About a boy

April 2019

 It’s one of those unseasonable summerlike days that can creep in unawares in April, giving a taste of what’s to come. One year I was as tanned by the end of April from endless days outside with the girls as I was after nearly a month in Singapore. The sky today is a darker blue than the usual springtime hue and I find it jarring. The tarmac of Herne Hill velodrome glints, the swathes of green grass and stark colours of sponsors’ flags a study in modern art against the vulgar sky.  

I sweat setting out bikes, the trikes and recumbents and go-karts and side-by-sides and tandems and lo-riders all adapted for riders whose bodies don’t work the same way as mine does. And the Velo Plusses, industrial-looking things with huge trays on the front on which we painstakingly load wheelchairs.

Yesterday I rode a hilly 200k and went to bed content.Today I’m mad with the ongoing too-slow process of divorce and the catastrophic pain of my internal deconstruction which feels more self-defeating than anything else, most of the time. I’m angry too at the torturous slowness of the anxiety-racked, heart-in-mouth process of trying to buy a house I now know I can’t live without, and I’m angry at myself for even wanting it.

 I’m angry for wanting anything at all. Broken glass I can’t help but step on. I’m angry with the weight of my body, my thoughts, my emotions and the clear cloudless blue sky that should promise hope and solutions, but only brings sweat on concrete, unbearable weight from above meets unyielding surface below.

 I don’t want to talk today. Usually I like the conversations, as absurd as they can be. Sometimes the carers cut through to the core of me with their kindness and empathy, with the dignity they allow their charges, and sometimes the people who ride these bikes also cut me to the quick with their observations on the world as they see it. But today I want to busy myself on the peripherals so I sort bikes, and make tea, and make myself useful as best I can.

A group approaches and I see a wheelchair. I go and get on the least unpleasant of the Velos and ride over, ready to load up my charge. He’s a young man, barely more than a boy, and he’s nonverbal and appears to have no motor control either. I load him up onto the bike, secure the chair and mutter instructions to his carer. Brake here, parking brake here, gears here. Off you go.

 The carer lasts two laps. Two laps while the sun beats down on her slowly treadmilling legs, two laps while my insides boil.

 She returns apologetic. ‘It’s hard work,’ she exclaims to her colleague.

 The boy says nothing. What can he say?  

 I say I’ll take him for a couple of laps. It will keep me occupied, it will keep the endless time passing. I get on the bike and take my powerless passenger out onto the track. Round and round a concrete track, underneath a merciless sun. It’s not just me who will break a sweat.

 I talk to him as we head out, the usual patronising chit-chat. ‘It’s a lovely sunny day!’ It’s a crappy shitty day. ‘Don’t worry, we won’t go too fast!’ Why would he worry? What could he do about it if I did go too fast? What can he do about anything, anything at all?

Sometimes on days like this the air above the tarmac wobbles, heat rising in wavy lines, non-existent moisture being dragged relentlessly from a dead surface that can’t quite block out the richness below. Below the foundations, damp earth, dark matter.

 I have learned from coming here that I fill empty spaces with pointless words, stuff that hateful openness with anxiety and awkward, shameful awareness of my privilege. What I really want to do and I increasingly sense my wordless companions want me to do, is to stop talking for both of us, stop pretending it’s them who need me to fill what only I see as lack. I fall quiet sooner every time I come here.

 I have learned how afraid I am of the deafening absence of my own voice.

My legs turn and the heat sinks down into the tarmac and rises up into the abominable sky. The air in between is light and soft, a breeze lifts my hair. I’m not wearing a helmet. Neither is the boy. ‘Not much point in a helmet,’ I say to nobody. I breathe in, and breathe out.

The boy breathes in, and breathes out.

His face is turned slightly to the side and the sun is reflecting off his warm sienna skin, lifting highlights from black hair. He says nothing. What does he need to say? All we need is here without words. We breathe in, breathe out. My eyes soften inside their tight, strained sockets. The bike moves us both forwards.

