On the Road Bike (34 page)

I must have been staring at him, since he added, meekly, ‘I love that bike, Ned.'

Far from scoffing at the absurdity of his obsession, I find myself nodding at him, with him. I understand his devotion to the bike, even if I cannot share in his deification, the bond built up between aluminium and deluded fool. Those hours spent gazing down and seeing in minute detail the stem, the bar tape, the brake levers. The gentle ticking of the chain and swish of rubber on tarmac is a fertile bed for reflection. Something appreciative, open and calming comes with each pedal turn. Mile by mile, often unwittingly, a fraction more of a rider's nature is revealed. The rhythm of the road sets the rhythm in the head, loosening with each turn. This is not a race, and nor should it be. This is a ride.

And so, Steve and Jim, Rob and Luke, Simon, John and the rest of the apostles, have become very particular types of friend. I see them seldom, if truth be told, but when I do, then time passes easily. Like in a pleasant dream, when the ride is over, I have no recollection of the dialogue. Only certain images, specific sensations endure in the memory.

That's how I explain that over the course of two or three hours of plugging on, up and down hills, in the company of this band of virtual strangers, only a few moments have lodged with any clarity. Once we got stuck behind a muck-spreader, and inhaled cow-shit for twenty minutes. And another time I dropped off the front of our proud but rather feeble line of riders who had been sheltering behind to avoid the worst of a headwind. I had been determinedly setting the pace for what felt like half an hour, but in reality was probably only five minutes, and as I pulled away, exhausted and free-wheeling back, I felt a hand gently at my back, and the grizzly West Midlands voice of a wiry bloke called Andy saying, ‘You're strong, boy, you are.'

At that moment, I felt like a world champion. Because Andy from Dudley reckoned I wasn't bad.

At a feed station after eighty-five miles, the worst of this interminable ride was surely done.

At least that's what I thought, as I hobbled through a village hall that had been requisitioned for the occasion, hungrily scooping up cakes as I went. It was only shortly after I had eaten my third slice of Victoria sponge that my bowels registered their presence for the first time that day.

Extreme amounts of cycling seem to have a curious effect on your natural rhythms. The body, in its concern that you might end up running out of food and water, tends to absorb more of it, and lets far less simply go to waste. Basically, what I'm saying is, you can go for hours without going. The year I ran the London Marathon, I drank fourteen pouches of Lucozade, followed fairly swiftly by two cans of Grolsch, before I even slightly felt the urge. It was most curious.

But now, and with an unanticipated urgency, I knew I had to act. I headed for the toilet, which, given that we were almost the last riders on the sportive (my mechanical incident had slowed us down by two hours) had already been used by several thousand MAMILs, not all of whom had fully signed up to the universal toilet principle enshrined in British common law of leaving the place in the same state in which you would like to find it. It was a mess, but, as I locked the door behind me, I couldn't have cared less. Only then did I encounter a sudden, unforeseen problem.

This ride was a new experience for me in more ways than one. It wasn't just the distance involved, it was also the clothing I had chosen. Because, for the first time in my life, and for reasons I still cannot understand, I was wearing bib shorts. I continue to wear them to this day, but have failed to grasp what it is I think I am achieving by doing so, other than conforming with the aspirant world of the MAMIL.

These strange devices, for those of you who may be unaware, combine the absurdity of the padded Lycra short and its over-engineered seat with the grotesque aesthetics of the mankini. The male human form, sporting only a pair of bib shorts, is risible. There is no other way to describe it.

In addition, as I was about to discover, there was another entirely undesirable side effect of bib-short wearing. A pee is manageable without the need to undress entirely. Evidence for this technique's application in the pro-peloton is abundantly clear if you watch any race live on the TV, though these are the bits of footage which have usually been tidied up in time for the more family-friendly highlights shows.

Anything more than a humble pee, though, requires the weary cyclist to undress almost entirely. You get the picture.

