On the Road Bike (33 page)

And epic? You can keep your epic.

The rain was hammering down, now.

We rode as quickly as we could to the start of the 115-mile ‘sportive' ride in Minehead, trying to warm up. The early-morning rain stung, and it was hard to keep your eyes fully open to the spray. Against our better judgement, we formed an impromptu and very poorly executed ‘paceline', each rider trying to shelter behind the wheel of the bike in front. One of our number, wearing many hundreds of pounds' worth of cycling clothing, some of it Rapha, and sitting atop a celeste green Bianchi road bike, touched his brakes as he battered along a stretch of dual carriageway. Thus it was that Joad Raymond, one of the country's leading experts on the works of John Milton, found himself skidding on a painted white line at the side of the road. He slammed into the tarmac, ripping open a hole in his badger-skin cycling shorts, and beneath that, his buttocks. (I may have embroidered the badger-skin detail. But the buttocks, I stand by.)

We all stopped, and did our best to help him onto his feet. We looked at his bike as the rain continued to rattle on our helmets. It seemed to be OK, but Joad wasn't. After gingerly accompanying us to the start, he rode back to his car, and abandoned the venture. He'd trained hard for the event, and had evidently been keen to explore how he shaped up against the rest of our delusional little group. We all commiserated with him, but were secretly delighted it wasn't us. Later on that day, Joad would find deep bruising appearing like ink on blotting paper all across his torso.

The rest of our number then lined up in the half-light on the seafront at Minehead and, with nerves on edge, eyes on stalks and shivering from the cold and wet, we set off as a group to climb onto Exmoor and to head for an unimaginably distant finish line on the south coast.

We, being MAMILs, had mistaken this for fun.

Fun, real fun, comes for free. It is part of the package we are born with, an inbuilt DNA reflex that lasts a lifetime but morphs into many forms. At first, fun is simply gurgling with newborn pleasure at the sight of a light fitting on the ceiling. With the advent of walking and running, however, fun gains in scope and sophistication. Fun, for at least a decade, is mainly based around three things: getting muddy, doing damage to stuff which has cost your parents' money and torturing indigenous British wildlife.

But gradually, with puberty and beyond, things take a more sinister turn. Fun is no longer as charmingly innocent and as one-dimensional as the naïve impulse to smash to pieces your best friend David's expensively assembled toy car collection with the lead weight from a grandfather clock. (He joined in, by the way, it wasn't just me. And anyway some of them were already dented before.)

As soon as we are legally able to vote, a darkly assertive, masochistic drive begins to take hold. Ingesting six pints of premium lager and a kebab made inedible by the application of at least an inch of chilli sauce may well be a profoundly rewarding pastime, but it is not necessarily the answer to man's quest for existential authenticity. Yet, this is the mystifying path British youth willingly treads, a wobbly route back from the pub spattered with undignified bouts of sickness and impromptu trips to non-existent urinals. It is, technically, ‘fun'. But it requires stamina, strength, money and determination to turn dizziness, nausea and bankruptcy into amusement.

By the time the beer and kebabs penetrate at a cellular level the firm, muscular flesh of male youth, turning it incrementally to a sad flab hanging over the belt, the fun-seeker is staring, with ghastly inevitability, at the cold heart of his fortieth birthday.

Now, and only now, for the MAMIL it begins. The horror has hit home. The presence of a dependant or two often amplifies the angst, suggesting, quite accurately, that a generation has been reared that is ready, and cold-bloodedly willing, to take the place of the one that went before.

The problem for the British MAMIL (is there an equivalent overseas?) is that he doesn't feel forty, and has, periodically, to check his own birth certificate to be sure. If the baby boomers who went before us were prematurely aged by wearing suits and having stable careers and affordable mortgages, then the generation to which this current army of MAMILs belongs is just the opposite: stubbornly immature. Their fortieth year, rather than being meticulously planned for, comes up from behind and mugs them, like the best man might assault the groom on a stag night.

In their panic, they have to get away. Literally. For some, this involves having an affair. For many, it involves facial hair or flowery, fitted shirts. For others, huge numbers of British others, it involves bicycles. ‘Fun' has been reinvented again. Now it must be worked at. ‘Fun' can only co-exist with ‘pain'. Sacrifice and reward is the Brailsford mantra: not something you need to tell a MAMIL.

A perfect day out for the afflicted seems often to involve a degree of misery on wet, cold roads, attempting rides of ill-advised length, where the only quantifiable joy is stopping.

Which brings us back onto a drizzle-whipped, blustery Exmoor.

Ten miles into the ride, after the initial enthusiastic bubble of conversation had popped, we had started our first ‘climb' of the day.

Climbs in Britain are often short, but they make up for this by being brutally steep. This, I was once told by a professional rider, was because road builders on these shores have tended to favour the direct route over an obstacle, rather than the gradient-sparing, circuitous alternative of the switchback, beloved of sophisticated Continentals. I can't help feeling a bit let down by our nation's road builders on this one. I can't even really blame the Romans, since I gather they were fairly active on the Continent for a while, too. It's just something we have to live with over here.

Mercifully, this climb was neither short nor steep. It was longish, and shallowish. Satisfyingly, there was enough of a gradient for sweat to saturate the foamy compound that sat between my bike helmet and my head, and then run down my temples. This was an important accessory. Without sweat, the MAMIL feels no sense of achievement.

