So many things to write. Oh you’re in for such a treat. A heartfelt treatise on the wonders of modern telecommunications, a head banging rant on the inadequacies of train companies before a return to rehashing old campaigns – to whit riding in the filth.

I bet you can hardly wait. Worry not because come the intersection of the Christmas break, guilt free hedonistic wine abuse and boredom, that whole stream of consciousness shall pore forth onto this electronic page.  Regular readers translate that as ‘grammar tortured through the lens of a delusional  Tourettes suffer marinated in a decent red.‘

I’ll do my best to meet those lofty expectations.

Until then, this.

Back in the midst of time I exchanged a bike I didn’t really like for one I wasn’t quite sure about. This has gone as brilliantly as any human within flailing distance of sanity could expect. It’s been built, admired, occasionally ridden, borrowed and outed as bit of a violent bastard.

This is not why I’m moving on. Oh I wish it were. But rationale has no place here. Or before here come to that. Hiding in plain sight on my desktop is a pantheon of discarded bikes spanning twenty years. All 49 of them.  There’s some proper analysis to come*, but the headline numbers are trending towards the Enron scale of false accounting.

Some of me believes this is exactly the form of catharcism required to trigger a change in behaviour. The rather larger part is thinking ‘Fuck me, what a ride, you think that was stupid? Well HOLD MY BEER and watch this!’

Watch what? My desultory efforts to triage a to-do list entering the fourth dimension were interrupted by a desktop ping timed at 0916. Some eight hours later I was the happy if somewhat confused owner of another Ibis frame. These chronological events bookmarked a text transcript best thought of as extended therapy.

I feel some context may help here. A week ago I’d postulated** that pointless bicycle acquisition was now happening to other people. Those marketing types were dead to me. The shedofdreams(tm) could now be considered a museum such was the lack of purchasing activity.

Smug-mode on basically.  Until that 0916 ping. My good mate and proper accountant Adam sent me a link to a new version of something I already owned. 20{45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2} off the latest model. 29inch wheels. Carbon. Lovely looking thing. You should buy that. I should probably explain at this point that Adam is our company accountant.

Let’s assume then this wasn’t professional advice. I wasted fuck knows how long watching videos and tying mental knots. Did I need a ‘third way’? Something between the playfulness of the SolarisMax and the scenery stomping prowess of the imperious RipMo? Into a gap the keenly priced Orbea fell, but was rarely first or even second pick.

Trying this adult thing, I concluded a bike with almost as much travel as one I already had was hardly the ‘void filler’  I might be looking for. And what is that? Ah glad you asked, and you’re still with me here. Sometimes I think no one gets how important this is.

90{45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2} of what we ride is hardtail friendly. A bit more if you’re a bit good. A bit less if you’re like me. Big bikes can work but they lack the immediacy, the agility, the poise of something with a bit less travel and quite a lot less weight.

I accept this is prising open a niche which may only exist in my head. Still once that idea takes flight there’s actually not that many bikes which fulfil the brief.  There is one tho and it’s from the same stable as the RipMo. It shares the etymology, and a little more of the history.

From XC bike to trail bike in four evolutions. At least one of which Adam has broken. He’s still keen for me to buy one. After further investigation elbowed aside other peoples deadlines, I was inclined to agree.

It’s not however a premise which stands up to any kind of logical probing. The kind that Carol is very good at. She was admiringly stoical as I attempted to make the case. Although ‘case‘ might be stretching it a bit. It was more ‘see that, lovely isn’t it, 20{45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2} off today, it’d make me very happy‘.

We consulted various spreadsheets of doom representing wide ranging commitments to important stuff, and concluded a Ripley could be squeezed in. Assuming I didn’t go ‘full supermarket sweep‘ with a virtual ram-raid of a well known on-line bike store.

No danger of that. I shall asset strip the Occam in exactly the same manner as the donor bike before that. It’s not like this is new to me.  Shiny parts look good for exactly one ride. We’re not making art here, but we might be making something rather more important.

Whatever it is, let’s be clear this is extravagance barely tempered by common sense. There’s no quantitative metric to ascribe buying an expensive frame as offering any kind of return on investment.

Sure no metric, but this is to confuse cost and value. Being lucky enough to invest in possible futures is a whole shit load better than wondering what might have been.

I know it’s stupid. Carol knows it’s stupid. I am troubled by feelings of guilt. But fuck me riding new bikes on sinewy singletrack with your mates is never going to get old. Until I get too old.

I’ve said it before but it absolutely bares repeating.  There really is no point dying wondering.

