Mud in my eyes

Still less graceful. But no lack of grit.

Yesterday I finally rode my Marin for the first time this year. It’s been all about the Surly so far, a love affair which shows no sign of abating but the simple fact is, stood outside work and talking to a fellow biker about swoops and speed and drop offs and bunny holes just made me feel so homesick suddenly that I decided that cold or no cold, not eating properly for a week or not, I was going to drag the poor old Marin out.

So I did. Because getting on my Marin seems to accidentally somehow be entwined in my mind now with battles. And it was a battle to leave the sofa and the tissues and the warm but it needed to be done and I knew it did. So off we went and it was awful. Too wide bars, too spiky pins in the pedals, saddle in totally the wrong position, gears clanking and brakes screaming. Not helping things was the fact that we live halfway up a really quite steep hill, about 200 feet drops in maybe 1/4 –  1/2 a km. Steep. Road. Argh.

Eventually we got to the canal. Yawn. Tarmac buzz from the wheels and spinning along in the big ring.

Wait. Spinning along in the big ring? I don’t do 3. I never do 3. I always sit in 2 on this run, always have. Never need to switch with my left thumb, only ever with my right. There was a hill, a teeny tiny little one as well and I still didn’t need to switch down. Pedal on, pretend it isn’t happening, my legs might catch on and go on strike.

Decide to see whether the little bridleway run full of single track joy is flooded or not. Not. Pass an incredibly well spoken couple with gang of well groomed dogs in two. Mental comment on pets matching owners. Smile. Pedal hard, drop down, pump the dips, pick my lines through the mud, no skittering, bad choice, pull it back, completely calm, call back ‘don’t follow me!’ and pause for Al to catch up.

Wonder why I’m not out of breath. Decide I’m not trying hard enough. Climb gently up the single track pushing as hard as possible. Wriggle rip the bars left right through the chicanes, avoiding branches, avoiding scratches. No scratches. Get to the end of bridleway and say ‘that used to be a bit of a challenge, what happened, did the rain wash all the gnarl away?’

Sit. Sunshine. Let Al take a pic and tweet it out because there’s no longer any reason not to. Start to understand what’s happening here but shrug, get back on the bike, back down the single track the other way. Back down the canal, all smiles and light. Get on the Greenway and realise the lack of food and cold is finally going to bite me. Leave Al to carry on to pick car shaped objects up and face my nemesis alone. The 200 ft crawl back up our hill. I decide to use the back alleys to wriggle up instead of the main road – the cobbles provide a wee bit of a challenge with traction, a little bit of interest to distract from the pain.

Which never comes. A gear left, I arrive outside our house, slightly damp, slightly out of breath and with vague wonderings about whether trying to make it right to the top of the 500 ft climb would be a good idea, today.

Because you see, it’s there. In my legs, in my lungs, in my body. It’s all there. Even with a cold. Even with barely any fuel. Somewhere, somehow,when I wasn’t looking, the 30 mins walking a day during the week and the over 2 stone lighter – they’ve unlocked a door somewhere in my body that has always been shut. I’ve suddenly discovered what everyone else feels like when they’re riding a bike. My tyre pressure is wrong. My saddle is wrong. My riding position is wrong. Because I am slowly becoming right, right shaped, right minded, right blood pressured, right weighted. I don’t suck at riding bikes. I’ve just been hauling way too much weight and now I’m hauling less, suddenly it’s like the sunshine broke through the clouds. I’m deliberately not basking in the sunshine quite yet, there’s another not inconsiderable amount of way to go before I can say I am the weight I want to be, but if this is the payback on the work done so far, then maybe, just maybe…

The grace will come.

Or; and you will know us by the subtle hints we leave as we pass through your landscape without leaving obvious traces unlike certain other groups of people I know…

Erosion is oft cited as the reason why mountain bikers may not play in the places where historically horse and rider would have headed down without a second thought since there was somewhere they needed to get to at the other end of the path.

I’d like to think about this ridiculousness for a second. We have moved on, in some places, from a time when hopping on a bike and riding in a direction had a purpose at the end of it which was the aim or objective of the ride. So, for example, the weekly shop or the attendance at church. Some of you are probably raising eyebrows right now but I’m one of a rather large bunch of people whose formative years was spent riding into and out of local towns by necessity as the bus service was rubbish and expensive. I rode to work, I rode to visit friends, I rode to the library and eventually to the cinema and to go shopping. 3 speeds, no helmet and other ridiculous behaviour I now acknowledge in retrospect.

