ‘no grip whatsoever’.

My new mate riding shotgun made himself comfortable for the long haul as we laughed in the face of off-camber roots, waved V signs at flat corners holding a scum of muddy water, and barely recognised the potential full sub-soil body implant of a notorious gap jump.

This is not me. I am not at home to Mr Insouciant. I do not do under-thinking. Post injury, it’s been harder to ignore the whispering that I’m just getting too damn old and risk averse to honour my mountain bike credentials.

Not today. Not even close. We toasted our escape from the ‘River Rapids of Ross’ with a beer and some post-storm steaming of discarded waterproofs. I’ve been buzzing ever since. It might be new-bike-thing, it might be that this one is going to take me closer to the edge. A place I thought largely abandoned to my younger self. It’s going to be epic finding out which.

It might rain again tomorrow. I give not one shit. I’m riding my bike.

*they are now at an age too old to be thought of as ‘children‘, but too young to be considered ‘carers’ 🙂

**a topic already under development in a semi-lucid state for the next issue of the never less than brilliant www.cranked.cc

*** It has payback. I can’t measure it. But it’s there. If it isn’t you’re doing it wrong.

They certainly do*. Remember last year when Adam and I spent three days narrowly avoiding drowning ? I do despite the best efforts of an expensive therapist. Ads and I postulated how amazing this route might be were it not under the cudgel of a bastard storm. We’d be back we said.

And so we were. I’ve always protested my best side is behind the lens, but I’m vain enough to post that first shot through the reduced letterbox of my readership. Game face on, someone actually behind me, not looking like a total gimp and hands off the brakes.

Vanity is one thing. Reality something a little different. These next two images ably demonstrate why anyone who hobbies in the outdoors remains obsessed by forecasts of bright sunshine or biblical rain. Kipling may have treated triumph and disaster with parity, but I’m not that stoic.

So while I’m smiling under warn blue skies here, the one following is pretty much x-rated. Fuck was as polite as it got.

Same bike. Same trail. Close to the same composition banged out by the lovely Phill from www.mbwales.com but with differentiation spilling into every other aspect of the weekend.

Blinking into the sunlight we’d looped around a dry Nant-Y-Arian the day before which didn’t suck at all. A day of firsts; first time blue skies lit short spring shadows, first time in single layers, first time wondering if we’d packed enough water, first time finishing with bikes the same colour they’d started.

We could get used to this. Of course we couldn’t because once the weekend was done, Spring fucked off back to winter and drenched an already wetted-out landscape with 100{45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2} more rain than the year before. Not that I’m bitter or anything.

For these three days tho, living in the moment was rewarded by another stunning day in an amazing location. The Elan Valley may not count proper mountains amongst its summits, but it’s still a tough day out winching for an hour before a switch to plummeting for less than two hundred seconds. Mostly on gradients suggesting 50kph was an appropriate velocity to test the grip of damp grass or moist rock.

We rode quite a few bits of the second Trans-Cambrian day. I hardly mentioned how much drier/warmer/less desperate conditions were-  to the point where I feel I may have lost my audience. No matter, this was the ride I was expecting last year even with its sapping grassy climbs and occasional boggy interludes.

It’s a land of big skies. What it lacks in woody singletrack, it more than makes up with butt-clenching speeds and ancient bedrock somehow perfectly shaped for modern mountain bikes. It was the kind of day you slog through winter for, painfully rehabilitate your ankle for, desperately regain your fitness for and toast with a beer or several for.

The next day it rained of course. But not for long and it barely took the edge off another fantastic day crawling up steep hillsides and racing down the other side. And this time I’m riding these trails with my friends, not strangers who were owners of a mountain bike without really being mountain bikers.

That doesn’t for a second make them bad people. They just aren’t my people. But right now I needed to be with my long suffering mates. I’d surfed into this weekend on a wave of angst. Work mainly but not exclusively, I was having one of those tedious middle aged crisis. Couldn’t shift the weight I’d added when injured, started to see real signs of ageing, spent too many introspective nights in hotel bars with no good company.

It’s all horseshit of course. It didn’t take me long under burning skies to remember why. Because for every shit day, every difficult decision, every inconsequential worry, there are mountain bikes, big hills, good friends and the joy of choosing black or wide over fading to grey..

