Today we ride…

A heartfelt column from a regular Singletrack reader… Sometimes there are more important things than bike riding. Even so, there are some times when there’s nothing more important.

Forgive me, for it has been well over a month since I’ve been out on my bike. Sure I’ve been commuting on my singlespeed road bike most days but that doesn’t count. Commuting is what someone who owns a bike does, riding at the weekend as well is what upgrades me to cyclist. As I say it’s been over a month since I’ve spent any proper time in the saddle. For me this is practically unheard of, and I haven’t even had the excuse of injury or illness to blame.

Actually I have had the excuse of illness, just not mine. At the start of autumn my mum was diagnosed with cancer, and lots of it. As the leaves fell, the darkness drew in and the temperature dropped it was hard not to see the parallels. I’m sure a great many people know the feeling of my world closing down around me, my stomach dropping away and changes occurring in the blink of an eye. As you would expect this impacted my whole life and my riding was one of the first casualties of this war. Obviously I was happy to let it slip. Even as someone who dreams in merino and probably wees 50% GT85 I know when its time to ride and when its time to abstain. Changes were made, riding didn’t matter.

One ride was even interrupted by possibly the most frightening phone call I’ve ever had to take. Things had taken a turn for the worse and it might be a good idea if we came down to visit. Tears burned my eyes as my brother and I raced back to the car. On cyclo-cross bikes in terrain we didn’t really know we rode furiously in the direction of our car. A vague description of turnings to take, roads to follow. Heart in mouth, lungs in mouth… it was no wonder it was hard to breathe. Filthy bikes were thrown into the boot, mud was scraped from clothing and we arrived at the hospital looking like we were in fancy dress.

Thankfully the first reports were overly dramatic and over the course of the next few weeks she has kept improving, albeit at a pace which would leave snails exasperated. Which has left us in a kind of hinterland, not knowing what passes for normality anymore. Shuffling along in the calm eye of the storm, not knowing when we will get wrenched out of the other side and back into the maelstrom. And in this quiet land the itch to ride began to return. Encouraged by both my mum and dad to “do something normal” I began to wonder if it was wrong to want to ride instead of staring out of the windows at another grey hospital afternoon?

The night before the ride and guilt abounds as I’m desperately trying to choose what to wear. Having missed “good autumn” I’m faced with leaping across a season without so much as a couple of transition rides to help get acclimatised. Thick layers or thin layers, gillet or jacket, buff or skull cap? The morning comes and today we ride. My brother and I have found a long enough route that will take us back towards our parents’ place. Leaving the warm confines of the train it takes a little while for my body to mould into the shape of a rider. The shape I’m asking my limbs to move to seems very different to the hospital chairs they’ve grown used to. Muscle memory thankfully begins to recall what it’s used to doing and I try to slip into a familiar tempo. Parts of my body that haven’t been stretched for a while make themselves known, as does the guilt that maybe I shouldn’t be here. Is my selfish desire to get the miles in all wrong or am I right to be trying to force normal life onto a non-normal life situation? Is this the cycle of life or just my greed to ride?

The recent weather has been one of the few factors that have made it easier to accept the sedentary life. The gales and floods that have battered the countryside felt strangely prophetic. Nature imitates life as the weather wreaks a havoc that mirrors the tempest that’s been raging inside me. Anger at the injustice at what’s going on and at my inability to do anything are my new riding friends. It seems only fitting that today’s point to point ride heads not only towards my parent’s house but also towards a headwind the whole way.

The countryside slips past in its familiar blur. The browns and the greens look the same as they do each year. I feel like I can conjure up what a late autumn ride could feel like, from the collage of past rides. It would be familiar and known, and the past is somehow comforting. And in a classic example of “live and don’t learn” I run out of energy near the end, the constant grinding of the headwind having taken a toll. A textbook bonk that I should have seen coming a mile off. I’d like to think that maybe an inner part of me wanted to make myself feel the suffering, a cathartic pain to manifest the emotions of the previous month. I doubted it though and as my stomach growled and my legs ran out of juice I tried to dig deep.

Bemoaning the death of the village store we continued on in the hope to find some food, somewhere must be open. If only I’d picked up a couple of those cereal bars I knew were lurking in the cupboard back at my house. Having finally found somewhere that could give me the small fuel injection to finish the ride (I wonder if you can get addicted to biscuit Boosts?) it was back to the riding. Somewhere between the start and this point I’d become a rider again, a tired one but a rider none the less. Legs converting hours of hospital inaction into forward motion. The smell of trees, clean air and soil replacing the chemical stench from the hospital that had refused to leave my skin. The only thing that felt unchanged, that was unchanged, was the situation that remained when I arrived to see my mum the next day. But today proved one thing to me, and that is that although I didn’t find any answers while I was riding at least it silenced the questions for a short while.