But we’ve mostly moved on from a world where the Lake District, for example, was navigable only through horse or bike (or hand pulled cart), valley jumping made possible by an intricate and confusing network of bridleways and cairn markings. So, now, we have bridleways, permissive bridleways, footpaths, and CROW areas – all of which seem intent of demarcation of our countryside into neat little boxes where different types of nature interacter can have their own neat little area which is never uncomfortably intruded on by any other group of user.

It’s a bit ridiculous really. And I’ll tell you why. Mountain bikers, real ones, don’t leave traces. Well okay, they do, but you’ve sort of got to be one to know one. It’s the subtle edging on the corners on the flats or downhills. It’s the fact the erosion is limited to a neat little 30cm wide ridgeway rather than as I’ve just passed on my view from the trainline, the equivalent of a footpath eroded into a motorway as people determinedly walk 4 across. Yes, I know you’ve seen road riders riding 4 or 5 abreast on roads, but please believe me when I say, it’s rare to find mountain bikers doing the same. We don’t like wide tracks, there’s no challenge to that, so we tend to perpetuate our own trails and ensure that we retain the features of the trail that we found attractive in the first place.

Then we come to the fixing the fells lot and the Lake District. It’s not, we note, bridleways which this lot are fixing. It’s footpaths which are needing to be rebuilt,the result of the weekend mass invasion from far and wide to walk up the same hill as everyone else, in the vain hope and aspiration of having 6 seconds on the top of the hill when there isn’t a veritable coachload of others trying to do the same. I’ve walked along bridleways in the Lakes, they’re slightly rocky, slightly challenging, but the only erosion I’ve seen is from what washing away the soil and sand from inbetween the rocks – and from what I can see the rocks are the things which are keeping the path together. So as it happens, horse hooves and bike wheels not tending to fall between the rocks but navigating gently between them, that erosion will continue to only be perpetuated by the water drain off.

This is where my confusion comes from. I get hit with ‘oh but you lot brake hard and leave skid trails all over the place’. Well yes, some of us do. It tends to be the ones of us who are massively out of our depth and probably shouldn’t have been on that path anyway. But how many mountain bikers have you heard of needing Mountain Rescue assistance? Bikers in sandals and hawaii shorts with nowt to drink but a 500ml bottle of water? No? That’s cos the people who generally attempt riding things which are silly and forbidden tend to also be the kind who know exactly what to pack in the morning when faced with a long tiring and potentially dangerous day on the hills.

And don’t get me started on the rubbish. Bikers come with pockets – on the backs of jerseys and usually some kind of accoutrement on the back or bike to deposit litter within. Walkers, I assume, come with the same by nature and yet it isn’t bridleways I find littered with leftover sandwich packets and water bottles. It’s footpaths. And so I can only assume that one group is well trained and well behaved and one is it.

But that’s a mass generalisation isn’t it? If you’re a walker and you’re reading this, think for a second not only how you perceive bikers, but how you yourselves are perceived. We like you. We smile and wave and most of the time you smile and wave back. But some of you don’t seem to want to share the access your forebears fought so hard to obtain and I just don’t understand why. If Scotland can understand that mixed shared use of trails does not mean the end of the world, why can’t we accept the same? Yes, there’s more of us, but there’s also more land to go at. And okay so erosion is an issue – but I don’t know if you’ve noticed that mountain bikers are a generous and kind lot and if you set up donation boxes at the beginning of the big trails, you might find your regeneration fund increasing slightly quicker than it does now.

By shutting us out and continuing to do so, you’re simply forcing us to go underground and use the paths anyway, at night or early in the morning. You might not have noticed that we’re doing that mind – because we leave no trace.

Mile 1. Faff about extricating self from flat and bike from racks. Realise I really have forgotten how to ride the bike. Feel massively intimidated by all the traffic, wobble around all the obstacles on the cycle path along the side of 6 lanes of traffic and thank everything that exists that there is a pavement for me to ride on, even if it feels very much like navigating a blue mountain bike route. Under the subway, out the other side. Park. Dogs. Scary looking dogs. Scarier looking dogs than Lancashire towpath dogs. Flicking gears up and down, up and down, up and down. Clock a hitherto unnoticed cafe in the park and think ‘good meeting point, that’.