So pretty much that. Captured on a long lens from Tim’s camera. Adequately distanced and relatively relaxed, Cez and I are looking outwards not inwards. Being outside does that. I cannot recommend it enough.

It comes down to something like this. Adventures are not pre-determined. The variables are legion and the biggest of those is you. Outcomes cannot be plotted nor results predicted. Instead you take in an attitude, an optimism and bit of bloody-mindedness to come out the far side a better person.

It might feel hard at the time and while you may get close to hating individual moments, you’ll never regret choosing to do over deciding to do not. Last September had many highs and a hell of a lot of lows, but fuck not for a second would I wind back time and sack it off.

Last weekend I rode my bike enclosed by perfect valleys, accompanied by my best friends, under sunny skies on amazing trails. Splashing through steams like this made me feel about 11 years old.  You cannot buy that feeling.

The past is a different place for sure. It makes too many people scared of what might come next. Not us though, because soon there will be another day like this. Bring it on.

*For the purposes of narrative cohesion I’ve butchered that famous L.P Hartley quote. I read his “Go-Between” during a terribly pretentious phase of my life. I came to the conclusion even then that that quote was the best thing in it.

There is much in this world to be irritated about. Especially if one is keen to establish a firm position on how you are right and why everyone else is wrong. The revisionist wisdom of age would suggest it’s more about finding an interesting place to stand. In this case at the foot of a dubiously vertical roll in ending in that picture of Spring goodness.

The lore of trail building states that he or she who builds it gets to immortalise it with some kind of naming ceremony. Which rarely survives narrative causality hence this homage to muddy injury being labelled with the self-explanatory moniker of “Head Dab”

A name which popped into my mildly concussed skull after I™d crashed five times within the first 300 yards. Twice on the same corner. So as I lay upside-down in the slime, inconvenienced by bicycle, my thoughts turned to the rather more pertinent question “why the fuck haven’t I moved to Spain?‘

There are reasons. As there must be for why six weeks into meteorological spring, we’re still in the bastard embrace of the Disney classic ‘Frozen’, only with less singing and more swearing. I can only surmise my penance for swerving eight weeks riding with a manky ankle is to re-live January and February in March and April.

Except it’s somehow bloody worse. After making plausible excuses for missing the weekly night ride*, guilt had me spinning furious circles the following day. Mostly in an attempt to ignite some kind of warmth under more layers normally required when the suns power mirrors that of late August.

Sun? Clouds’ thief has stolen that for the last few weeks. Warmth has been replaced with single digit temperatures, trails with a filthy mess of tidal slop and motivation with the grim realisation that 2kg of winter sloth isn’t being shifted by  beer and biscuits.

I’ve no one to share my misery with. Not that conversation was much an option- with ragged breaths oxygenating moist air in a futile attempt to counter the organic plastercine between the wheels. Occasionally I gasped quiet entreaties to fate idly questioning if this may be some kind of test and, further, when the fuck might it be ending?

No time soon based on the first fireroad climb slick with the detritus of recent forestry. I missed that fireroad though as the first proper off road climb spontaneously struck up an ensemble performance of slick roots and deep mud with scenery provided by a landscape mostly dead or stutteringly dormant.

Finally after 30 minutes of pointless chuntering** a descent happened. Quite slowly to be honest. First time on the hardtail for three months and not wishing to be found half eaten by walkers some days hence, my progress was somewhere between stately and worried.

In between those states, grip wasn’t entirely absent. I was too busy whinging to make any real attempt to find it. That whinge flipped between internal and external after sawing my way desperately up the next climb to find my reward somewhat not as advertised.

A year ago it looked like this.

Yesterday, this was the rather more disappointing vista.

This kind of thing went on for a while. Let me spare you that and move straight to the highlights. Oh sorry there weren’t any. Here’s an example of a non-highlight – the three and a half minute climb to access a few of the best trails took over twice that. Because that’s how long walking though churned up mud with the frictional properties of soapy glass will take.

It wasn’t all bad. Say when considered to the shed-bike of perpetual misery -which mocks my trifling efforts whenever I decide outside is just a bit too bloody depressing. Plus the bike was way easier to clean than my full suss.

