This evenings ride only tells half a story. We did ride 6.5 miles in 1 hour. Yes indeed, people on my Twitter stream can indeed ride 3 times that in the same amount of time. It was, by any stretch of description, a complete and utter self indulgent pootle through pouring rain and the beautiful breath taking sound of it hitting the canal in the silence of wheels and slightly heavy breathing.
Some of the story involves the narrowest single track I’ve ever ridden – a tyres width and no more. Some of the story renders 4 riders exhaled breathe turning to steam in the cold as body temperature and external temperature clashed and the particles spun in chaos. It involves that special kind of mud, at a special kind of depth, back wheel skittering, the threat of a full skid poised on the tip of a penny in the wind. It meanders through the first 3 miles where my lines flowed – an awareness that my bike and I had finally become a unit, finally clicked, and finally it felt as if all I needed to do was simply think about where my wheels should be and they would magically drift there, all by themselves. Sheer simplistic non-technical dreamy flat singletrack which if it had been carving down the side of a hill would be the stuff my dreams are made of.
That’s not the story. The story is the one I cannot tell, of the woman riding behind me. It’s the story of a woman riding in tracksuit bottoms, a t-shirt, trainers and a tigger backpack. Of a mother of three, and a teaching assistant who will one day become a teacher because she is so good at being a mother that it is indisputable that she will become a teacher, and a really rather fantastic one at that.
It’s the story of falling off and picking yourself back up again. It’s the story of realising 30 minutes later what that fall could have cost the person falling. It’s of profit and loss sheets written in bright red, of risks taken not knowing the possible cost nor the outcome. Of a love of pedalling which if written would bring tears to even the coldest hearted eyes.
It’s about riding in front of a woman, listening to her talking, and understanding that women have balls, and some women have bigger balls that any of us could ever possibly imagine. That riding downhill at 30mph is an impossibility for some people, not because they don’t have the balls, but because frankly it would be sheer insanity. Insanity of commital proportions.
Today I learnt that 6.5 mile pootles can be the equivalent of the red downhill run down the side of Aonach Mor and that appearances can be incredibly deceptive. That steel runs invisibly inside some people and you can’t take it out. Northern grit. My fucking god.
