On the Road Bike Read online

  And so, as the road suddenly bore steeply upwards, and I entered the unreal world of the second half of the Bec Hill Climb, I was assailed, not by the furies, but by the clichés. The head spun, my eyes popped, my tongue glued to the roof of my mouth, my legs burnt. And my vision, as if conforming to some sort of cartoonish aesthetics, blurred at the edges, eventually narrowing to a small saucer-sized circle of clarity, which veered wildly left to right, and then right to left as I swung the bike, in agony, from side to side. I tried to change down a gear, and heard a crunching sound as I screwed it up. My pedals jarred as they missed a beat.

  ‘Shit!’ I commentated, although by now, my mouth had lost the ability to articulate a hard ‘T’ sound. So it came out more as ‘Shish!’ Which is a chicken kebab, I thought to myself. And, filled with the oddly relevant mental image of skewered meat, on I went.

  I could hear voices shouting encouragement. I began to feel sick. I glimpsed my name, in chalk, on the road. I very nearly was sick. I felt the road steepen even more as it neared the finish line. I moved beyond sickness into pure horror.

  But miraculously, it stopped. As all things do eventually stop, relent, or end in death, this one too had passed. I had walked out of the dentist’s room. I had left the examination hall. I had landed on Free Parking. I had crossed the line, and coasted through a melee of other riders and concerned friends and family towards the main road. I couldn’t figure out how to stop.

  I just wanted to fall asleep on my handlebars.

  And that, once I had finally ground to a halt, was pretty much exactly what happened.

  I did eventually wake up.

  As my eyes opened again, I lifted my head, still connected by a useless neck to my shoulders, both slumped against the frame of my bike.

  I looked towards a bright sky, towards a figure occluding the glaring, low sun. The silhouette reached out a hand to me, and placed it gently on my back. He smiled beatifically, his single earring glinting at me, a halo of light caught in his silvering hair.

  Then, with a euphoric rush, I suddenly knew who it was. Sean Yates, the former Yellow Jersey of the Tour de France, was offering his congratulations.

  ‘Good ride,’ he said, trying not to laugh. ‘Well done.’ Those were the very words he used. I’ve framed them in my head.

  ‘Cheers, Yatesy!’ I slobbered. I would absolutely not have called him Yatesy, had I not been in a state of delirium. Clearly, I now thought I had crossed a Rubicon, and that I, too, belonged. But ‘Yatesy’? Unforgivable.

  When I think about that encounter, I wonder if I dreamt it. Sean Yates had guided Bradley Wiggins all the way around France, cajoling, imploring, praising, exhorting his charge to ever-greater efforts. But the clock was ticking down fast on his own career. A couple of weeks after this odd exchange on the top of a hill in Kent he left his job at Team Sky.

  The last rider he called home might well have been me. I am certain that this was not what he would have wanted.

  For the record, this is how it ended:

  The winner, with an extraordinary ride, set a new course best. Jack Pullar conquered the White Lane in 1’42”.

  Alan Peiper, riding as if his Tour de France depended on it, bust his guts to finish it in 2’34”. And he beat me by four seconds, which I find entirely reasonable.

  My time of 2’38” prompted Ron Keeble to text me later:

  Give me a ring, when you have stopped bleeding from the arse. If you’d kept your head upright, you could have gone faster. Well done, though. Proud of you.

  And Garry? Garry Beckett made it up the hill a long time after me. This is no boast. There were good enough reasons for it: folklore has it that he stopped for a cigarette on the way up. Eventually he rolled over his own finish line in a record-setting slowest ever time in the history of the Bec of nine minutes and thirty-five seconds.

  We all sang ‘Happy Birthday’. He had a face like thunder.

  Unobserved by the wider world, this scene has been repeating itself for half a century. A not-particularly impressive hill, ridden by somebody-and-nobody cyclists, a race of great unimportance, honour in small measure, celebrated with devotion and cream teas.

  Men like Garry Beckett, and before him, Ron Beckett, ensure the perpetuity of these exclusive traditions, the church fetes of the cycling world. ‘Come! Chance your arm at the coconut shy!’ ‘Bob for apples!’ Or: ‘Ride the hill climb if you dare!’ The last rider up the hill is cheered as throatily by the Thermos wielding, trouser-clip wearing community as the first.

