There’s no FinSnow. This was recounted to me by a pal who is flying to the Italian Alps atChristmas for a weeks skiing*. I’m sharing some of her pain, with my inner eleven year old pining for a dump of the white stuff somewhere more local.

Two reasons; firstly the stupidbike(tm) is clearly going to be an impossible to calculate brilliant once frozen rain covers the ground, and secondly asanother month of slogging through Gloucestershire’s finest Flanders Experience is likely to leave me seriously considering indoor hobbies.

Snow isn’t the seasonal norm it was in my youth. Sure that was back in the Cambrian age, but Boxing Day walks often morphed into desperate shovelling rescues of smaller children lost in four foot snowdrifts.

Back in the here and now I saw a man – not obviously searching for all his marbles – cheerfully shopping for seasonal gifts in an ensemble of shorts and a t-shirt. It was time to pushthese childish memories aside and instead spend the kids Christmas money on pointlessbike stuff.

Firstly a tyre not stamped with summer. The Dune turned up with rotating rubber perfectly configured for hardback and dust. Show them some mud and they responded magnificently by storing this frictionless material between sparsely hosted knobs** before sending you on your way into something both stoutly vertical and bone crushing.

I bought a fat rear*** which improved things down the back no end. Traction amusement as my thin tyred riding friends slithered about with absolutely no chance of success, while those of us engaging ‘Fat Drive‘ just made it so. Mostly with a fist pump nobody noticed and occasionally a failure we’re not going to talk about here.

An additional purchase was justified on the grounds that one trail much returned too was marked by a facsimile of my forehead. Three times we’d ridden it, three times I’d crashed on the steeper section- shoulder charging anapex with more crossed up action than a weekend transvestite.

Not today. My additional purchase begat significantly additional purchase on the slimey dirt. Much of which was pebble dashing me as the paddle steamerrotation of four inch tyres mined deep into the Forest mud.

Again I’d responded to the prevailing ground conditions with Internet snake oil.A front mudguard offeringborderline efficacy but with a rather more irritating stand out characteristic. Being lowest-cost-bidder flexy plastic, it genuflected to the front tyre on encountering the smallest bump. I was basically ‘travelling with woodpecker‘ asthe bloody thing beat itself to death at irregular intervals.

The rear was stolen from a time long past and best resembled a too small toupee for a too bald head. It added a bit of weight, significant comedic merit but little in the way of mitigating the dirty protest splattered from shorts to helmet.

Riding when conditions are quite this shitty can be summed up by ‘a bit more grip than expected, quite a lot less than required‘. Even with barely inflated trail crushing tyres, much of the steering was more hydrophobic than biomechanical. Grip’d turn up for about as much time to begin to trust it, before whipping away the tablecloth of traction leaving us feasting on moist earth.

Fun of course especially with unseasonal temperatures.The forecast promised much but delivered only wind blown showers. The trails – of which I’d been bitching about three weeks ago – were epically muddy. I’d like to give my three week youngerself a damn good slap on the grounds of not appreciating how good it actually was.

Five of us out, a total of eight working knees – one of which was mine while the other has succumbed to ‘patellatendonitis. The Physio suggests I leave it at least a week before riding – good advice I cheerfully ignored because – hey – when it’s this damn good why wouldn’t you ride every day?****

I’ve no idea if the StupidBike is any good really. I don’t know how it goes round corners but I fully understand how it slides sideways. It’s a bit of a drag uphill, but amusingly competent the other way onceyour belief of tyre grip has beenrecalibrated.

It’s getting me out. It’s a stalwart to the grumpy individual who makesexcuses not to ride. It’s making my riding pals laugh a lot. Ithas me giggling.

But we’re just fighting the phony war right now. Bring me that bloody snow.

*more accurately drinking ruinously expensive coffee while watching artificial snow melt as quickly as it can be made.