And at one point when sliding properly sideways, I was silently proud of taking charge, shoving it back into line and only kissing a tree which had previously been nominated as ‘bark most likely to have an Alex Tattoo coming soon‘

What pissed me off most tho wasn’t the earth-clamping cold or the leaden skies long distanced the promised sun, nor the deep puddles freezing my feet. It was the hidden underbrush which savaged my ankle. Yeah somewhere in this apparently dead foliage was a bastard bramble pretending spring had in fact arrived.

That was a tough cut to take. As I grumpily shoved the now brown bike into the car, it started to rain a little harder. So what I thought, it’s not like anything can get any wetter. Including me.

I love riding in Spring; hero-dirt, burgeoning vegetation, myriad colours, lusty smells and fast trails. Right now in mid April that’s a verified score of zero from five.

What can you do? You can go and ride that’s what. Last week we slogged 60km through this cipher of spring. Sunday next we’ll be doing the same. A month ago I couldn’t ride at all. This is way better. Just got to keep telling myself that.

*Mud I can do. Rain I can do. Cold I can do. Night I can do. Just not all at the same time.

**if I every form a band, we’re going with that name,

In the last issue of www.cranked.cc I lamented the temporary loss of cycling to injury. The displacement of a weekly ritual with nothing to fill the gap. Conflating that with a world where riding mountain bikes is a thing you talk about not the thing you do. Missed the fucking point as usual.

The point being it’s not the virtual road to nowhere that’s the issue here. The gap isn’t between self-pity and an uncertain future. It’s how far you’ve slid down the mountain from the summit of reasonable fitness.

No amount of time on a turbo trainer is going to mitigate that. Well it might for someone without a diary launching that individual to all four corners of the UK- elbows deep in whatever they’re serving with beer in another anonymous hotel.

So that’s me then,  but the first ride back was gloriously muddy and endlessly fantastic. Tiring but life affirming. The second went a little further in conditions somehow even worse leaving me struggling on the last couple of climbs. A week later we rode out and that 60km broke me in ways I don’t remember.

Then came the snow and other excuses to put the fitness recovery on hold until a trip last weekend to Coed-Y-Brenin. The first – and I’m putting it out there – the best of the UK trail centres. We left behind the slop and misery of the forest to ride grippy trails at silly speeds.

Up to around two thirds of the way round anyway. When even the drug of rocky singletrack triggering the release of endorphins couldn’t hide tired muscles and gasping lungs trying to keep up.

Up being most of the problem. Sure many other body parts had the complaints line on speed-dial, but the legs and lungs which normally hoist me up any grade at a respectably brisk pace flipped into a state of extreme sulkiness, leaving me with nothing other than a ‘limp home’ mode.

Most of my riding mates reckon I’m reasonably fit. I’m a bit humble bragging about it, but secretly it’s a matter of some pride. Sure others may be faster when the gradient turns negative, but give me this climb at least. I never really considered it any kind of skill until I lost it.

Desperate times dear reader. Clearly I’m not going to get any faster downhill,  but  riding uphill isn’t really that hard. Hard-earned maybe but nothing that a serial hit on the lumpy geography of home trails won’t provide. Trails which will soon deliver on Springs’ bounty – loamy, fast and occasionally dusty.

Trails which trace perfect turns through a field of bluebells. Beckoning you on for one more climb to lay down another layer of singletrack memory. Digital happy place for the taking. Not a place for the infirm or unfit. Right here and now tho, they’re shit. Tractionless tyre-filling monsters ready to violently transport the uncommitted from a stable position atop the bike to a somewhat less comfortable countenance slammed into the ground. Or a tree.

Which is where I found myself twenty minutes into my first night ride for five months. Shunned the wheeled dark back in October for solid excuses based around training for a half marathon. That silliness is how we ended up here in a mildly ironic circular route.

Conditions – in my view – were horrible. Not properly muddy where a good tyre might bite, but nowhere near dry. The median between those two states is ’slick’. This first trail had been built during my enforced absence and it was a mystery of  tight steep switchbacks bisecting the fall line.

Made the first two, crashed on the next three. Walked for a bit having trapped my still poorly ankle between pedal and stump.  Well limped really. Found everyone else mostly dab free and remarking on how well the trails were holding up after all this rain.  I hope the dark hid my disappointment on why I was the only one not finding it easy.