  This race is why God made bunting. This race is what makes Garry Beckett. Men and women like him will never let go of their clipboards. They are as dependable as the onset of autumn, as unselfish as the warming, soft October sun casting mottled shadows down onto rutted tarmac.

  Herne Hill was blustery and not particularly warm, the last day I went there. It was also empty, its tilted bowl open to the slate sky, not one bike cutting across its grey skin. I was there with a handful of colleagues to film an interview for a documentary on Bradley Wiggins, just six weeks before he would go on to win in Paris.

  We had chosen the location, and invited Garry to join us, to talk on camera about his memories of a young Wiggins. He had brought with him, after an afternoon spent digging through old boxes in the attic, a wonderful photograph of a bicycle polo team, Garry in the middle, and the future Tour de France winner an awkward, gangly presence at the side, his features half hidden by a mop of unruly hair.

  Garry arrived early for the interview, while our cameraman was still busily filming other bits and pieces. A very fine drizzle, whipped in by sudden winds, dampened the air and clung to our jackets and bobble hats, forming a fine mist. I could see him taking in the old place, gazing at it, as if looking at it properly for the first time. And because he was looking, I looked at it too with fresh eyes.

  The old pavilion, earmarked for demolition, crouched down behind the ugly temporary stands, the series of Portakabins and containers behind that, which served as changing areas and storage rooms, and then the long, elegant sweep of the track, away towards the woods and the back straight, then bending homewards again, parallel now with the gravel track running in from Burbage Road. Then there was the open expanse inside the track, grassy and exposed, the wind picking at a crisp packet. It stuttered its way towards the finish line, and then snagged on the foot of a table with a Formica top, left carelessly trackside after the last meeting had come, raced and left.

  I searched the velodrome for meaning. For me, its story was theoretical, I was simply trying to Photoshop together faded images and paste them into the here and now. I was trying to place people in this landscape, to imagine voices of men I never knew, nor saw race. Herne Hill, in its splendid isolation and cellular decay, was a symbol for something else, a cipher, a code by which to read another culture. I didn’t get it.

  I had not grown up here. This was not my playground, and the sport I had grown to love had not fully taken hold of my heart. It merely dressed me, and informed my outward choices from time to time.

  But to those who can hear them, places like this talk. Garry, perhaps even tipping his good ear towards its voices, was listening to his childhood, and before that even. This was where his parents, Hazel and Ron, had courted. And this is where, for Ron, it had ended.

  ‘I’ve not been back since Dad died.’ He smiled at me, a quick wistful smile. ‘Not once.’

  I gave the track one last glance, then thanked him for his time, and wished him all the best. Then I took my leave, for the time being, of Garry. And, in doing so, I took my leave of the world to which I had fleetingly been introduced, Beckett’s world.

  It’s a rather noble, if sweary, place to be.

  CHAPTER 15

  DEVON IS A PLACE ON EARTH

  SOME RIDES TAKE much longer than two minutes and thirty-eight seconds.

  Somewhere in a gloomily lit hotel near Minehead, one mid-September morning, four men sat in a sullen circle. Our dour quartet was not onl
y in the early stages of a middle-aged decline but, more pressingly, a cooked breakfast.

  Some of us knew each other well. Others had met for the first time over the course of the nervy evening before, where we had swapped prognostics and indulged in industrial-scale expectation management. ‘I’ll just be pleased if I don’t die.’ Now each one of us was lost in thought, cutting through pasty sausages and chasing slimy, bruised mushrooms round a plate.

  Our minds were already riding out on the road, getting wet and cold and wondering frantically what malformed impulse had dragged us to this creaking establishment in this part of the world on this particular morning.

  Our helmets, next to each place setting, rocked gently as we sawed at our food, their foam innards exposed and naked. The scraping of butter on toast at times was the only sound, save for the comings and goings of a surly waiter. He left us in no doubt how much he resented being called into action before dawn on a Sunday morning by noisily refilling the bowl of limp, translucent grapefruit slices, and then sighing showily at the sight of the orange juice carafe, whose levels had sunk, again. We sipped guiltily from our glasses, and squinted out of the window.