**Oh God where to start. Okay, I was in London last week and it was like that. Except for the sparse bit.

***Insert your own joke here. But be kind. I’m been really busy. Not had time to ride much. Anyway it’s not fat, it’s just big boned. I think of it as my personal eclipse.

****Because you can’t. As you’ve been sectioned under the mental health act.

I look at this picture and what I see if far less important than what I remember. Sure the backlit horizon is coloured a blue missing from ournorthern latitudes. The trail has rocks, dust and not insubstantial exposure. The rider is rocking some mismatched colour scheme most notable for shirt sleeves in December.

You cannot see the big grin. You cannot go back and live in that moment. Solet’s seesome more.

To your left a 3 foot fallinto a culvert. To your right a drop of about 300 feet into a valley where they’d collect your remains with a spatula. Want to know the difference between living and being alive? It’s on this2 foot ribbon of trail which narrowed to less than half that without reducing the exposure. You heart maybeat 3500 times in an hour, but you notice it only for the 5 seconds it’s banging against your ribs.

Elevation is everything. We shuttled 1000 metes from the valley floor before climbing another few hundred metres on dirt tracks to access the one of the best half kilometres of trail I’ve ever ridden, Took me a couple of attempts to ride that line. I’ll not bore you with the details but its pretty much encapsulated in ‘don’t fall right’.Stuff of life right there.

Sometimes it’s hard to take your eyes off the 3-D problems demanding instant solutions, but really you must. Because even in the lower reaches of Sierra Nevada, this is what lies beyond your trail focal point.

Even I can acceptthe view from this bar is even better than a view from a Bar. I loved this trail, steep and nasty at the top bisected with deep washed out gulleys. Be brave here and the bottom section rewards you with a relaxed flow of perfect curves. Drag you eyes from the dust kicked up by your tyres and burn that image into your retinas. Because a 100 days of grey awaits on the other side of a 3 hour plane ride.

Riding on brilliant trails under shadow parabolas cast by endless sun isn’t enough of course. Half the joy of riding mountain bikes is where you are. The other half is who you are with. My good mate David rode lots more than his head told him he could. This is my favourite photo of the whole trip.

Obviously being atedious narcissist, it’s back to being all about me. Although a proper rider would have taken far more wall than that. Quite enough for me though thank you very much.

As with all good things,every day ended with beer. And more beer. And occasionally brandy. To be honest not thatoccasionally.

I felt terribly guilty abandoning my loved ones for the third time in a single year to selfishly ride my mountain bike. But by God I came back a better person. And after 2000 kilometres and 7 months, finally worked how to ride the bigbike properly. Also learned some important stuff about friendship, while beingreminded of theendless joy of being in high places.

You can see more pictures of dust and general tomfoolery hereand if that’s motivated you to try something similar, David and I would recommend getting in touch with (another) Dave athttp://bikingandalucia.com.

Orgiva is a fantastic place to stay, it’s essentially the administrative centre for this side of the mountain. This makes it a non-tourist bustling town full of great bars and restaurants chock-full of lovely people. The riding is immense and endless. The trails are lumpy and bedrock hard at higher altitudes changing to fast and loose lower down.

This is the route back to Orgiva. We are 10 minutes from a cold beer!

Much of it is pretty steep, quite a lot has a degree or more of exposure. Everything is covered in dust. It’s verymuch a mountain biking paradise.

You will be unsurpassed to hear it’s one of my favourite places to ride. The other is the southern Pyrenees. We all be back thereIn 131 days. Until then these digital memories will salve me against the grittiness of winter.

Riding in the endlessly splendid Andalucian region of southern Spain, my life was full of appropriateness. Firstly the fully suspended, modern angled and expensively adorned 160mm travel mountain bike fitted perfectly into the folds of the Sierra Nevada mountains.

Secondly dusty ridingsegued seamlessly into hot tapas and cold beer. Thirdly every photo contained the holy trinity of blue sky, dry rock and stunning views.