*Yes it’ll be showcased on the hedgehog. Again I apologise for excitement deferred while I get my regression analysis shit together.

** to the normal riding crew who responded with a combination of heroic stoicism and mild hysteria.

The nights are getting longer. The temperatures are heading lower. The leaves are on the ground, and  the trees are buttoning up for hibernation. Rain is less of an annoyance and more of a constant. The northern hemisphere is preparing for its annual shutdown, and that’s shit and bringing me down.

Especially as Autumn last year was a riot of fall colours, still dusty trails and the feeling that this was just summer madly denuded. Not 2019 – we moved Jess into university halls at the end of September in t-shirts and shorts. No clouds split the perfect azure blue from bustling vegetation to long distanced horizon.

The calender spoke of a changing season but we weren’t listening.  Then we were listening to hard drain bouncing off the landscape we live in, the houses we take shelter in and drenching us when we ventured outside.

Trails tinder dry from a long summer held out way beyond our expectations. But like a middle aged man fighting the flab of ageing, inevitably they succumbed, drooped, raised a weary hand of surrender* and switched from hard-pack to something both new but with a horrible familiarity for our riding life until March next year.

So now it’s wet, it’s muddy but – crucially – it’s not cold. I’ll take two out of three because I know what’s coming. And my whining over geographical inevitably is muted by riding with my good mate David who has a six in front of his age. Yet he has no truck with an e-bike or excuses. Strictly analogue.

I’ve been riding with Dave for over a decade. He’ll be the first to accept he’s not as fast as he once was. Like that matters, He retains a passion for riding bikes even when we’re facing a full on mud enema. Even when having not ridden much this year, he’s still keen for a big day out

I blame Matt for my late developed stubborn streak to go long. We start short heading out to the Forest on puddle infested fire road slaloms. A cheeky descent on a track best thought of as ‘possibly illegal’ gaps my skills between rain washed roots and the assumption of summer grip.

No matter we’re giggling in the manner of those entirely invested in the ridiculousness of the whole endeavour. We don’t ride because we have mad skills, or because we’re the fastest or we have a point to prove. We ride because this is what we do. Until we cannot. And a bit of mud absolutely is not that thing.

A bit of road, a bit of  traditional old XC if you will, poking in and out of the woods, 90 seconds of sideways action on a trail where I sacrificed a brake lever and a shoulder a couple of years back. Made the turn as did David,  still giggling. Combined age of 112. Beats mowing the lawn.

We fetch Steve from Bacon-Sandwich Central. At the tender age of 47, we wonder aloud on the veracity of his long MTB trousers. Kids today eh?  We plan a big loop, Dave looks a tad worried, I tell him it’ll be fine. I’m a bit worried too but keep this to myself.

We head out in the classic approach of ‘dicking about and getting lost’. We ride trails first cut twenty years ago and long abandoned as new stuff gets built. We ride the ‘pit of despair’ and somehow find thigh high mud mildly amusing. We get serious riding some proper slippy singletrack, only to fall over handlebars laughing so much as Dave arrives from a direction entirely distanced from any recognisable trail.

We talk shit and ride some more. I can feel the front wheel travel perpendicular to the trail when an off camber root hits. The rear follows suit and because I’ve yet to remember how to ride loose this cannons me off in a direction best thought of as ‘woooah that’s a big tree’

I find myself and Steve in a dialogue stealing essential cerebral capacity on a steep and rooty trail. Steve goes ‘Hey there’s loads more grip here than I was expecting’ / Me; “Really? Because there’s fuck all on this corner you’ve just ridden you lying bastard’

No one crashes. No one knows quite how. Dave takes a detour as Steve and I add an extra trail. I chase a man who I know is quicker than me using an ill thought out strategy of braking later. Two seconds later, I’ve blown the corner and am instead sliding over a bank. Can barely ride for laughing.

Eight hours of riding finally deposits us at the pub. We have earned that beer. David especially. He’s knackered but buzzing. He’s nearly ten years older than me which gives me hope I can still be doing this in that timescale.

We ride home. It’s 11km and I’ve done it maybe a hundred times. But every time I get to wonder how brilliant it is to be riding bikes at an age when that age codifies leisure time spent on sedentary activities. A bit of me loves not being quite like those peers of my age. I’m not judging. Ok yeah I am and this makes me better somehow.

More of me thinks about when it stops. But seeing David still having a bloody good time even tho he is totally bolloxed when we finally get home is a whole lot more. We’re might be getting old, but none all of us are growing up.

Let’s keep it that way.

*that’s a metaphor rather close to home. Other than it improving much in 2020.