And aside from one climb when gritted teeth and bloody-mindedness put me close to the front, most were viewed from the opposite end of the group.  Some of my best friends had clearly received both fitness cheats and bike handling skills for Christmas. The bastards.

It got better. It had too really. Long learned skills gently edged out full braked terror. It wasn’t fast but it stopped being quite so crash-y. I was counting the climbs in a way I never used to, until we crested the final lump leaving us high above Ross and a couple of trails from beer.

One of which has a decent sized gap jump on it. Ridden it many times. Didn’t ride it last time out, before I monged myself, when it was slick like tonight. Not making that a habit. My plan to follow everyone off it didn’t survive first impact with reality as they rode away from me as had been the form the entire evening.

Right then. Stop. Have a little word with yourself. Internal debate on not being bloody lame. External validation with a single ‘fuck it’. Three seconds later it’s over and it was the anti-climax I’d promised myself it would be. Still felt bloody good to get it done tho.

The pub, the craic, the being something others my age are not – that all stands and I’ve missed it. Being crap in the dark and the mud I’ve pretty much accepted. Being shit uphill I will not. I need to be as good or better than I was before.

The ride back to that is going to be long, and occasionally painful. So same time next week then?

 

 

300 yards east of that image location is the main road. Which must mean this is our lane, which rises gently from the house on the standard Herefordshire gauge predicated by the pervasive road-narrowing scheme.

It might as well be on the moon. Similar ambitious forays into orbital mechanics would be required to transport any vehicle from here to there**. Switch the view 180 degrees and it’s hardly any kind of improvement.

Our house nestles in a shallow bowl at river altitude with three exits to – however close Ross approximates to – civilisation. The one right there, a farm track masquerading as an official thoroughfare climbing fifty metres in less than a mile, or a final conduit to something deserving of road marking which is even steeper.

After 36 hours of snow driven on by relentless winds, we emerged to beautiful cornices sculptured by nature and an acceptance that snow ploughs happen only to tax payers not marooned in a tiny hamlet.

This is why I bought a 4×4 when we moved here. It’s still not entirely clear to me why I sold it. A replacement of sorts lies behind the door to the shedofdreams(tm), itself garrisoned by drifting snow requiring much grumpy shovelling to breach.

Provision wise things were looking promising; human fuel, heating fuel, backup heating fuel in the form of seasoned logs, and a fridge full of beer for emergencies and breakfast.

Physically tho we were pretty much stuck. Working internet though reached out beyond these four walls and told of the standard hyperbole and stupidity triggered by the first #snowmageddon hashtag.

You know the sort of thing, revving cars going first backwards, then sideways then into some innocent parked car. Ecstatic sledge based kids being hauled up wintry slopes by “snow-day” parents . Cats being repurposed for the new winter sport of Feline Curling, and sad snowmen being the recipient of the carrot the salad bowl forgot.

Important stuff no doubt. But locally a far more serous problem presented itself. We’d run out of wine. Let me qualify that, I’d run out of wine – Carol barely drinks anything, on the grounds I’ve already exhausted most of her allowance, but occasionally fortifies herself with a 70s parody snowball. She has sufficient ingredients to last sometime into the next millennium, whereas I was bereft through what must be called out as piss poor planning.

Bike it is then. Sold the fatbike. See previous remark re: 4×4. Still we’re nothing if not chubby in 2018, so Jessies’*** bike was pulled from the rack along with clothing previously campaigned on freezing winter commutes.

Things started well. Fab to be out on a bike. Passing tractors created grippy wheel ruts, so we headed up the steepest hill on the simple grounds it wasn’t the main road. Yeah that was apparently clear, but where’s the fun in that?

Fun soon turned to slog as the snow deepened to the point where even farm machinery cannot go. Brilliant I thought, just me and the snow, no one else has been up here, how cool is that?

Pretty bloody cool when you’re up to your armpits in it with the bike over your head.

A selfie in those circumstances would likely have left me incapacitated in a location where the aforementioned moonshot represents the most practical rescue mission, so you’l have to take my word for it.

Along with the masterclass of grip management heading down the other side. Past the Cider mill when even I can gird a road bikes’ loins beyond 55kph. The steepness combined with freeze/thaw tractor ruts had the tyres keen to investigate the left and right margins of the road. Mostly at the same time.