Mile 2. Crawl up the non hill at the side of the park. Consider briefly turning around because the legs I thought I had on the flat seem to have abandoned me as soon as the path even attempts at ramping upwards. Pass a runner coming down with a dulux dog. Grin. Get nothing back. Sigh quietly. Cross another 4 lanes of traffic via a footbridge – I’m supposed to dismount but there’s no one on it and it’s a really good test – cornering at slow speeds, pulling up little inclines from standing stopes, navigating the narrow. Down the other side and into the massive leisure centre’s sprawlingly quiet road network. Past the leisure centre leaving the super fit people behind. Arrive at the bridleway cross roads. Feel my shoulders drop and smile for the first time.

Mile 3. Exploring. Getting lost. Discovering what’s on the ground bears no resemblance to the map on my GPS. Ignore the GPS. Have lots of fun wondering all over the place but baulk at riding on a footpath across a golf course even though I’m sure the TFL cycle map says I’m allowed. I’ve still not managed to put a circular route together so today is just riding down anything that looks interesting. Notice I’m not as out of breath as I was last time I came even though it’s been a while since I managed to actually ride my bike. Pass no one. See no one. Feel… free. Finally.

Mile 4. Oh I remember how to climb hills! You’re supposed to pull from your stomach! How on earth did I forget that? I remember how to corner properly! How on earth did I forget that! I remember how to navigate around all this street furniture! How on earth did I forget that! I remember, suddenly, why I do this. Whizz back down all the hills, head to Tesco Express, stuff my Caradice with food, come home.

Best not leave it so long I forget again, huh.

Dear housing developers,

This is how NOT to treat a biker.

Don’t promise what you can’t deliver. Before I moved in, I was told there was a bike cage with a bike rack inside to lock my bike into.

Guess what? I turn up with my £1,000 bike because I don’t have a car and find a bike rack in a car park. Not even bolted to the bloody floor. Good thing I’ve got my super duper bike lock which cost a packet then, isn’t it. Still, it’s convenient so I don’t kick up too much of a fuss.

This evening I came home in a rush because I’ve not been out on my bike in weeks and I needed to ride my bike. If you’re not a cyclist, you will have no comprehension of this – find your nearest biker and ask them.

I got changed, dashed downstairs to the bike racks and found….

An empty space.

The clue as to where the bike racks used to be are the rust marks on the floor. There is no note. There is no sign. There is absolutely nothing at all. Guess what I thought?

Yep. I thought I’d had my second bike in 3 years of riding stolen.

So out the front of the building I go to call Estate Management on the intercom. Who promptly tell me that the bike racks have been moved to the 1st floor.

Off I trot to the 1st floor. No. They have not been moved to the 1st floor, the 1st floor is where the garden is on top of the roof of the car park and no, there are no bike racks there.

So I decide to find out what the UG button in the lift does. I walk out of the carpeted corridor into the car park and get hit by the utter stink of chemicals. And a floor which looks like this:

Which would explain the stink. The lights are on in this picture. When I first entered they were off. Being as how it’s the upper level of a multi-story car park, and the roof is a garden, some light was leaking in, enough to just about make out my bike in the cages back right, but not much. Not much at all. I didn’t feel very safe because there is absolutely nothing else on this floor at all. Just the bike cages (hey they appeared) and the bike racks in them.

I walked on over. It was sticky. I’m a girl. I have no idea what this crap is, it smelt like mentholated spirits. But surely no one would put something dangerous on the floor and then send me down there to find my bike, right?

I wonder over to my bike. Rescue my bike. Discover there is no way out of the area of the car park where my bike has been placed without my consent or any kind of contact whatsoever except for moving this:

Bet the owner of that car is real happy. This is the other side of the fence which I had to swing out and remove to get my bike out of the fenced off bit of the car park, because guess what – that bit of the car park is not ready enough for cars to drive on, but absolutely fine for cyclists with skinny tyres to ride on – that bit of fence is the only way out without taking the bike along some carpeted corridor, through two heavy wooden doors, down in a lift, and out of the front door of the building.

I finally get out. The exit gate is knackered – it keeps opening and closing of its own volition. Go for my ride. Discover there is nothing in my legs. Okay. Fine.

