Hmmm...

I've not been doing well at blogging. Mostly because 24/12 ushered in a period of ferocious busyness. Or at least that's how it felt to me. Too many things in too quick a succession with the added joy of cumulative sleep deprivation.

And now I want to feel rested and well and cheerful and ride my bike, the Ragley one, on wooded, sun-dappled trails. And I don't and I'm not. But there you go. That's not enough sleep for you.

As for 24/12 - in last coin in the pay phone mode: horrible conditions, river almost burst banks, soloing, eleventh-ish at 1am. Started throwing up. Probably ate something. Gutted. Emptied. Probably something on my bottle in the middle of a mud fest. But there were good things too and positivity and humour and a very, very fast journey home on the Sunday afternoon.

And that's it really. Sort of. Except that it isn't...

Tapering.

Mayhem's done and dusted in mud. Bontrager 24/12 is looming at the weekend. Solo. And I'm tapering. I bloody hate tapering, but given that Mayhem fried my legs by dint of mud and singlespeed and an odd, grinning happiness that I don't know where it came from, but I'm glad that it did. Given all that, it's probably just as well.

And oddly, for once, I don't feel frantic and jumpy and hair-trigger, sparky-eyed desperate. For once I just feel sort of mellow and calm. Which is a first really.

I even dragged the race bike out of whatever dark recess it hides in between races and did unto it that which is not unlike maintenance. Changed the front wheel bearings that died at 24/12 last year. Checked the brake pads: check. Changed the tyres to something more suitable than the stupidly iffy front, grey Michelin and balding rear Racing Ralph. Stuck an inverted lay-back Thomson post on it so it looks even uglier than before - Maverick you know, beauty in function and function in ugliness - checked all the linkage bearings for slop. And put it away again.

I still hate tapering though. I'd rather be riding. Always.

A Truman Show Moment in the Midst of Mayhem

Mountain Mayhem that is. A properly ridiculous quagmire of a course. Four men, a teenage boy and a one-year-old baby. Mud, lots and lots of mud. And a rigid, ti, singlespeed 69er with mud tyres.

Somewhere in the middle of it, I wandered off left and I came to the end of Mayhem. Beyond the mud and the vans and the tents and the drawn-faced mud-splattered riders with their battered bikes and bodies. Beyond all that was a ten-foot deer fence with a matching gate complete with ladder stile.

On the other side of the gate was a green, improbably dry-looking field full of happy-looking sheep basking in rays of golden sunshine. And for a moment I wanted to just climb over the stile and keep walking without looking back.

A proper Truman Show moment.

But instead of embracing freedom, I looked out over sanity for five minutes or so, then climbed back down, wandered back to base and knocked out another lap.

It's not a bad thing to be reminded that riding bikes, racing bikes, isn't real. Is a luxury. A game. That you do have a choice.

But at the end of it all I was proud of us. Of me. No-one folded or complained or griped or panicked. We just kept riding and grinning and rolling through the whole ridiculous, surreal thing - 8th in vets, 13th in Sport Men, which wasn't too shabby. But actually the numbers don't matter, the people do.

A Small Ball Of Grrrr....

I love my Ragley Ti, it's mad in a totally uncivilised way. It wants to go - up, down, round, straight off things, straight over stuff, it wants to go fast.

Normally that's fine. Normally that's the best thing in the world. But after four weeks of kicking myself senseless in a structured way, on a long, steady, chatty,  autumnal - June is the new autumn you know - Peak District semi-epic, it simply isn't.

Try to ride it steady and restrained and mellow and it sulks and grumps like a hung-over dad woken on a Sunday morning by bright-eyed kiddies who want to go play in the park before breakfast.

It grumbles.

It hates meandering along the sort of rocky trails it normally skims over in a blaze of shiny aggression. It blunders up short climbs it'd normally dismiss with a blur of pedals and a high-pitched whir of sun-lit, ecstatic, take-off ebullience.

It sulks.

It still looks after you. Even when you're slow and tired, that slack head angle makes steep downs a breeze. And every so often it hints at smooth, blurry, speed.

But mostly it just sulks.

Said sorry to it. Washed the grit off its shiny titanium tubes. Gave it a virtual hug and put it back in the bike cave where it undoubtedly spent the night grumbling to the other bikes: 'He wasn't trying, the useless git. Just sat there waiting for me to do the work. I need a new rider, a proper one...'

Until next time, when normal service will be resumed. Sorry Rags...

Where do I send the invoice?

Let's see: around 16 sessions @ £xx per session, starting in the bleak mid-winter and finishing in the bleak mid-summer. Letters, maps, mindfulness and something not unlike sunshine. Tears. And rediscovered music. A hard, glittery ball of crystalline anger that doesn't seem to be there any more. It rolled, unnoticed one day, under a virtual fridge.

Who do I invoice?

You?

Six months ago I would have, really I would. But not now. The magical mystery tour of dark, broken confusion and shifting truths, things that were or were not or might have been in singular or duplicate and all of your different personalities seem like something from another life.

In truth I'm even a little grateful now. I dodged a huge bullet and, I hope, actually learned something for once. I hope I'm a better person as a result.

I never thought I'd say thank you, but thank you. And yes, I know you'll never read this.

Celebrated by buying new race shoes. Appropriately muted ones.

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.