Been on a bit of a holiday...

About a Ride

I want to tell you about this bike ride I took.

It was a ride in brilliant weather, so hot that I took to riding through puddles for the alka-seltzer fizz of the watery bubbles settling on my leg hair. It was my first ride after shaving my ponytail off, and the wind channelled through the short stubble was the most refreshing thing I have ever felt, like a fluid massage of my brain.

It was also winter, though, and the icy breeze was tickling me through my sodden and somewhat sparse beard, as I dragged raindrops off my chin with my upper lip. I was soaked through, and had never been so cold, but we would find relief in the unlocked toilets of that hotel where we stood under the hand driers for half an hour.

It was two in the morning and it was the best part of my day, cruising home from Truro and praying I didn't hit back ice, but I also had the chance to see first light and know that today I would go further than I had ever gone before, until I was chasing my shadow through the red evening where my tinted sunglasses turned my cyclist tan into something European and the angle made my shadow's legs 90% of its body and my shoulders rolled just ever so slightly and my form was just so beautiful in that shadow that I was resentful of the aches starting in my lower back that would make me sit up and ruin this picture.

I was riding alone, with nothing but my thoughts, riding until I thought about nothing but riding and forgot about the girl who wouldn't return my message or the arse that I'd made of myself that night or how I was faster than I had been another time but still not as fast as how I had been that one time, but I was also among friends. Or I was riding to meet them, riding with a bag full of camera gear to record a million half-completed skateboard flips for the one that came off. I was following Rhodri's dad through the fiftieth mile as he span so easily and I wondered at how incredibly shaped were his legs and I wondered if my legs would be that shape at his age. I was riding with my family, as my little sister lost her footing on her little crossbar saddle and her tiny foot went into Dad's front wheel and we knew it wasn't broken but she cried a fearful amount and we never used that saddle again. I was riding with the club, chaining around like Belgians and looking amazingly dapper, but I was also wearing my cross-country gear because whenever I got to where I was going, I didn't want to have to look like a cyclist.

I was riding strong, but I got dropped on the first hill and wanted a pack of cigarettes to give me an excuse, but it was also that ride where I had to drag everyone along, knowing that we were still unlikely to make the train and it was partially my fault because I had thought they were stronger than they were and took them on an unresearched route, because we would be able to make good any errors.

It was also that ride where I tried to outbrake Seth on his mountainbike into a hairpin turn and had to bail and roll the bike sideways at waist height along the retaining wall above the sea cliff, puncturing a tyre and bending the forks, but that was ok because later I'd take that road bike to the old mine workings and rag it over the dirt jumps and weaken the frame until it gave up on the ride into college and I had to run it up the hill because I get up that hill as fast any person on campus under their own power and to hell with the bike.

I overtook cars at fifty miles an hour, but later I would bonk and get re-taken at less than ten. I held onto a trailer on the way to the fourth vineyard not really because I was tired or drunk but because why not? I was laughing, because of the ridiculousness of my slick tyre spinning uselessly in the loose mud so close and yet so far from home; laughing because I was too tired to do anything else; but mostly laughing because this moment could not be taken away from me, and it could never be denied that I had felt this way and, therefore, I had not missed it.

I stopped in this cafe, a great open space where the air above could percolate between the overabundance of tables that were nestled like grounds in the filter. I met someone else there, doing his first half-century in half a decade, and I made sure his tyres were up to pressure. This was also the place where I had sold my old bike, my old bike that was built of so many new and replaced parts that it was really my newest bike. I never got the chance to ride it. That was to the guy who changed my life; changed my course, changed where I lived, changed who I met and perhaps most importantly changed how I rode.

The ride took me through fields, but not really through them. Over them. Separated from them by fences or just the millimetres of air between my pedals and the dirt, and I missed the dirt because I was going somewhere and couldn't stop and I couldn't even really smell it but I could remember the smell and that was why I missed it. But this was also the ride where Gerry and Andy crashed and we all set on the bank in the sun for an hour and we could feel the warm stones of the old wall and the cold, brittle stems of the long grass and we were all so sorry that it had happened but so glad that it should happen on this day and not any other.

It was that ride where I spent two hours trying to manual and never getting it, but being really happy with my bunny hop so it was ok.

It was definitely that ride where I came into gravel time and time again too fast, and skidded out every time and the blood welled through the decapitated capillaries in tiny dots and then joined and spread until my whole knee was covered and I got blood on my gloves which turned so dark I thought it was brake dust. It was that ride where I caught up that piece of babyhead gravel in the spokes on the front and numbed my last two fingers on my right hand for two years since I took the impact on my elbow, but as I flew it was that ride that was my first on my Halfords' special full suspension, when I felt like I could take on anything and went over the handlebars on the first descent, like on my practice lap at my first cross-country race where the downhillers jeered as the ladies overtook me and I snuck off after the first lap.

It was that ride that my derailleur hanger sheared and bent the chain and I had to hitch a lift to the station and I couldn't have been more grateful, but also that ride where I ran out of patch kits and had to call my mates away from whale-watching on a south african beach to rescue me and their mild resentment couldn't match my shame.

But then it was also that ride that I saw a whale of my own, entirely unexpectedly, and a sparrow hawk that perched on a branch three feet from my face. It was that ride where the golden gorse swamped the lower slopes and the vivid pink of the Rhodedendrons speckled on the loch banks made the whole glen look like an estate garden.

It was that ride that I carried my bike over a mountain, and ran up and down Ben Lomond before pedalling home. It was that ride that I went from home in London to home in Caerphilly and I kept on having to call Sadie so that she could find me on map and tell me where to go. It was that ride where I rode for 24 hours even though I had crashed on the first lap. It was when I went to visit my Dad for the first time under my own power after I had been getting closer and closer and it was a surprise for him and it was a surprise for me that today was the day that I didn't need to call for help.

I had to get a train home. I could barely keep my eyes open. My bike dripped leftover mud in the vestibule. The green and grey swished past my face but I wasn't going through it because it wasn't in front of me or on either side of those bobbing shoulders and blurring past that blurry wheel which I shouldn't have been looking at but sometimes all you can do is watch the wheel and stay there, right there, because you are so afraid of how much harder it will be if you don't.

That was done, now, and I was done and I was on an aeroplane, an aeroplane at just the right altitude so that I could see every inch of the path that I had sweated and swooshed and cranked and span along and the achievement was in no way dimished.

I loved that ride.