The problem was though, that I couldn't. The hours of riding had left me with a pair of virtually useless shoulders, just about the last body part I imagined would become impaired by sitting on a bicycle. It must have been the transferred strain of bracing myself against the handlebars, but for whatever reason, I had lost most of the mobility in my upper arms. I couldn't lift them above chest height. As if weighted down with dumbbells, they simply wouldn't rise to the occasion, which meant that I couldn't reach the shoulder straps of my mankini. I started to panic, picking at the material with my teeth, trying to yank the straps off with increasingly desperate sideways jerks of the head. It was all in vain. I was stuck, in a toilet in Devon, in bib shorts.

Already I knew that this was going to be a test of a friendship. I retrieved my phone, and dialled a number. I listened to it ringing in on the other side of the toilet door.

‘Matt?' I ventured, timidly. ‘I'm in the bog.'

Cycling is a very bonding experience. Often in unexpected ways.

We pushed on for home.

‘I think I would like to get out and ride my bike for a bit now.' Matt Rendell's dry one-liner wasn't particularly witty, but it hit the spot. Already tired to the point of wanting to weep, I cried with laughter. There was only the absurd, quivering impulse to remount, and get to this cursed, arbitrary finishing line.

Our legs were hollow, useless and British. Our humour, it now seemed, was just the same.

So, to our own surprise, we set off again. It seemed such a small distance, given how far we felt we had ridden, but the final thirty miles just wouldn't give up and leave us alone. They took us down to the south coast of Devon, and into Sidmouth. There we hit the sea front, and a howling headwind, which led us neatly to the foot of Peak Hill.

There had been much talk of Peak Hill all day and for most of the weeks and months before that, as our group of intrepid middle-aged fools swapped their worries and advice in a series of increasingly panicked emails. It had assumed an awful status in our minds, it would prove our undoing, would provoke our collapse. Peak Hill. Approach, all, with awe and fear beating in your heart.

The climb began.

As the tarmac reared up, so too did the tension. I could feel an artery above my ears begin to swell with blood and thump quite alarmingly. I was taken back in an instant to an image of my old history teacher, who had an appallingly active ‘head-vein', which throbbed more and more visibly the deeper he delved into the background politics of the American Civil War. Perhaps cycling would have helped him too. Lost in such thoughts, my legs turned over and on I climbed.

For all of four minutes. At which point it was all over. I mean, it was unutterably unpleasant, obviously, but it stopped quite abruptly. It is amazing how everything passes, given time.

With Peak Hill conquered, a silver dagger planted squarely through its black heart, we then hurried for home, or rather Teignmouth. And I say ‘hurried', but perhaps ‘held on for grim death' would be slightly more accurate.

At one point, I heard, above the roar of a main road, one of my co-sufferer's bike computers emitting a beep, which denoted the passing of a mile. Steve turned to me, with a smile, and congratulated me on having just ridden a hundred miles.

‘Your first century, Ned. Well done.'

There was no ceremony, no daubing my forehead with the entrails of a magpie, nor tying me to a stake dressed in a bridal gown, but I felt uncommonly proud of my achievement and, for the first time since our shaky start in the Somerset gloom, ‘one of them'.

And eventually, it was done. By the time we crossed the line, beaming, covered in crusty layers of perspiration and snot, our party had been whittled back down to just four. Almost nobody was there to watch us, four abreast, nor were any of the casual onlookers even vaguely interested in the immensity of our mission, and the glorious poetry of its execution.

It is often the way with greatness, that it goes unappreciated in its own backyard.

I wish I wasn't a MAMIL. There is almost nothing about the species, seen from the outside and, indeed, observed from the inside, which isn't at best laughable, and at worst, ghastly. And when compared with the more exotic leisure rider from the Continent, whose numbers feature many more women, considerably more pensioners and a large cohort of terrifyingly able children, the narrow demographics of the British MAMIL are depressingly slight.

But this is what I am. No use pretending otherwise.

That evening a clutch of us, including the heroic, battered Joad who'd put his bike in the boot of his Saab, and driven all the way to the finish to be with us, sat in a truly disgusting pub in Torbay and ate the worst fish and chips we have ever been served. Fortunately the beer was just as bad, so at least there were no discrepancies.

It tasted bloody brilliant.

