by Ned Boulting
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 abo
ut 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.’
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.’