It was mostly slips and giggles narrowly avoiding taking out upstanding members of the local community armed with snow shovels, and increasingly, terrified expressions as a tail sliding bandana wielding idiot sashayed by with a cheery “I’d stop and say hello if I could but.. oooooh fuck hedge, arrrrggghhh, saved it”

Doing my bit for neighbourly relations, I sympathised with those who’d trudged across the arctic wastes in search of a loaf of bead. Their search was to prove fruitless, whereas  my transactions in the village shop were more of the clink-y and chocolate-y sort.

Appropriately provisioned, I considered my navigational options. Back over the hill with evens odds of smashing bottles during intersects of steep and icy, or a 2 mile yomp on the main road with only a 25{45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2} chance of being wiped out by Mr I’ve got a 4×4 so 90 MPH is absolutely fine.

I chose wisely. Whummed down the main road on 12 PSI tyres and a bag full of moist grapes. Arrived home to find the local farmer had lobbed about 10 tons of deep lying snow into a field he didn’t own. Well that’s the pub conversation sorted for the next six months anyway.

Whereas tomorrow I’ll be aping the big mechanical scoop with some one person-power shovelling. Much as I loved riding my bike today, Swindon is probably a bit too much of an ask on Monday morning 😉

*I spent bloody ages thinking that up. If you’re not a student of the Fast and Furious franchise, that’s hardly my fault is it? I might start these blogs with a list of pre-reading 😉

**especially if you™re the embarrassed owner of a real wheel drive car shod with ditch-finder tyres and an automatic gearbox.

***She™s ridden it twice. It™s definitely hers. I™ve merely tested it for safety on the other 24 rides.

Well I didn’t die. In other news my ankle failed to explode nor swell to the size of the ‘Tomato most likely to win an award for the most amusingly shaped vegetable‘.  Bikes were ridden, beer was drunk, lies were told. The latter specifically when being quizzed on my homage to a man recently introduced to a second leg.

Happily telling fibs to my family is ideal preparation for fabricating huge whoppers to the physio, who understandably takes a dim view to a refusal to subordinate my need to ride against 200 years of medical precedence. Which explains why my opening gambit of  ‘that’s why it called practising medicine eh?‘ is met with stony silence and a weary shake of the head.

I don’t know better of course. What I do know is how much riding defines me, and how looking into the abyss of ever stopping makes me more than scared. I’m also well attuned to what a healing body feels like – having smashed it up so many times. Good enough is good enough and slinging Camelbaks over shoulders, while we’re loading the van, is nothing more than normalised behaviour.

Riding though is something different. Lock four mountain bikers in a pub and refuse to release them until they’ve created a single definition of mud and you’ll be waiting a while*. What we do agree on tho is the epitome of mud bastardness is ‘soft over hard‘. A slurry of matt black sliding viscously over firmer sub soil in some kind of Fibonacci sequence.

Throw a tyre at that and you’re spinning the wheel of possible outcomes. Might got left, could go right, definitely won’t be going forward, fair to even chance of having a lie down to consider your options.

Generally these conditions do not suit my riding style. Who am I kidding? These conditions leave me way adrift of the pack wondering when Spring might turn up. Not last week and not yesterday either. It’s the hope that kills you. Not much rain this week, there are buds in the trees and dry patches on the ground.  Today should be so much better.

It was quite a lot worse. I’m still okay with that against a baseline of not riding at all but after 36km I was mostly ruined. My ankle was what I’m thinking now as standard. It hurts a bit but not much more than normal. The rest of me was properly broken; lower back, neck, arms and legs too long distanced from hours of hard physical exercise.

We’d run out of food but being stubborn to the power of stupid carried on regardless, climbing on slick paths then attempting to navigate leafless trees where amazing tyres met their seasonal match. Second time out though my worry about smashing my ankle up faded a little into the background meaning progress was upgraded from glacial to stately.

The singletrack was mostly shit but the experience was fantastic. The sun shone, the bullshit flowed, the temperature kept the shivers away. There were no crashes but there was beer to toast our uninjuredness. And at the end of it all, I chucked a dirty bike in the shed and risked ruining the washing machine with muddy kit.

