I do. Grumpily watching it pass me by while impatiently waiting for ossification of the splatterbone. Both seem a long time ago, after a ride which started wet, dried out briefly before the weather gods stopped trolling and maxed out the celestial fire hose.

When the going gets wet, the wet head off to the nearest roofed building selling sanctuary in the form of warm fires and warmer pasties.  Before then we’d had a couple of hours riding surprisingly dry* trails, chatting with like minded weather deniers and answered one of life’s deep questions.

“How many separate parts would you expect in a functional seat post?” My riding bud and fellow collarbone wrecker Simon looked a bit confused, but confirmed any answer should not be in the plural.

Three has the kind of plurality suggesting a trail side fix is a priority. Something had unscrewed, something else had pinged from the inner recesses of the post while the remains were open to the increasingly moist elements.

Not having packed the three-eighth Gripley**, nor having Matt available to sigh deeply, take the broken bike from my unprotesting hands, do something practical and then return it magically fixed, I fell back on my own engineering prowess, logical approach and the kind of mechanical savagery that considers  a  “rock hammer” as a descriptive term for any handily lying stone that can be percussively repurposed.

The Forest of Dean is somewhat counter intuitively peppered with such rocks. There’s a lot of geology going on and much of it appears to have reared out of the ground through some kind of localised plate tectonics. Trust me on this; I’ve ridden into plenty of them, and landed heavily on quite a few more.

Scanning my surrounds for something handy and heavy scored me nothing more than some sad looking damp woody windfall. Undeterred I slammed the saddle hard into the frame attempting to recess the errant bushing back into place, leaving me a simple “screw job” to evidence that engineering prowess history suggests may be a wish fulfilment fantasy.

It kind of worked. In a bushing stuffing sort of way. Not quite enough for me to get the thread started and even after some novel and tangential approaches to a solution***, we were left with a three piece seat post. So, as with most difficult situations, I chose to ignore it and crack on.

Cracking on was an excellent choice. Already we’d ridden pine strewn trails with just enough bounce for a tyre to grip, and not enough standing water to take it away. There’s probably more grip right now than at the height of summer. Not that I’d had the chance to sample it. So it’s easy to get carried away right up the point where Mr S. Root, first name Sniper, glistens menacingly on an apex your bold, maybe now courageous, line is sending you through.

All that stuff you watch and read about riding roots pops up on the internal HUD. Stay off the brakes, commit to the line, loose limb your appendages and let the bike move underneath you. Makes absolute perfect sense when watching a pro rider dispatch a nasty root stack on YouTube. Back here in the real world however…

… my mental and physical approach is at odds with such best practice. First I like to get a panic in early. Reduce the brain load when it all goes south. It also gives me plenty of time to decide if I’m going to brake first or stiffen up like a man recently diagnosed with rigour mortis. Often I do both because that’s just the way I roll. Mostly into the undergrowth, head tucked into the body whimpering “be the hedgehog”****

Sometimes, despite the athletic ability of said family Erinaceinae***** I exit the corner in approximately the same configuration I’d entered it.  This is why I snub all day rides in the winter-  no one can be that lucky all the time.  Felt pretty lucky today though with plenty of modestly paced excitement mixed with occasional sideways action.

A super slack hardtail with barely a mouse fart of air in chunky 2.6 Rimpact stiffened tyres definitely helps.  And an encouraging mate who prefaces the rides with “if it’s really shit, we’ll be elbows deep in home made pasties in less than 30 minutes“. However, Simon’s not been riding with us long enough to fathom that bringing me along adds absolutely nothing to the navigational capability of the ride. Probably reduces it.

“I don’t really know where I’m going” he’ll tell me. I smile because I’m 100% with you there brother 🙂 We failed to ride the trails I’d planned, but did get to ride at least two of them twice.  Just being out on the bike is more than enough on a day like this. We didn’t ride very far, nor climb very high but those metrics have no place on a day when any ride ticks the big box “pointless fun”

Come February, I’ll be bored of the mud, the filth and the cold. Pining for the seasonal ratchet to be cranked by the incoming Spring.  But this last summer, when conditions were perfect, the only thing getting dusty were the bikes hanging in the shed.

So right now you can rain all you bloody like. Have working collarbone, sufficient wet weather gear to waterproof a small elephant and steadfast mates who are always up for a bit of bog snorkelling.

Best ride then. Because I’ve tired the alternative and frankly it’s shit.

*Not dry but also not the rim deep horrors charactering Jan and Feb.

**As in “I THINK THE ELLIPTICAL CAM HAS GRADUALLY SLID UP THE BEAM SHAFT AND CAUGHT ON THE FLANGE REBATE, WITH DISASTROUS RESULTS.” – T.Pratchett taken way too soon.

***Slamming the saddle even harder.

****Significantly more appropriate than being the ball because bouncing off trees is not the end state we’re looking for here.

*****and some would say the speed. The world is full of these cruel bastards 😉