It was a leisurely enough ascent for me to maintain a respectable speed, or, at least, the illusion of a respectable speed (cycling always feels fast when there is no one faster than you for comparison). I was able to keep the bike moving steadily and more-or-less straight. It is when you start to climb at less than walking pace, on gradients of 20 per cent, that you begin to wonder what, quintessentially, is the point of the bicycle. Beyond a certain gradient, it becomes impossible to push the cranks any longer, the back wheel spins around without purchase, and, well, you fall off. At this point a bicycle is an encumbrance, something of great beauty that is no longer fit for purpose, like trying to use a clarinet as a makeshift funnel for decanting yoghurt.

Our little group, which, minus the unfortunate Joad, had set out together, began to splinter. People climb at very different speeds. I was surprised and horrified to discover that, while I was very far from being the best, I was also quite some distance from being the worst. In fact I quickly established, to my growing disappointment, that riding uphill was something I wasn't shockingly bad at. I should rephrase that: something I felt I could do marginally better than dreadfully.

This was not necessarily good news. Nobody actually likes climbing. It is gruelling and it is masochistic. The thought that it was my ‘strong suit' depressed me greatly. I would now have to make an unpleasant experience still more unpleasant by trying really hard at it. Just to show everyone (including myself) how almost-not-too-bad I was.

Flanked by a couple of other riders I had never met before, I crested the top of the hill. In fact, in common with lots of quixotic British ‘climbs', the uphill bit just kind of petered out, indeterminately. There was no summit to speak of, no defining crest. There was no vista, just more trees and a road leading off into an unremarkable and curvaceous middle distance. The pressure eased in my legs, and I stopped pedalling. And that was where it all went wrong.

In an instant my rear wheel froze solid. My bike, in a violent attempt to throw me over the bars, settled instead for the equally painful, much more effective and significantly less glamorous tactic of ramming my genitalia firmly against the stem. The freewheel mechanism had suddenly locked up, stopping my back wheel as certainly as if you'd stuffed a poker in the spokes. I came to a juddering, lopsided, leg-splayed, almost-upright halt. One leg grounded, the other still clipped into a bike which was suddenly, violently crippled.

This was a problem. We had a hundred miles still to ride, and we were in the middle of Exmoor. I tried my phone. There was a bit of signal, but no obvious number to ring. I wondered vaguely if my dad wouldn't mind driving out to pick me up. But then I remembered he lived in Scotland.

Bikes, or at least bits of bikes, are profoundly boring.

Yes, I have owned bikes in which I have invested inexplicable emotion. But I have done this in the same way that a racehorse owner will turn up occasionally at the stables to admire his thoroughbreds, and then let someone else muck them out and fine tune them for race day. I have no idea how they work, and, frankly, I couldn't care less.

There is a whole grammar to be absorbed and observed by cycling enthusiasts. Often it relates to gear ratios. 53 x 24. 48 x 36. Or, let's try another: 36 x 22. I would wager that not one of these actually exists. Already there will be people clicking their tongues disdainfully at my wilful ignorance. Let them click.

But I do know that, despite their commonplace functionality, and semi-antique design (how much have they changed, really, in sixty years?), they contain a mystifyingly high number of working parts. Thousands, perhaps.

I know this, because when help finally arrived, my bike's back wheel was opened up and laid bare in all its miniature glory.

When I first came to a juddering halt, there were almost a dozen soulmates who stopped with me. But after a two-hour wait for assistance in the sporadic rain, their number had dwindled to three or four, and, eventually, none. In the end it was just Andy, the mechanic, and me.

By the time he finally found the offending pin, or whatever the minute component was that had prevented my wheel from turning, I had turned almost entirely blue with the chill. He removed it with the precision of a surgeon, and sent me off again, with the warning that ‘at any given moment it might lock up again. Maybe on a descent.' He advised me to ‘go easy'. I looked at him aghast.

I was quite alone. I pushed on, aware that I had a hundred miles of undulating road still ahead, and that I was older than forty.

I rode for another ten or fifteen miles on my own. It was awful, lonely stuff. The route followed a river that bent round again, headed north and dropped off Exmoor. I hit the coast in a little town, and there I found a group of about half-a-dozen guys who had decided to wait for me. Most of them had been complete strangers before that morning. I was so touched I nearly wept. Instead I just wiped my nose and shook them one by one with my snotty-gloved hand.

I have made friends on a bike. That day, running up and down the contours of a county whose topography simply doesn't know how to unwind and relax, I forged a few friendships with a couple of blokes. I still ride with them every now and then, when we get the chance. When I started to cycle, in my mid-thirties, it was decidedly not my intention to meet new people. In fact, I was fairly sure I'd met enough people in my life already. But I was wrong. Cycling's proved me wrong.

This is not to make any exceptional claims on behalf of this sport. Any team activity bonds people together. But there's an understanding for, and a patience with, the strengths and weaknesses of others that I have found, at times, moving. The courtesy of giving someone a tow by letting them slipstream behind you when they are struggling is as rewarding for the donor as it is for the recipient. Everyone, too, must climb at their own pace, safe in the knowledge that if the ride splits up into pieces on a hill, the first to get to the top will wait for the pack to re-form.

People share: expertise, kit, flapjacks, water. And people share themselves.

There are those whom I have known for years, but with whom I thought I had nothing in common, who have become close confidants. I had a colleague who was a shy man in his mid-forties. He was undergoing a rather ghastly divorce and had been forced out of the family home. In order to remain close to his children, he rented a one-bedroom flat near to their school, and cycling became his surrogate emotional life. He joined a club, and rode thirty or forty miles most days when he could. He told me once, with a glint of mad love in his eye, how he had drilled two substantial hooks above the fireplace in his tiny living room. That was where, nightly, after he had washed and dried it, he would hang his bike.

‘Sometimes, a whole evening will pass, Ned. And I'll not have moved from my armchair. I'll just have been staring at it.'