Welcome to the Western chapter of ‘Angles Anonymous’. My name is Alex and it’s been 15 years since I properly railed a corner.  Chronology matters here. I wasn’t the best descender in 2004 back when I had two fully functional  knees. Then I nearly didn’t after an accident which left me a hairs breath from leaving hospital in a wheelchair.

Physically that was a fairly intense time. But you heal. Externally for sure but mental scar tissue goes all 5th columnist on your muscles. That’s ignored when you’re finally back on the bike decoding a ribbon of singletrack firing synoptics at high speed. Dendrites flood your neural cortex. Tendons tense. Visual cues switch chaos for muscle memory.

You know how this goes. A hundred thousand corners groove the process deep into your conscious. There’s a rapid assessment of trail conditions, of grip, of camber, of terrain balanced with a quick check of your bravery coefficient. Divide X by Y, line up appropriate biometrics and push hard on the inside bar.

That’s a push into the fourth dimension where the confidence pixies fire up the adrenaline compressors. Where physics meets geography. Where that edge threatens to throw you off, but you laugh it off and risk the abyss. Oh hello righteousness I’ve missed you from that hospital bed.

It didn’t go like that. It went like this. See the entry, remind yourself what happened last time, worry a bit, grab the brakes a bit more, bottle the apex, blow the exit. Watch your mates ride away. Spend some time in the land of self loathing.

Being an analytical sort of bloke the answer was clearly crossroaded at a happy place between quantitive and qualitative thinking. A hundred YouTube videos and a couple of skills courses left me instead somewhere between annoyed and deeply fucked off. It wasn’t happening. I couldn’t trust the tyres, the forks, the geometry enough to even slightly push it.

That’s bullshit of course. What I couldn’t  trust was myself. That mental  scar tissue was binding my ability. Not helped by the getting older and not bouncing quite so well. Entropy is a total bastard what with it travelling in the wrong direction. I was running out of time while riding like a man who was so concerned with crashing he’d forgotten why he’s got on the bike in the first place.

Relearning is pretty much new dog old tricks. Motorbikes taught me go hard on the inside hand.  Skills courses insisted outside pedal down. Everyone quick says look where you want to go. It kind of worked until it didn’t. I rode sketchy stuff hanging on to better riders and then lost them on the next turn.

15 years should transition you from anger to acceptance. For me tho it’s just continued to piss me off. I’m doing the hard stuff, but I can’t ride those corners in the  Venn of fast, risky and amazing. And maybe I never could again. We’ve done denial, let’s move straight to grief.

And then a forum thread full of fuckwits awash with advice best thought of as clinically insane furballed out a video recorded back in 2012. Straight headtubes, Non bolt though axles, no dropper posts. Based on current marketing convention they were lucky to survive the 2 minutes 54 of hamming it up.

The ham was strong. Talk of ‘laser peckers’ and ‘pointing the penis’* nearly had me hitting the X,  but lost in the misogyny was the concept that hips were a key player in cornering. Was this the missing link?

No. And Yes. And no again. We all point things at things** when riding bikes. Some of us do it naturally. Others overthink it. I’m in the second camp attempting to sequence non linear actions into some form of success strategy. It’s always felt – post smashing myself up – contrived and ineffective.

Hips tho. Even old non articulating hips.  Point them in the desired direction of travel and feel the whole biomechanical structure creak into place. I kind of knew this but what I’d missed was leading with the hips stacks everything in a direction mostly likely to punt you out of a corner a) quite quickly and b) not straight into a tree.

With nothing to lose other than a innocent spleen, I decided to give it a proper go. Not a slight shift of the hips, more a full on point and – if things went well – a ‘woot’ to confirm success. First corner, commitment a bit questionable and I grazed summer shrubbery far removed from the dusty trail.

For fucks sake,  had a word with myself.

Next corner went ‘full pointy’*** which has some consequences. One was facing in an entirely different direction without quite understanding how that might have happened.  Bloody hell that’s a thing. How long have I  been riding bikes? Surely someone should have told me.

They would have told me this. It’s not a panacea. It does not swap technique for bravery. It doesn’t work everywhere. It needs to be learned. But when you do, the whole ‘am I doing the right thing ‘ is replaced by ‘swivel those hips and all while be well’

Let’s  not get ahead of ourselves. It’s an evolution not a revolution. It’s codifying stuff I already know. It may not survive the soggy season. It doesn’t override my fear of spending days back at that hospital.

What it is tho is a reminder of why I do this. Of waving the big fuck off to being 52 years old and still riding at a reasonably brisk pace. Of not confusing those years on the planet with a loss of ability. Of never stopping learning nor thinking there is something important about acting my age.