  It was still dark enough for the one sodium lamp outside the old inn to burn brightly against a background of ink-blue rain clouds. A beastly sky had started to drip heavily against the ancient glass of the window, blown in by sideways gusts. I watched John lining up his home-made energy bars, and wrapping each one carefully in cling film. In fact, we all watched him, envious of his evident preparedness.

  We could delay no longer. One by one, and wordlessly, we collected our bikes, zipped up our various jackets to the chin and stepped out into the rain.

  Not one of us had undertaken this lightly. Each had carefully apportioned the time needed (three whole days) for this indulgent jaunt. Gone were the days, by about twenty years, when a trip like this could be an act of spontaneity, the simple impulse to hitchhike to Dublin, or cadge a lift from Munich to Marseille. Nowadays going away like this required Internet research, seeking out and reserving bed and breakfasts, quid pro quo negotiations with family members for favours granted and liberties taken, intricate logistics and loads of carbon fibre.

  Jauntily, my two travel mates on the way down to the West Country had estimated that the three bikes on our roof rack were collectively worth about £24,000. This, unfathomably, was the truth. My car, the same hopeless vehicle I had driven for a decade, was worth about 2 per cent of that at best.

  You will, by now, have heard of the Middle-Aged Man In Lycra, I have no doubt.

  By God, if we weren’t MAMILs, I would like to know who was.

  Pointlessness and cycling are closely related. In Britain they are first cousins, maybe even siblings.

  There is a man who crosses Blackheath most days on a mountain bike without using his hands, wearing a mask, and with a dog leashed to the handlebars. His arms flail wildly at his sides, as he wobbles his way across the common. He is very slow, and very odd and seems to have cornered the market in pointlessness.

  Or perhaps he’s discovered something that’s eluded the rest of the sport, like the man I gave a lift to who lived on an island in the middle of a Scottish loch. The lesson that particular middle-aged Briton taught me is this: that actions that appear hugely pointless may well have some serious point visible only to the actor.

  This wiry, shy hitchhiker, who climbed into my car at Brent Cross, had developed, over many years of solitary training, a new way of running that he was convinced would one day allow someone to complete a marathon in less than one hour. This ‘new running’ was based on a genetic throwback to earlier species of human. It involved swinging your arms in synch with your legs, rather than in opposition. I listened with as straight a face as I could as he told me his tale. It transpired that, after many months of letter writing and badgering, he’d been invited down to Channel Five’s headquarters in Battersea to demonstrate his discovery to a potential documentary maker. The meeting had not gone well. My hitchhiker had felt humiliated when the filmmaker had asked him to run up and down a busy London street to demonstrate his craft.

  ‘I froze,’ he told me, as we continued our drive north. ‘I just couldn’t do it. I felt as if he were laughing at me.’

  I let him out at Knutsford, where I was turning off the motorway. I hope he got home.

  At least he felt imbued with purpose. What do I think I am achieving when I am out on my bike? Training? Travelling? Developing new, hitherto undiscovered ways of pedalling? None of those, really. I am just turning the pedals increasingly slowly.

  I am always on the lookout for uncompromisingly selfish trips with like-minded friends. These rides exist for no reason other than to feel twelve years old again on descents (and fifty years old on the climbs). I treasure these rides, and I like the feeling of having achieved something and nothing in particular; the vacuous, fulfilling charm of the stretched calf and aching hamstring; that sense of having passed through the length of a bit of the world. Trees, towns, clouds, puddles.

  There have been all sorts of poorly orchestrated excuses for daft bike rides down the years. I have crow-barred them into my everyday life. Once I suggested that the whole family go to Hastings and stay in a crappy bed and breakfast. I invited neighbours with kids to join us (only those with carbon bikes were eligible, i.e., John from the other side of the hill). We ate a simple meal of battered carbohydrates with appalling vegetables in the evening, a dinner that will be remembered mainly for one of his kids vomiting all over my laptop while watching a Disney DVD at the table. This served us all right for being the sort of parents who allow that kind of thing.