That’s a ritual that gets boring in winter but yesterday it just made me smile. A detoxification process if you like; an anti-arsehole activity, a mud flung sense of perspective that there was this,  and there was all the other stuff I needed to show I cared about. Rather than assuming just being there was quite the same thing.

Knowing you’re going to miss riding is less introspection and more basic self-awareness. Working out how it’s the metronome of a larger life is probably more important. Without one, I’m not very good at the other. It’s at least half the reason I’m sat in yet another hotel room drinking water not beer.

Spring is coming. My favourite season. One of rebirth. Never gets old however many times I marvel at nature regenerating in all sorts of amazing ways. Since I’m hardly a spring perennial, it’s time to prepare myself for another season of riding mountain bikes.

There’s stuff I can do nothing about. Entropy is a relentless bastard. What’s in my control right now is making sure I’m as ready as I can be. For eight weeks that choice was taken away from me.

It’s done me some good. Forced me to stop and heal. Given me time to think. To work out if this is still my thing. To decide how much I’m prepared to suffer to be as good as I can be. Thinking time is over though.

It’s time to ride. Three sweet words.

*two reasons. 1-they’ll never agree and the best you can hope for is about eight separate versions of the same thing and 2-it’s a pub. That’s pretty much our spiritual home.

 

There’s a certain cadence spinning the truth at this time of year. The pretence that being outside is something to be cherished. The belief that schlepping through endless mud shall somehow defibrillate the flatline of Spring.  The conceit that riding through the endless shit of winter somehow elevates you over those stuck to the sofa through apathy to the power of Pringles.

That’s my world from 2002 through 2017. Every year upped the bar of commitment as proper cold winters gave way to an indeterminable period of grey dankness shrouded in rain.  Avoiding the damp squelch of soft limb on rain battered tree was nothing more than a happy non-accident.

Then after a couple of hours of something that feels like therapy shared with like minded souls, tedium demands another thirty minutes of harvesting the bike from its mud mould. And that’s before being washing machine denied prior to an apparently infinite manual rinse cycle of clothes made three times heavier by their carriage of forestry operations.

Well I’m missing it. It’s been a month since I last rode* a mountain bike and it’s at least another of the same before mental requirement meets physical reality.  There’s a certain irony that this excuse to wimp out is the best I’ve ever had,  when all I want to do is go out and get properly filthy.

I’m not eulogising  it; clearly it’s going to be bloody horrible out there, with a negligible amount of fun wrapped around a few hours of misery. After which there will be the pub. Before which there will be a shared experience, a recognition of group stupidity, a laugh at what other people might be doing with their Sunday.

This is what I’m doing. I’m sat in front of this screen facing off to my other life. The one which pays the bills but isn’t exactly inspiring. Don’t get me wrong, having absorbed an internet thread on the horrors of shift working when you’re middle aged, it’s clear I’m still living it easy here. So there’s stuff to do and I will do it while rain batters the window, knowing the only outlet is an hour on a static bike in the shed-of-misery.

That and giving my ankle the Paddington stare while wondering at high volume ‘when are you going to get better you bastard, it’s not like you’ve suffered any abuse. Well not until I ruined you, but it’s time to move on‘. It’s not moved on much still requiring Nurafen balms and the ministrations of my long suffering physio who tells me a) it’ll get better in a few more weeks and b) you’re not 18 and in Kansas anymore.

So this is what I’m left with. Sweating in a cold shed and walking the dogs. The stupid young one** acting as a depth indicator in a lake that was once fields. That time being yesterday before the rain decided 24 hours was an entirely appropriate duration to flood the local geography.

At some point I’ll be able to ride a mountain bike again. Whatever the prevailing weather and trail conditions, at least one of my extensive shed based collection shall intersect with the grim outside my door. Until then I’m left with the buggeration of the observer, the chagrin of the not included, the desperation of the hanger on.

Here’s the thing-  when you wonder if it’s worth going out in the grim. If you’ll get anything other than a winters crack, back and rucksack of moist mud, if the ball-ache of dealing with the aftermath of winter is worth it, remember this:

You have a choice, Trust me, that’s a good thing. I’m beyond envious.

*more carried across the Brecon Beacons. I’d pay lots of cash right now to do that again.

**the old one is just as stupid. He just doesn’t like getting his feet wet.