Hi my name is Alex and it’s been three days since I railed a corner. I’m done with this group. I won’t be back.

I’ll be riding. Not worrying. Not overthinking. Maybe not railing a corner but giving it a damn good go.

Is that enough? You betcha.

*amazing really with content such as this that women are not overly represented in Mountain Biking.

**I don’t want to lose my audience here by getting too technical.

***As much as a middle aged man can. Fully articulated hips happen to the next generation.

The day didn’t start well. The planned skive ride stopped before it started. The potential back up afternoon ride was similarly sacked off. Work stopped play, and that’s not a call a man with limited years left to ride and total control of his own diary should ever have to make.

The Wednesday night ride stepped up to take in the slack and was nothing short of awesome. The Wye Valley is so preposterously stunning in summer there is no place I’d rather be. You point and click in any direction and end up with a banger. That’s the picturesque landscape doing all the heavy lifting.

A landscape you get to ride in until you run out of light. Then there’s the pub you get to drink in. Until you run out of money.  We’re on the cusp of artificial light buttressing the sinking sun, but we’re not quite there yet.  That’s a reality tinged with sadness as our little part of the planet turns its face from the sun.

But we’re hanging on. To dusty motes hanging in sun baked stillness. To bikes air brushed with dust. To summer lines and endless grip. To T-shirts and sweat. To knowing it’ll be many months before it’s this good again.

So let’s get amongst it. The local trails above Ross are of questionable legality. And that’s stretching the most charitable definition. The shovel pixies are both skilled builders and passive advocates of Marx’s firmly held view that all property is theft. I have concerns from both sides, but bloody hell they’ve created a mini bike park which repeatedly pokes the fun gland.

It’s a small hill. One ten minute climb to the top and maybe two minutes down. Rinse and repeat. Trails snake left and right with clear progression from the flowy and fast to the frankly ridiculous. There’s one steep rock drop matched to a roll out you might as well name ‘busted collarbone’.  I’m not riding that.

I am riding everything else though including a big gap jump I’d been studiously ignoring for a year or so. I’m a man who works best with a margin of error. Preferably half way across the page. So why I attempted this on my hardtail is beyond me. Caught in the moment I guess. Oh and that bike is beyond awesome. It looks like a normal bike but rides like a champion.

There’s some steely magic crafted into Cotic Bikes. Tonight I’m all cantered hips and dragged rear brakes. It’s point and shoot silliness that never gets old even as I approach my 52nd birthday. There are moments which transcend the whole age thing. Just you, a brilliant bike, a bit of confidence, a mate to chase and dust particles to excite.

In the words of Jo Burt, this is why. It’s easy to stuff your head with lyrical earwax when you’ve had a great ride, but there is something to this. And it’s something like this. It’s Riding Evo. It’s a slightly braver version of who you are. It’s pushing a bit harder and not being scared. It’s feeling the tyres giving up but cracking on anyway. It’s taking the accident out of emergency. It’s as close to living in the moment as any of us get.

I just wanted to keep riding with my mates. I love the bullshit and the banter. I love the fact we’re all very different and yet somehow all the same when we ride bikes.  I love – because I’m as shallow as a tea spoon – better riders than me saying ‘Shit Al, what are you on tonight, that’s proper quick’.

I know what I’m on. Adrenaline chased with a dopamine hit. This is what I love about being an average rider. Because when you get it right, when confidence seeps in and anxiety exits stage left it feels amazing. You stop feeling like a fraud, a credit card rider, all that gear and still no fucking idea. You get a glimpse that this is how great riders feel all the time.

And I don’t want to be one of those. Really. It’d just have me chasing the next level thrill. The more stupid. The desperately difficult. I don’t need that in my life. What I need instead are nights like this when good enough is so much more than good enough. When I’m nailing every apex, feeling – really feeling – what the bike is telling me, pushing just a little bit harder and laughing out loud as the bike rails a corner or nails a jump.

Yeah like the landscape, the bike is doing the heavy lifting here. But I’m close enough to steal some of the glory. And what a thing that is.

We’re drinking cold beer watching the sun set. It’s not even 9pm. Summer is rushing into Autumn. The cold season awaits. But just for today, just for a moment, it’s perfect.

The best of days.

Robert Stevenson’s novella has infected one of my mountain bikes. It’s all ‘oh what a lovely well sorted trail bike’ until someone has a nasty accident. That someone being my mate Tim who took ‘the snapper’ out in Finale apparently to test the breaking strain of his tibia.

For more on that, you’ll need to arm yourself with a copy of this quarters www.cranked.cc and a strong libation to numb the gory bits.