God I loved it. Came back last Thursday and not seen the sun since. Hidden by horizon clamping cloud and sideways rain. Half of the North is underwater while the rest of us are grudgingly grateful to be merely sliding about in tyre deep mud.

So when the going gets tough, the not very tough get silly. My good friend Matt is not what corporate bullshitters would call a ‘completer-finisher‘. So it was no surprise to see the stupidbike(tm) proxying the same version I’d abandoned in his garage, before buggering off to sunnier climbs.

This is no problem at all though. I have many other bikes to ride most of which Matt fixes with no complaints and technical explanations I pretend to understand.

However, with everyone needing a laugh, a frenzy of activity saw many cheap and heavy components replaced by nearly new items from my bottomless spares drawer*

Off went the brakes that didn’t work, the transmission that did but at a cost to weight rationot really captured in my Venn diagram of light/blingy/arguably pointless. Having no suspension other than the undamped rebound offered by a brace of tractor tyres, I felt a dropper seatpost represented nothing less than a safety accessory.

Talking of tyres, the supplied ones really aren’t bad. In the dry. In any other conditions their chief attribute appears to be some kind of alchemic reaction transformingmud into a frictionless surface offering all sorts of exciting diversions. Steering not being one of them.

After some dithering, I ‘stuck the knobbly one in the back’. Writing that down has made me both laugh and wonder whether ‘I’ve gone at this from the wrong end‘. At best I’ve created a paddle steamer shifting huge volumes of mud to arse crack. At worse I’ve prioritised traction over steering.

Assuming the lashed together bastard love child of John-Deere and a rubber fetisher makes it to the first downhill. I have only one spare tube apparently fashioned from an elephants condom. If the weather turns for the worse, it offers sufficient flotation properties to rescue me and quite a few friends. When it finally snows, I’m fucking this bike thing off and just taking the tube sledging.

The new tyre really didn’t embrace the tubeless experience at all. Even with Matt’s compressor bullying air into the vast orifice at a 100PSI. It was flappier than – no really not even I can go there** – er a very flappy thing. I had a quick delve into the bearded world of the Fat Tyre Forums and apparently there’s much to prepare involving badgers, illegal substances and a level of stickiness which suggests any such activity should be carried out in a darkened shed well away from the children.

So tomorrow night I intend to be entirely inappropriate. The stupidbike is prepared for its first night mission. In conditions best thought of as ‘Herefordshire’s Famous Flanders Flashback’, I fully expect it to be rubbisheverywhere.There’s that and the joy of beingabandoned far behind the back of the group. I shall navigate by their belly laughs and amusing retorts on the pointlessness of one mans endeavour to testthe maximum amount of foolishness a stupid bicycle can offer.

At least it will now stop. And go without the sound of chainrings being tortured by shifters assembled by the lowest cost bidder. I expect the traction to be outstanding, front end grip less so, but trees are always just that bit softer in winter.

Assuming some kind of survival/not checking in at a mental trauma clinic, the following night whatever remains of me and the stupidbike shallattempt to summit the mighty peaks of the Malvern hills.

At the end of which, this experiment shall be declared a wonderful success and it’s just the other 99.9{45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2} of the population who don’t get it. Or there will be a suspicious fire in the shedofdreams.

No point dying wondering eh?

*mostly. Some additional expenditure may have been required. I like to think of this an investment is ‘future and most necessary spares currently stored on another bicycle‘

**some metaphors are best left unwritten. But for full transparency, I’m smirking like a teenager on his first encounter with hedge grumble here.

Today we talked about training. It’s important to provide some context here; we were sat outside the pub wolfing down crisps and re-hydrating with Wye Valley’s finest liquid products.

We’re vaguely familiar with the concept of junk miles. We’ve heard about rest days. We’re aware other dabble in the mystical world of Vo2 thresholds. There was however a universal ‘what-the-fuck-really’? when the alien concept of weighing ones food was introduced.

