Fuel.

A soft, steady and roasting solo 50-miles plus in the Peak yesterday - sort of Stoopid Loop - interrupted only by the wanderings of suicidal grice (yes, the plural of grouse is definitely 'grice' or should be), an ice cream stop courtesy of coincidental friends and a very dead right-hand pedal. Big thanks to 18 Bikes for selling me new ones.

A day of proper, luminous happiness under a burning sky made bearable by the wind. Had this playing on repeat in my head and later on my shuffle along the Longdendale Trail...

Funny stuff. Somewhere in the last six months, I've lost the cold, hard, glittering ball of sadness and anger that I've used as fuel for too long. Trying to ride in the moment, feeling the drumming of tyres on parched trails made rutted by dinosaur bike tracks and the sound of the wind brushing past. Which all sounds like a load of rubbish, but there you go.

Someone once told me that I rode a bike as if I hated it. I'm not sure about that. I think it was more that I rode like someone who didn't like himself very much mixed in with the intrinsic brutality you sometimes need to ride stuff in the Peak. And some people are very good at picking at your insecurities and throwing them back in your face. And no, I'm not Nijinsky on a bike, but so what.

But anyway, it was a cracking day of warm, trashed legs and a sort of calm, slightly poignant happiness.

Blue.

Rewind.

Wrote this about a year ago for BikeMagic and re-reading it this morning kind of ramped up my enthusiasm for this year's Mayhem. And I kind of like it because it's how 24-hour racing is for me.

One Man's Mayhem

There are always clouds over Mountain Mayhem, literally. This year they were big, broody, black and grey ones who seemed to treat the place like Waterloo station – they breezed through, looked around, thought about stopping for a quick leak, then hopped on another train and were out of there.

Perhaps fortunately, given the event’s reputation as the mountain biking equivalent of the Somme, none of them chose to hang around. They were also the reason that, as a last minute call up for a mixed team decimated by apathy, the only bike I chucked in the car on Friday night, was a singlespeed…


So what was it like? Well, for a start, let’s kick one thing into touch, Mayhem’s not really about the riding. If it were I’d be bettter off staying home in the Peak and hammering rocky tec, na, it’s about, well, if not ‘the love’ then at least the people and the atmosphere and the event and yes, even the brooding threat of a deluge.

Some snapshots of ‘why’ – rolling up on Friday evening to find a bunch of mates I haven’t seen for far too long, a cold beer, a barbecue, new faces, old faces, faces somewhere in between.

The first changeover, hanging over the barrier trying to remember our first rider’s name and bike and jersey colour, then ‘Me! Me! Me! Pick me!’ Wristband on and the first roll out of the arena. The familiarity of legs easing into life, pedals turning, a little apprehension, a big grin.

The first steep climb. On 32:17. And the relief of finding it’s not so bad after all. Bits of track familiar from previous years but stuck together in the wrong order. Slithering amusingly through slippy-surfaced singletrack after a brief shower on the second lap of a double with the front tyre writing cheques its nobbles couldn’t cash. Ooops…

Waiting. Eating. Chatting. Night-lapping, a small pool of self-contained, creaking ti in a bubble of bright, white light. And bantering. ‘Yes, the cat’s a magic cat, it steers the bike, I just pedal…’ Bikes that pass in the night, fellow singlespeeders – ‘what ratio are you on?’ – Wayne on his rigid P7 who turns out to be a friend of a friend of a friend. Small world.

Crashing. A blur of walker avoidance and a bad line and whoops, whoomph, over the bars and head-first into a handy tree. Blowing, at the top of the big climb on lap two of my second double and wobbling home with legs vaguely attached to brain by a length of limp string. Floaty.

Sleep. Wake. Dawn.

Morning laps with tired riders in slow motion interspersed with kingfisher flashes of the proper fast boys and girls rattling through. Chatting to spaced-out soloists and feeling a proper fraud when people think that singlespeeding is hard, because really it’s not. Not compared to riding for 24 hours. Or teetering down a steep, slippy descent on a unicycle. Or riding your first Mayhem, with no idea of what’s coming.

Funny things – high fives from kids along the side of the track, being offered chocolate buttons on the Kenda Climb where I can’t take my hands off the bars, bloody singlespeeds, the ‘Jump of Doom’, the sound of geared riders fumbling for ratios at the bottom of climbs, smugness. The guy who sort of caused my crash later buying me hot chocolate and cake after a weird serendipidous meeting. Nine Inch Nails on repeat in my head.

The final lap of a triple stint, that could have been a quad, but I hopped the barrier on the far side of the arena and I chose a bacon and sausage roll, I chose laziness, I chose to chat and wait while the clock counted down.

And finally I got to shake Pat Adam’s hand, with a daft grin on my face. Tired, warm legs, tired bike. A post-finish chat with soloist Rob Dean, who’d gone out held together with tape and come apart when someone banged into him.

The steady roll back to the tent and tired, post-race chatting. Slowly folding everything back into the car as the place empties and tents and cars are hoovered away and the place reverts to a big, green, lush field again.