Nothing changes but everything. The boy hasn’t moved, or made a sound. He is still and peaceful and I know as surely as I know the legs that are turning and the hair that’s being lifted in the breeze, that he is content. It rises from him, invisible wavy lines like heat from tarmac, and it is irresistible. It draws answering soothing waves from me, my own invisible lines intermingling with his. He is content. Joyful with all of it. The soft breeze. The forward motion. Me.

Everything softens, the urban landscape melts upwards into the gently waiting sky. Harsh angles and jarring lines blur and fade. Sweat flows and breath draws, I am here, he is here, we are here. I have made the boy happy with my service, he has made me happy with his unquestioning acceptance of it. We are moving forwards together with nowhere to go, and we are drowsy with contentment. We are at peace. 

When I reluctantly return the boy his carer exclaims with pleasure. ‘He looks so relaxed!’ I say I thought he was, but I didn’t know. She smiles at me.

She knows this magic.

Later I write to a friend, a sensory therapist who trained and worked with nonverbal children. I tell her I worry I’m crazy, or looking for things that aren’t there. I tell her I’m afraid I’m projecting my own need to be seen onto a nonverbal child. I loathe my own ignorance as I tell her I could never even see the point of bringing a wheelchair user all the way to the velodrome just to get pushed around in circles on an adaptive bike.

She says I’m not crazy and that she too knows how it feels to talk without words. She talks to me about the experience from the boy’s perspective, the sensory elements I understand and appreciate without thinking, the breeze of motion, the angle of the sun, the surroundings, the sense of purpose that comes when you circle a velodrome by bike on a sunny April day. She shows me that for the boy it was something of a peak experience, just as other things that I have done on bikes have been for me. She shows me that what we share is everything, to and for both of us. Me and the boy.

And then she says ‘but before all of that, Cathy, for him to even have that experience let alone want to share it with you, first of all, there is trust.’

Before there is anything, before there is hope or faith or love, there is trust.

Two 400s

Chalfont St Peter, May 4

There was one thing I took away from riding 40km of the 407km London-Wales-London audax one cold, windy day in May, after the ensuing violent crying in my car, the sort of crying that shakes your solar plexus as well as your shitty old Nissan Almera Tino. Without consciously realising it I had thought this ride would make me all sorts of things, prove all sorts of things, and justify the choices and actions of the woman who decided last summer while staring down the barrel of the long, bleak, arduous aftermath of a dead marriage that she wanted to be the kind of person who rode 400k audax.

The violence in the crying was the relief, the realisation that all those things I thought that ride would make me, I was already, all the things I thought it would bring me, were already here.

Once all that was out of the way enough clarity of thought emerged for me to realise I truly believed I could ride this distance.

Stumbling straight out the blocks isn’t brilliant but let’s not start telling myself more stories about what I’m not. I’ve learned enough in the last year to know when to give myself a big hug, stroke my own hair, send myself home for tea, bath and bed and then put on my big girl pants and work out what I’m going to do about it.

Cyclopark, Gravesend, May 11

Right, this is much better. I am here, correctly attired, in good time, with my bike packed and set up and ready to go, and no possible further opportunity for faffing. If I say so myself my preparation this time has been exemplary, other than the fact I forgot toothpaste but did remember the chamois cream so currently my crotch is more minty-fresh than my mouth, however because I was in good time, I was able to stop at a garage and pick up toothpaste and my toothbrush is in my drop-bag so we’re ALL GOOD.

Tea, toast, teeth, bit of banter with the assembled, and a bit of AWE at the geezer having a cheeky fag before the off (‘everybody tells me off for it now,’ he confides between drags, ‘but by 3am they’re all asking me for one. Don’t worry.’ He pats his jersey pockets. ‘I’ve got enough for all of us’). I’m just about to propose to him when somebody admires my Eastway. Somebody always does, and as well they might, as it’s an absolute mile-eating monster these days and I fancy that it’s starting to get a bit of a retro vibe to it. OK it’s not getting any younger, but then neither am I and I’ve never looked better either. Anyway. We’re away.