  But the next day, my masterplan of cycling hubris came to fruition as John and I indulged in the futility of riding back to London, through rolling Sussex, up and down the cheekily sapping Kent climbs over the M25 and home. It was good, if exhausting, and, on balance, it had been worth picking the drying semi-digested peas out of the keyboard of a MacBook Pro.

  My job helps, due to the large amount of unpredictable travel. Even when I am working on a big football match at Wembley, I will arrange for someone in a car to carry my suit to the stadium, and I will ride the eighteen miles there. After the match, having interviewed the winning and losing players and manager (which, in football, for some reason necessitates the wearing of a suit), I will leave the players’ tunnel, change back into Lycra in the toilets by the service entrance, scrunch up my carefully pressed clothing, stuff it into a rucksack, and then cycle home.

  I’ve stuck the bike on the roof of the car whenever the opportunity has presented itself, via work commitments, to go and explore another bit of the country. A day filming with Plymouth Argyle meant forty miles of agony on Devon’s roller-coaster topography. The Grand Slam of Darts at the famous Wolverhampton Civic was an opportunity for my good friend Steve to guide me along the lanes of Staffordshire on a freezing November morning. Liverpool versus Benfica in the Champions League prompted sixty unplanned wintry miles around the Wirral Peninsula, until my antiquated Tom-Tom lost power and I ended up getting thoroughly lost somewhere near Runcorn.

  All these miles have been memorably pointless, as self-centred as a long shower when everyone’s queuing to use the bathroom, and as uninspiring in the retelling, too. These, for me, are my rides. This is what the whole cycling thing is about.

  And epic? You can keep your epic.

  The rain was hammering down, now.

  We rode as quickly as we could to the start of the 115-mile ‘sportive’ ride in Minehead, trying to warm up. The early-morning rain stung, and it was hard to keep your eyes fully open to the spray. Against our better judgement, we formed an impromptu and very poorly executed ‘paceline’, each rider trying to shelter behind the wheel of the bike in front. One of our number, wearing many hundreds of pounds’ worth of cycling clothing, some of it Rapha, and sitting atop a celeste green Bianchi road bike, touched his brakes as he battered along a stretch of dual carriageway. Thus it was that Joad
Raymond, one of the country’s leading experts on the works of John Milton, found himself skidding on a painted white line at the side of the road. He slammed into the tarmac, ripping open a hole in his badger-skin cycling shorts, and beneath that, his buttocks. (I may have embroidered the badger-skin detail. But the buttocks, I stand by.)

  We all stopped, and did our best to help him onto his feet. We looked at his bike as the rain continued to rattle on our helmets. It seemed to be OK, but Joad wasn’t. After gingerly accompanying us to the start, he rode back to his car, and abandoned the venture. He’d trained hard for the event, and had evidently been keen to explore how he shaped up against the rest of our delusional little group. We all commiserated with him, but were secretly delighted it wasn’t us. Later on that day, Joad would find deep bruising appearing like ink on blotting paper all across his torso.

  The rest of our number then lined up in the half-light on the seafront at Minehead and, with nerves on edge, eyes on stalks and shivering from the cold and wet, we set off as a group to climb onto Exmoor and to head for an unimaginably distant finish line on the south coast.

  We, being MAMILs, had mistaken this for fun.

  Fun, real fun, comes for free. It is part of the package we are born with, an inbuilt DNA reflex that lasts a lifetime but morphs into many forms. At first, fun is simply gurgling with newborn pleasure at the sight of a light fitting on the ceiling. With the advent of walking and running, however, fun gains in scope and sophistication. Fun, for at least a decade, is mainly based around three things: getting muddy, doing damage to stuff which has cost your parents’ money and torturing indigenous British wildlife.

  But gradually, with puberty and beyond, things take a more sinister turn. Fun is no longer as charmingly innocent and as one-dimensional as the naïve impulse to smash to pieces your best friend David’s expensively assembled toy car collection with the lead weight from a grandfather clock. (He joined in, by the way, it wasn’t just me. And anyway some of them were already dented before.)