It’s fair to say training programmes are generally happening to someone else. Not that we sneer at such efforts from a position of medical certainty. The last time Matt wondered aloud what the bump on his head might be, the Saracens Head Oncology Unit instantly diagnosed him with a life threatening tumour. Or Cat Aids. Possibly both.

We just ride loads. And, in my case, drink too much, attack cheese in the kind of frenzy last campaigned by the Mongol Hoards and rarely pass the biscuit barrel without making a significant withdrawal. Which may explain why some days you sit astride your bicycle bending mountains to your will, and others when the entire ride is spent wondering who signed the holiday chit for both your lungs and legs.

Today was more of a ‘I can see my legs but they’re not taking much input from the skull hosted root vegetable’. Always ready to blame something else, my first excuse was the prevailing ground conditions tending to the wearisome plasticine. Didn’t seem to be slowing the others down much. Switching channels, the issue was obviously a bike unridden for three months.

That’ll be the Pyga then. Now sporting a longer fork and a fat rear tyre. It felt a little dead after the Aeris, but hard to target it as the problem since it’s carried me over 4000 kilometres in these last two years. Short of a hovercraft, there’s nothing stopping me being at least average other than just being me.

In despair, I rooted deep into the pack harvesting a sickly energy gel of doubtful provenance. Two hours in and threemoreto go – because that’s the minimum period to qualify for a Doran Death March – any kind of supplement was beyond welcome and deep into necessary.

I’ve always had a deep-seated, if entirely illogical, mistrust of this kind of thing. My experience of gels isnot what’s in the inside. During my long yet undistinguished racing career, sticky wrappers clung to innocent foliage inside the tapes. Lots of middle placed pilots struggling with a humour bypass felt the best thing about being outside was to litter it with non biodegradable packaging.

Not me. Mid pack at best but right on. Bananas, malt loaf, any wrappers stuffed into shorts not stay pressing my crotch. Tutting as those whippets wrestled their way past – fast you may be, but a planet loving human you are not. It was practically Yoda.

Trail food nowadays tends to come in packets marked ‘Caution – extremely sugary product within‘. Wine gums, jelly beans, chewy snakes and Haribo. Many times on wintry hillsides bereft of motivation, a hit on the glucose gland has returned us togood cheer.

So mid ride stops tend to coalesce around establishments selling outsized bacon sandwiches. Washed down with sugar suspended in strong black coffee. None of those things were immediately available, leaving me nooption other than tochug down agelatinous creation promising instant pep through the flavour of summer fruits.

Ugh. Gag Reflex. No instantPopeye muscle popping. Ten minutes later though my legs came back on-line givingat least a passing resemblance to limbs which may yet power me up a few more hills. What kind of Elven magic is this? I’m well practiced in mainlining the 6:30am double coffee shot with added caffeine but this was something entirely different.

It didn’t stop me riding like a total spanner of course. See previous excuses re: conditions and bike. But it did get me as far as the pub where any post-gel crashes were cushioned by a pint. Then – just to be sure – another one. 60km of slop and slide left me pretty much empty, but I filled right back up avidly discussing plans for the winter and stupid challenges when the sun finallyreturns to the Northern Hemisphere.

I broadcasted a text to the riding crew in the vein of what a bloody good laugh it was*. Summarising the replies is illustrative to why we get up at 7am to throw ourselves at the scenery: ‘gets rid of the crap of the previous and prepares you for the shit of the upcoming week. It’s what makes us, us’

That +lots. The gel saved my ride. The ride saves all sorts of other things. I don’t want to train. I’m not interested in diets and supplements. Being fit is the symptom not the cause. Riding bikes is what makes us, us.

Worth repeating that.

*specifically for the other three find ever more amusing** ways to lambast my purchase of a Fat Bike

**for a given value of amusing.

Even inside the world-of-endless-niche which hostsmountain biking, fat bikes are still bloody stupid. Not so much a problem looking for a solution, more a victim looking for a corner to hide in. Fat bikes unite ourbarrack-room lawyer community in universal mirth.