The next day, with £24,000 of bikes back on the top of a car worth less than £500, we drove home again. Our dander was up.

IRRITATINGLY, ON MY
way out of an NCP car park in Liverpool, I ripped off my roof rack, bruised my bike and bent all four doors to my car.

Seen from any one of a dozen CCTV cameras pointed down at my stationary vehicle, the accident must have seemed comically avoidable. There was no clear and present danger; just a Renault Scenic with a man behind the wheel trying to exit an otherwise deserted car park one Friday morning.

I had wound down the window, pulled the car park ticket from between my teeth, and slotted it into the machine. As the ticket was ingested, and the barrier prepared to rise, a moment of time elapsed that was short enough to have passed by inconsequentially, but long enough, surely, for me to have understood the impossible physics of the manoeuvre I was about to execute.

It was like this. I had a bike on a roof rack. Ahead of me was an exit barrier with restricted headroom, clearly marked with the words ‘Restricted' and ‘Headroom'. The barrier went up, I slipped the clutch and drove forward. It was, in short, a bit bloody stupid.

The sound was visceral. A crack, followed by a boom, which faded into a teeth-clenching ripping, metallic howl as the clips that held the roof rack to the car heaved free of their homes, bending the metal of all four car doors as they did so. A twang.

Then a tiny slice of silence, as I sat in my car in horror, eyes raised roofwards.

Next came a comedic clatter, like the cartoon dustbin lid that continues to spin long after the collision. But that wasn't quite it. The bike falling over was the last noise, slapping sideways onto what remained of the roof rack. This produced a cacophony of clattering spokes and chains and pedals all resonating their own distress like an orchestra (whose members all hate each other) warming up in order to perform a particularly unpleasant contemporary symphony.

I sat still, my hands on the wheel. I wore Wallace's grin from
The Wrong Trousers,
with the ticket held once again between my teeth.

Then the barrier came down, blocking my exit.

It was a good job that the man I was about to visit had a refined sense of slapstick.

Tony Hewson was the winner of the 1955 Tour of Britain, a veteran of the 1959 Tour de France, and the author of two fine books on his experiences. As one of British cycling's pioneering road racers, he had traversed the Continent in a retired ambulance that doubled up as a makeshift mobile home to three aspiring cyclists. Bits falling off and the regular heart-stopping mechanicals were a fact of life for him and his band of unlikely comrades, They were known as ‘Les Nomades du Vélo Anglais', which he used as the subtitle for his excellent memoirs
In Pursuit of Stardom
. Tony's writing is full of encounters with chaste French ladies in the confined space of the ambulance, bumping heads and tripping over tables. His life on the road was like a monochrome episode of
Terry and June
, but set in July, and in France. He had a career like a particularly awkward-to-unfold deckchair.

And yet, when it came to owning up to my moment of mechanical chaos, I still hadn't quite the courage to admit my folly to him. An hour after the incident, and en route to visit him, I was still adjusting myself me
ntally to the havoc I had inflicted on my self-esteem and my possessions. I was going to be a bit late, too, which I hated.

I dialled his number and waited till he picked up his phone. ‘Hi Tony.'

‘Is that you, Ned?'

‘It is. Listen, Tony, I may be a bit late.'

I was standing in a windy, drizzle-flecked car park outside Birkenhead, while a man in a Halfords boiler suit wrenched at the mangled remains of a roof rack with a crow bar. He stopped and, dropping the tool down temporarily to his side, actually scratched his head in the way that you might imagine someone acting a perplexed mechanic in a second-rate drama would do.

‘I've had a problem with my car. They're just having a quick look at it.'

I did not dare confess that the damage I had done had started with a serious injury to a bicycle. I had learned after a few years of exposure to cyclists, that harming bikes, as well as neglecting them by failing to clean them and allowing them to rust, was sacrilegious. The bike, in whatever form, was an object of reverence. Like the idol of any cult, the bicycle inspires great passions, peculiar sensibilities and blind devotion. Turning up to an appointment with an ex-pro sporting a mangled racer I'd casually driven into a height restrictor would be like attending an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting with a can of Diamond White.