Ride back. Through the knackered gate, swing out the fencing, roll the bike through, swing it back. Up the ramp to the upper floor. Ride to the cages. Nearly wipe out. Realise I’ve been riding with something incredibly slippy coating my tyres and perhaps that might be why my bike hasn’t been feeling too great under me. Rack my bike up. Walk back across the car park:

See that skid mark? Yep, that’s the evidence of me landing on my knee as I skidded, with my hands full variously of water bottle, carradice big seat pack and keys.

My right arm is currently full of pins and needles and is aching and my right knee clicks when I bend down and will probably feel bruised. It hurts when I walk on it.

My hands stink. My shoes stink. No doubt the tyres of my bike are ruined because I am absolutely damned if I am going back downstairs across that floor to wash off my tyres.

Would someone tell me, exactly HOW this is the right way to treat cyclists? I wouldn’t mind but I’m paying a not inconsiderable amount of money for the ‘privilege’ of living here. A privilege which has so far included a cooker extractor which didn’t work, broken lights when I moved in, a washing machine which wasn’t connected, a towel rail which was missing the crucial wire to make it work, a fuse blow hoover and flaking plaster next to the sliding doors as well as multiple scratches on the bottoms of the door tracks themselves. Conveniently none of which was picked up on the professional inventory company which I am expected to pay towards on check out to do a no doubt similarly shoddy job.

My recommendation?

Don’t go near a St George Development with a barge pole. I will be emailing them tomorrow with all these details explaining that if they don’t return my bike to somewhere more accessible where I don’t have to risk falling over to get to it I will be contacting solicitors.

There are some things I should not aspire to do. There are some days I should not have a blog post buzzing around my head. 9 hour days, commutes from hell, big deal presentations to do tomorrow – this should not be the day for the buzzing blog post to rise to the top.

But I stood outside our offices today and I watched the mini pelotons pass, watched the women not sure of herself chasing the wheel of the assured and confident woman in front, shadowing her moves, cutting up the moped to stay on her back wheel and I thought…we’re all chasing someones wheel.

I rode at the weekend and found a bridleway of muddy joy 2 minutes from 6 lanes of traffic. I found almost 300 feet of hill to climb and enjoyed every second of it. I navigated with pride the pedestrian bridges twists and steep push offs in silly gears and I saw a man staring in the Quick Fit forecourt and wondered what he was staring at.

I chased my shadow down the bridleway and the squirrels too. I chased my thoughts as well. Big moves, big deals, chasing them all away to find the burn, find the blank, find the stress relief and the place inside my mind where it all makes sense.  I rode back down the gentle incline again, a little faster, a little more sure of myself, back to the bridge road crossing. Find policemen gently guiding a lost looking lady into a police car. Smile. Am smiled at back. The football lads shouted ‘header!’ as the ball headed towards me, a snatch of ‘wow that’s gross’ lost in the distance as speed bumps disappeared beneath my wheels.

I love it there. I love that place. It doesn’t matter whether my wheels are on fire road, singletrack, chippings, slate, wooden slats or chicken wire – I am always there. The quiet happy serene gentle focused place.

I’m reading a book about a pair of blokes doing the Great Divide run from Canada to Mexico. 2,500 miles. It’s like an itch I keep coming back to. I can’t explain it. It’s linear. I don’t want to race it.  I’m scared of bears and I am pathetically useless right now at packing my bike lightweight. But you can buy bear scarers, you can be sensible with your food, you can learn to pack lightweight, you can do it easily when you’re small enough to fit into the super lightweight stuff that’s being manufactured, you can save the money that’s needed for equipment and food and transport and flights.

But most of all, you don’t have to race. Cycling is not about racing. It’s not about getting there. It’s never been about arriving. Who cares what’s at the end? The end means no more corners to peek around the corner of.

No. If I’m going to do it, if I’m going to make the commitment to myself, before I’m 4o, to do something a little bit ridiculous, it will not be to race it. It will be to know how it feels. Because reading about some things just isn’t enough to make the nagging little whispers go away.

Chuck clothes on. Don’t think about it too much, notice 3/4 leggings are now full length, notice the padding is not quite sitting where it should, that the base layer is comfortable and the layer over is perfect. Throw combats on, notice they’re bagging around my tummy but keep them on because I need to move. Socks, top layer, shoes, out.

Pedal. Don’t really notice a thing. Drop down the hill, leave the car well behind, realising in passing my braking is much more confident and I’m leaving it later but being more efficient, corner, turn, up onto the Greenway. No thinking about avoiding my guards when turning, feet in right position. Leave a slightly confused looking lad behind me with his super charged remote control toy car. Onto the road. Pedal. Never ridden this road before. Pedal. Notice the gradient climbing, switch gears. Pedal.