We point and giggle because of their innate pointlessness. Designed – although that’s a charitable use of the word – for sand and snow, they are defined by comedy outsize tyres clearly harvested from a tractor, rarely suspended by anything other than belief and ridden by men – always men – proudly bristling in the vanguard of ‘peak beard‘

They cost too much. You could buy a proper mountain bike for that*. Heavy, cumbersome, slowto climb and evenslowergoing down, a fat bike slumps into a niche no-one cares about labelled ‘rubbish at everything’. Except Snow and Sand. I’ll grant you that. But living in a landlocked county with bugger all winter precipitation, this doesn’t represent a killer sales pitch.

Why then Al did you buy one? That’s what they’ll be asking. All my friends with whom I share the dirty Sunday service. They won’t pose that actual question because that’s not the way frenzied piss taking actually works. I expect at least one member of the under-niche’d will need oxygen or the Heimlich manoeuvre to arrest their mirth.

There can be no argument – however well formed – to defend the indefensible. I’m not even going to try. My strategy is far more nuanced: I shall merely pretend to have gone stark, raving mad leaving me with no memory of wandering into a vast outdoors warehouse and returningwith this bastard love child of a MoonLander and a marketing professional owning just the one yellow crayon.

It won’t work of course. I expect the joshing to go on for, oh I don’t know let’s say, ever. Quite right too because this bike has many, many problems – the least of which is the reaction it inevitably draws. Those child-drawn tyres are inflated with single digit PSI. Translate that to the road, and it’d be easier to pick the bloody thing up and trudgeto your muddy destination.

When you arrivethings are unlikely to improve much. Massive tyres do offer a form of suspension. Technically we call this massively-undamped wrist splitting chaos with more than occasional squirm. You will absolutely be heading in one direction, but equally unequivocally this is not a direction in which you are even consulted. You mayattempt to stay this wild craft using skills long learned but they will serve you not at all. Eventually there will be a form of arrest as fat tyre consitenersagainst unforgiving tree.

You shalllreturn home battered, likely bloodied and burning with a hatred of men – shed based in remote winter regions and boasting the facial growth of a rhododendron – who felt sure this was a valid evolutionary branch of bikus suspensionus.

All this is true. Probably. But when you’re slaloming through the surprised shoppers of Go Outdoors, Gloucester whileshimmying between tented fabric in the camping aisle, there is a massive grin splitting your face whichnot even the fiercest beard could contain.

Yes Fat Bikes are stupid. Of course they are. But this one issomething else as well; cheap for a start, less than the cost of a decent set of forks**,£493 to be exact. The rolling chassis of frame and wheels are pretty good while the rest of the kit is pretty typical of a budget constricted product managers spreadsheet.

He or she doesn’t have my shed load of spares though. Even after building the moustache, there’s sufficient pre-loved collateral to fit proper brakes, wider bars and decent transmission. At which point there will be no excuse but to go and ride it.

I don’t expect it’ll be faster uphill or down than any of my current bikes. I don’t care. Nor will itbe clattering through serial obstacles by sheer dint of brilliant suspension and modern angles. I’m not much bothered by that either. Because I have a good feeling it’s going to make me giggle at any speed. You cannot look down at that front tyre and not crack a smile.

Those marketing types have missed a trick here. If they’d named this niche ‘silly bikes for big kids‘ they’d have sold a shit-load more. Jess jumped on this one in the shop and came back with exactly the grin that’d crept up on me in the tent section.

So will the maiden voyage but tomorrow on one of Matt’s Muddy Death Marches starting at 08:30 and finishingsomewhere close to darkness? Of course not, I have many other bikes far better suited. Instead, I’ll wait for a couple of spare hours, a stretch of loamy singletrack, a mind that isn’t fixed on fast forward,and a place where I can feel 10 years old again.

Fat is stupid. Stupid can be very good indeed.

* or for those living in the real world, a tidy 2nd hand small car.

** Not that I’m putting that out there as a rational purchasing decision.