Until next year.

Word Drought..

I was going to start by saying that you might have noticed that I've been rather quiet recently. But that's kind of presumptuous - specifically, it assumes that someone actually reads this stuff. But anyway, there are good reasons for that.

For one, I'm lazy. For two, I'm lazy. And for three, I seem to have run out of words.

I have a sort of theory that words are a bit like milk in cows. There are only so many of them per week or day or decade in any one person. Some folk have loads of them, tanker loads, others have less. Or fewer. Or whatever the right words are.

You could go on with the analogy and talk about grass and udders and milking machines I guess, but I'll leave that to you.

But mostly anyway, that's all an excuse or two. Really I don't have that much to say. It's not that I haven't been doing anything, I have. But I don't really have much to say about the things I might want to share and the things that I have stuff to say about, I don't really want to.

My friends will no doubt recall that I've been a bit of a nightmare for the past couple of years. They'll also have a fairly good idea why, which I'm sorry about. There's only so much brokenness and despair and incomprehension that you can expect people to put up with. I've lost, temporarily I hope, a couple of my best and closest mates.

So I decided to fix myself. Properly. And that's what I've been doing. With help. Sorting out the behavioural patterns that have been hardwired into me. Discovering ways of changing them, because I believe that people can and do change with time and life and effort. And you know what, it's brilliant and some of the things that help are deceptively simple.

As simple as focusing on the feel of your tyres running over rough tarmac or the sensation of wind on your face as you ride or even just your breathing.

And a lot of it's not that simple. You watch yourself in certain situations where before you'd have just reacted and start to understand what the pulls that make you act in a certain way are. And you can do that, but that doesn't stop those patterns being strong.

Even at a really basic level - this isn't really about riding bikes, not in the big sense - but out yesterday for a very hilly steady road ride, some tall fella in pretty team lycra with shaved legs breezed past me because I let him. A year or so back I'd have gone fierce and sparky-eyed, latched onto his wheel, then ripped past at the earliest chance in an utterly juvenile, pointlessly competitive way.

But I didn't. I didn't need to. I was on a steady ride at my own pace. So instead I just sat 50 yards back as he twiddled off, then realised in reality he wasn't very fast at all. After the initial, 'look at me with my buff shaven legs' spurt of speed, he was kind of rubbish. And even with four hours of hills in my legs, the frantic twiddling on a medium sort hill of told me everything I needed to know.

So I put in a bit of an effort. Closed the gap. Then ripped past at the bottom of the next climb in an utterly juvenile, pointlessly competitive way. But at least I knew what I was doing. And I chose to do it, not because I had to. Or needed to. But because I wanted to.

And he may have been at the end of a really long ride. Or having an off day. Or just been a bit rubbish. But if you're going to shave your legs, at least have the grace to be quick with it.

Small steps.

Out Of Time.

I dunno, you take a week off and the weather goes stark raving bananas. One minute it's summer, the next it's doing a passable imitation of the next Ice Age. And then today, an alpine spring arrives. Snow on the hills, melt water on the (Longdendale) trail and bright, warm, spring-like sunshine poured over everything like some sort of meteorological custard.

I'm at the tail-end of some tenacious death virus, so this was a proper, gentle, relaxed potter. Took the Double Cross and meandered down the trail talking to lambs - yay for spring lambs - and walkers and an inquisitive lurcher.

I even stopped to remove the bloody great rocks that brain-dead walkers used to pad out a couple of muddy sections of what ought to be and is again, smooth, fast, rooty singletrack. And I failed, once again, to clean a set of rock steps on the cross bike. Not so much the steps, more the run-out at the bottom.

Anyway. It was lovely. And sunny. And aimless. And the lurcher talked a lot of sense, for a dog.

Didn't Chase Anybody.

Lovely road ride on Sunday. Lots of hills. Lots of sunshine. Lots of peace and just the odd miserable looking cyclist - yes you, roadies and you, mountain bikers, both equally grumpy looking - and in all the hills and bumps I climbed, I didn't chase anybody.

Yay for me. No carrots. No sticks. No need. It's kind of a small victory in a slightly bigger war.

In other news: the GiT is on the verge of being reborn. After three years of not really caring how or what I drove, the poxy, whispering, OE-type back-box pretty much fell off the Mk2 and, well, if you have a stainless Jetex just sat there, you really might as well use it. So on it went.

Hurrah for a familar, grumbly, deep-toned idle and that little hint of a hissing rasp at 2,000rpm or so and suddenly it sounds like a car. And all it really needs now is a branch manifold, the VT engine mount(s) and the TSR motor, with a big-valve head, cam, chip and all. You can take your poxy turbo diesel estates and shove 'em.

Hello spring. Missed ya.

Out Of Words

I seem to have run out of words at the moment.

Haven't taken this pic for a while...

Something like winter. At last... Forget the wanky sheep cartoons with the mawkish summer bird. This is what it's all about. More please.