It’s a long hill. It’s got a few steep bits and it carries on, all the way from Rishton into Blackburn. Pedal. Pass the runners chatting with gears left. Pass the other runners slightly slower, still gears left. Cars whizz by but they’re not my problem any more – it’s not for me to take evasive action, it’s for them, I’m just drifting in the focus that hill climbing gives us all, a slight conscious decision to monitor my cadence, keep it smooth, no rocking, no blips, trying to keep it elegant and my breathing out of breath but my heart rate running right where it needs to be – up but comfortable.

Onwards and a biker nearly runs into the back of me off a side road to the left. Mutter.  After a mile of climbing I need a drink so stop because I can’t quite get my head around drinking while riding on roads yet. He passes me. Walking. In the road. Boggle. Two roadies also pass me, but they’re not whizzing past, and I briefly wonder about trying to catch them. Decided not to. Grip the hoods, pull and push, that beautiful synergy of energy transference that I only found a few weeks ago and now love so much. Briefly acknowledge I’m acclerating up a hill and grin a bit.

Pass the man walking his bike up the hill. He’s younger than me. I’m confused, then leave it. Don’t see the roadies again but that’s ok. Into the traffic of Blackburn and everyone is courteous and polite and gives me space. Beat a pretty land rover off the lights. He nods as he passes. I nod back. 22lbs lighter with the calf muscles of someone 22lbs bigger and I’m pushing and the bike is responding almost instantly. Still gears left.

Onto the canal. Sit in the sunshine, to text Al. Bask. Take pictures. Know there’s another 5-6 miles home and feel nothing. Emptiness. It’s just a number. All there is is the right way and the wrong way and an acceptance that I’m just going to ride it.

I have left some things on the hill I climbed today. Fear. Shame. The mental image in my head of a hippopotamus on a bike. The idea that I will never ride my bike on a road without abuse being shouted. Embarassment and the ease of giving up.

If I can keep this muscle power through the next few stone weight loss…there’s someone I’d like to go on a road ride with. Well, actually, there’s a few people I’d really like to go on a road ride with. And know I wont be dropped. Know I can keep up. That’s the aim. I reckon we’ll be there by August or so.

Standing outside a station in the freezing cold. Smoking. Yes, I know. Sugar Free Red Bull clutched in one hand and suitcase handle in the other. Day dreaming. Enjoying briefly that beautiful moment while I can before I quit again of the silence and the mind drift and the almost day dreaming though never quite managing to and…

Click.

Head snaps up, contemplation disappearing like my smoke wisps in the wind. Unmistakeable sound. Unmistakeable heart thud. Unmistakeable blood surge.

The sounds of riding out bikes are not confined to riding our bikes. They ripple through the air in front of us when we least expect it and snap us back into the here and now, a reminder that tomorrow, or the day after, or this weekend, there will be the same sounds, the same ridiculous looking clothing and we wont care because we’d rather be in that ridiculous clothing than this ridiculous clothing which most of us despise wearing but know we must in order to blend in and not show our true dirt loving colours.

Just one click.

30 minutes of day dreaming of the perfect bit of singletrack.

Last year I got a GPS for xmas. So one year later, I’ve ridden 356 miles. Except I know I’ve ridden more because I didn’t always remember to take the gps with me on rides where I knew where I was going. Well duh, why would you. Except of course, now I know. Data.

Flicking through my activities list there are some big numbers ridden. 20 and 30 mile rides up and down dale. But they’re just numbers, a list of data that doesn’t mean anything to me until I remember the actual rides themselves.

I’m a bit of a secret data addict – I love spreadsheets, love finding the stories in data, love tracking trends and producing shiny graphs and infographics to make it easier for people to understand the enormity of numbers. But when it comes to my own – well what does 350 miles mean?

I suppose for someone who was over 19 stone, quite a lot. I pushed that 19 stone up a lot of hills with muscles far stronger and connected than they had any right to be.  Eventually I stopped sweating and panting and started to serenely climb hills, looking forward to the quiet peace which comes from there being nothing else in the world but getting to the top. I found quiet in my mind and quiet lanes out in the countryside. I found bike handling skills which meant I rode my cross bike on roads the same way I would a mountain bike, cornering and leaning and body position just so, no skidding, no skittering, just glee at preserving momentum. I mastered flicking bar end gears instead of thumb shifting and I finally learnt about using gears properly both up and down in order to not end up expending too much energy on the climbs.