Coincidence I hear you mutter. Oh I think not after the sadistic bastard had a stab at separating my arm and shoulder last weekend. Ah you mutter on, but you’re always crashing you useless twat. Yes well there’s something in that, but work with me here. At least let’s agree that all bikes have personalities.

What? You’re not even throwing me that bone? Tough crowd. Look they do, my Solaris Max is basically a puppy amped up on a sugar rush, the RipMo is a calm explorer fearing nothing of scary landscape and the Orbea is just, well, mentally unstable. And like the worse kind of nutter, it lulls you into that false sense of security before making strenuous attempt to bite off your nose.

I’d not ridden it much before Tim lunched himself into a innocent tree. Strangely it’s not been granted day release from the ShedofDreams since. It’s just hung on the wall bullying the other bikes. Sufficient time has now passed however for firm knowledge to soften into conspiracy theory.  Last week I extended a tentative hand of friendship with a ride on our local trails. All alone in case it felt the urge to murder someone else.

Of course it was fine. Dr Jekyll in control. I still wasn’t sure I liked it much, but that was less about it’s dubious character and more that it’s very different to both my other mountain bikes. It climbs like an absolute mad bastard for a start.

Efficient, I thought, gets you to the top of the hill so it can kill you quicker. Down tho it’s only not brilliant because I am not brilliant. 150mm of travel both ends, decent angles, somehow both taut and plush. Not massively engaging. Not sure why.

I rode for two hours and wasn’t obviously dead. In fact it’d been a bit of an anti-climax. Like all the other times I’d ridden it. All 7 of them. Maybe  Tim’s accident and my whole ‘Holy Shit here comes Edward Hyde’ was nothing more than displacement activity.  Best find out.

I should have known. The day before Tim had an extended session genuflecting to the Shrine of Mong, he was riding like an absolute demon. I’ll be honest, I’d never ridden the bike that fast, but once switched from his 29er Ripley and within a few trails he was having it fairly large. A bit annoying really as we’re normally closely matched but I was – and there’s no kind way of saying this – getting my arse handed to me on a plate.

It is a fast bike without doubt. 2 hours into our long weekend ride, I started to finally gel with it. Rewards a bit of commitment for sure, but otherwise it’s pretty much vice-less. Until it wasn’t. Heading onto a trail we rarely ride, Matt and I had on of those exchanges.

Him ‘Do you want to do that shit jump?  I’m on holiday next week and really don’t want to crash’ Someone else ‘Ah come on we’re here now, it’ll be fine’. That someone was me. Mr Hyde was clearly in the driving seat. My cautious self still retained a modicum of risk assessment tho, so ‘But only if you go first’

Normally this stops me hitting jumps too slowly. Today however Matt decided to adopt a bit of an Al-Approach. There are good reasons for this. The run in is okay but that’s as good as it gets. The take off exits two wobbly logs bouncing on a decaying tree, while the run out narrows alarmingly with trees left and right ready to stop you – if not dead at least mildly concussed.

A normal me would have abandoned after watching Matt extract maximum value for his 180mm forks on landing. He wasn’t troubling the 180mm on the back much. I didn’t trouble mine at all having rolled off the 3 foot plank with only sufficient velocity to outrun growing vegetation.

I landed in some a second or so later. Having realised this was a classic over the bars arms out/collarbone at risk crash, I snapped into ‘full tortoise’, hit the ground with my head and shoulder before rolling painfully into the bushes. The bike lay beside me looking pleased. Yeah Ed, you total bastard you got me that time.

Haydn persuaded me not to have another go. The bike looked disappointed. It was sure it could deal out more than soreness and scars given another chance. I gingerly rotated crunching bones and decided this was the correct course of action. As was not blaming the bike.

No bike would have saved me. Rider error 100{45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2}. The rest of the day went absolutely swimmingly. Literally when I found a ridable line through a pit of mud Matt and H had failed it clear. It was a pyrrhic victory though with my reward being head to toe fetid moistness.

The bike however was great. The more I rode it, the better it was. So sure now that its split personality was nothing more than an excuse, I punted it round the always-brisk Wednesday night ride. And you know what? It was bloody fantastic. Grip, poise, agility. Three out of three. Loss of limb. Zero out of one.

Watching the sun set blood red on the dusty frame, I couldn’t help but conclude that lunacy was definitely involved. But the one barking* at the moon wasn’t the bike. It was me.

So Dr J is a keeper. Mr H can fuck off tho. That crash bloody hurt.

*more giggling to be fair. It just doesn’t scan as well.