I met some amazing people and got to know some others better. I learn that in the same way football can be the glue of social chatter, so too can a love of the Tour De France. I watched men destroy themselves to win and understood, just a little, every such a little, the pain but also the weird pleasure in stripping everything in your body back, that place where your mind has gone walkabout but your body carries on functioning anyway because it knows it has to and getting to the end is all that matters.

I rode 5 of the 7 Stanes in a day. I spent some time with someone awesome whose quietness rubbed off on me a little. I got a few nasty lesson in fuelling and took them with me too. I lost all embarrassment at my body in a car park somewhere in Scotland and understood that power comes in many packages and mines just a little bit different.

I lost a stone. Already it’s making pedalling a different experience. It’s more pleasurable but it’s tempered none of the determination to push as hard as possible up hills. My breath is ragged now because I’ve set out with the express intention of making it so, not because I’m out of control and unfit enough that simply pedalling makes me out of breath.

I over took people slower than me. Hundreds I think. And in the middle of a sportive entered by just under a 1,000 people I found a whole entire road to myself and felt something else, a feeling I’d not felt since I came second in a cross country race a really really long time ago. I felt achievement. It hurt, and there were tears, but people sponsored and were kind and the money went somewhere incredibly important and it was worth every second for the click which happened on that road alone.

So that was the last year. What of the next?

I’ve got some targets. I want to go back and complete 7 of the 7 Stanes. But the main target I suspect will help with that – to be a size 14 by next Xmas. Realistically, really realistically, it will be an easy target to hit and I should, by that point, have been a size 14 for some time. But size isn’t everything of course, fitness is. So along with that, I need to ride a lot of miles, and a lot of road miles at that, to build a set of muscles which will take me up the hills I want to climb.

I want to go on a mini adventure. Lots of mini adventures. I want to enter the Singletrack silliness at Lee Quarry this year – but there are a tonne of other things I want to do too.

But ultimately, really, all I want to do is ride my bike. Everything else is a bonus. I just want to ride my bike. Lots. I want to break my Brooks saddle in and I want to ride the drops on my handlebars comfortably. I want to learn how to really take my cross check off road and make it earn its keep. I want to commute to work in sunshine and I want to sit on the top of a mountain and know I can ride all the way back down.

But most of all, very most of all, I want to be able to ride in a group of people, a big group of people, and just keep up. Be in the middle somewhere. Drift around and chat a bit. Relax enough about my fitness that sparing conversation wont impact on my ability to complete the ride. Because if you’ve ridden with me and found me quiet – that’s why. I am not a fun person to ride with at the moment. I conserve breath because I need to.

By this time next year, I want to be able to ride with the girls and keep up. That’s all.

That’ll do.

It’s just like riding a bike, people often say. People who I can see are strangers to the wonders of matt lycra. Who don’t understand Presta vs Schrader and why knowing which you are is important. Who are oblivious to the snaking networks of connected shortcuts littering out urban landscapes (and our rural ones too).

But the thing is, they’re right. Even if they haven’t been on a bike in 20 years, they’re right. Getting back in the saddle after a rather embarrassing few months off is…well…just like getting back on a bike.

I can remember which way to flick the gear changes on the end of my odd looking but much loved drops. I can remember where the edges of the big wheel to small wheel cross overs are before the chain jumps. I can remember always to have my opposite leg at the top of the rotation when turning left or right so as not to bump into the mudguard. I can remember to switch down before decelerating and back up again after bridges, my dog dodging foo is strong and my people dodging skills are even stronger.

What I can’t remember, it transpires is how to work my works on both types of valves pump leading to my standing by the side of the canal towpath as people passed me by in oblivion as I utterly forgot how to work not only the pump but the valves on the tyres as well.

Not my finest hour. So instead I nursed the poor limping  Cross Check home distributing weight carefully so as not to let the rims hit the bumps.

But.

The sounds of the wind whistling in my ears, of moor hens splashing, of fish jumping in the stillness of the canal behind me, of birds circling and the colour of the sky in the distance over the Bowland Fells. The beauty of the brief silences in the lee of afternoon walkers from Blackburn, Rishton and Church. Inside nature instead of bubbled away from it, experiencing instead of just seeing it.

I’m a stone lighter, and oddly it makes a difference. I push and the bike just goes. I’m running in the same gears  before I stopped. I can sprint up the little hills still but the biggest difference is my riding position. I am comfortable, finally, riding on the hoods. Not on the drops, that’s going to be another 2 stone or so, but for know I’ll settle for pulling on the hoods, head bobbing and feeling the acceleration that no one is generating but me.

I don’t much care how silly I look any more. My weight is going the right way – down.  And the power in my legs is still there. And really, that’s all that matters to me right now.

Merry Xmas :O)

Appropriately named place is appropriately named

It looked innocuous enough, the route I’d planned.

Figure of 8, nice and simple. Admittedly, we’d never ridden any of it before, but it looked fine on Basecamp. 1000 feet of ascent, 7.8 miles – should be easy compared to what we’ve done before.

This was not easy.

The first inkling something was wrong was when the bridleway running over a track indicated on the map turned out to be a tractor wide ditch with something approaching a stagnant stream and reeds growing voraciously down it. I say down it because the gradient was not unrideable but it was definitely a climb.

No, the issue was not the gradient. The issue was initially the miniature ponies. You see what Basecamp and the OS maps within it don’t tell you is that the first farm we passed was the home of Only Foals and Horses. No, I’m not making it up.

So after my other half negotiated passage with the guard ponies by the gate, and they all attempted to consume his bike we discovered the next obstacle. Bogs. Lots of bogs. Stunning effort geologically, that the water even managed to stay in one place long enough to create one considering the gradient, but there you are. Ankle deep intermittent slodging. Interspersed with occasional riding.

Get to the top. Scare off some sheep. Through a farm yard with barking accompanied by a rather worrying thudding against some corrugated iron. Onto the Grane. Past a photographer with tripod looking way to cool to be out in the middle of nowhere on a windy moor. Yell ‘nice shot’ as I pass – well it will be.

Play hunt the bridleway. Find the bridleway. Lose the bridleway. Through another farms yard. Find the bridleway. Lose the bridleway. Over a style.

Fun descent down a track through puddles and mud. Yelps echo from in front as partner discovers perils of not scoping trail ahead in winter. Much laughter.

Another ridiculous climb, past a row of terrace houses clinging tenuously to the  side of yet another steep but thankfully short incline. Feel a teeny bit like landed in Kansas. Sit. Listen to complete silence inbetween Cockerels crowing.

Hear the unmistakeable tap of crutches. Around the corner comes a 12 or so year old lad, crutches slipping and sliding on the choppy surface of an unadopted road which hasn’t seen fresh tarmac in 30 or more years.

‘You’re brave’ I say. He smiles and pauses ‘what happened?’
‘Fell off a motorbike’ grins sheepishly. ‘I bet it was worth it?’ and off he taps again. Don’t realise until later there was mud on my glasses, my face, my helmet……well everywhere, truly. Didn’t think maybe……maybe.

Onwards. Road descent. Cross as it’s not the point of today, though make a mental note to bring the Cross Check back. Turn onto what we think is a fine thing to ride, as it’s a footpath on a track. Turns out, no, the track doesn’t make it okay. Definitely doesn’t make it okay. Find a slightly trying not to be too cross farmer at the end of a difficult sluchy sloshy slurry filled climb. Gasp apologies. Get permission to ride on up the now tarmaced track. Make suitably grateful gasps.

Climb some more. And more. Admire the views. See the houses at the top of the hill we’re heading for. Realise that according to the Basecamp route we’re now half way around. Turn onto road. More climbing. Shove the last of the jelly babies in. Raid the pub for some emergency fuel. Make the executive decision to cut the ride short and not do the other bit of the 8. Crawl up the hill. Back across the farmyard with the rubber dogs. Back down the bog covered bridleways, back wheel skittering, off the brakes for the first time all day.

As you will notice if you click the route summary at the top, final distance and ascent on the ground equalled the total of the predicted route doing the full figure of 8. Yeah. Basecamp is officially dumped.

The moral of this story?

It’s all miles in the bank. It’s all route finding experience.

The post title?

No word of a lie, as I reached the end of the last little bit of track to arrive back on Haslingden Old Road, past me there swept, silently and gracefully, a peloton of road riders – around 15 or so. Multi coloured jerseys, all black lycra shorts, silent and serene.

Swans and hippos my friends, swans and hippos.