I’m in the front bunch, with the chap who said this was his first 400, filling me with hope that I would not be the only one without a previous under my belt, only to casually add he frequently does 24-hour time trials and anticipates completing the entire ride by 3am. That’d be impressive. We didn’t start until 9am.

The final control is at 342km and that’s where my bag will be, so I can sleep if I need to, so instead of thinking about this as a 400km ride and falling to pieces again at the sheer enormity of the task, it’s broken down into a 300 plus a recovery ride home. And a few more k.

The route for Invicta Phoenix - incidentally my favourite name for an audax ever - goes through Kent, Surrey, Sussex and Hampshire. I know most of it and there is no point in the route that doesn’t hold the comfort of familiarity and the knowledge that I am not too far away from my children.

One of the dark niggling thoughts I carried for my short attempt at LWL was ‘what if you get a mechanical outside Wales? You’re a long way from your daughters.’ It’s impossible to circumnavigate the tug of my children, the yearning for their presence even when I know they are safe and well and cared for, the way my thoughts return to them the second I feel under threat. It’s beyond rational thought, it’s pure biology, every cell in me is created to protect and nurture them, it overrides reason and fact, careful argument. It just is, and it can’t be argued with or denied. Instead I have to find ways to work around it, to stretch those invisible threads between them and me, to work out how far away I can go, for how long, and how much risk I can accept, before my structures crumble and I am nothing but an animal, a wolf-mother howling for her cubs, violent crying in a Nissan Almera Tino.

Torrential rain before the first control at Edenbridge, proper biblical stuff, but that’s OK because I have my rain jacket, and spare socks and a change of jersey in my seat-pack, it’s fine. I’m all prepared. A bit of flirting with one of the old men on steel at the first control because our drops have got tangled up. ‘Oh look, we’ve hooked up,’ I trill. ‘It’s too early for any of that,’ he protests. Oh come on mate. It’s never too early.

A chap with tri bars passes me, but he doesn’t pull too far away. I am eventually joined by a Suave Older Gentleman who is beautifully spoken and an all round delight, and we swoop down to the second control at Rudgwick at a decent pace, joined by another chap whose Garmin doesn’t work. We form a nice peloton, Suave Older Gentlemen introduces himself as Martin and we all take turns at the front. I know how this works now. Apparently get enough miles under my belt and I can finally ride in a group.

After some stunning, if salty, cheese on toast at Rudgwick we’re off again but after a while Martin says the pace is too much for him to keep up all the way round, and he drops back. I’m pretty much on my own for this stint, tri guy and I pass each other a couple of times and somebody joins up with me for a while but their chain creaks like nobody’s business and I’m quite glad when they peel off at a bike shop. Christ, it’s hailing. England in May, eh?

Ten minutes later it’s glorious sunshine and that’s how it stays all the way to Hampshire. That cheese on toast was so salty I’ve gone through both of my water bottles so I hunt out a tap. Just outside Winchester tri guy and I finally align and we roll in together at what I can only describe as a blistering pace. He says he’s called Richard, is doing Paris-Brest-Paris, has teenagers, and other pleasantries.

Winchester, Tesco, a wrap I don’t really want but I need to keep eating, some summer-fruits Oasis, tea. Time to push on to Petersfield. I lag. I feel a bit flat. God, we’ve only done 170km. Richard is ahead with a few other riders and I’m off the pace and slumping. We climb, I catch up with the bunch, then drop off again at the descent. This isn’t great, but don’t panic, just get to the next control. Richard leaves the group to ride with me, and I pick up a bit, and we get to Petersfield at 7pm. 200k in ten hours, MacDonalds, have to force it down, have to keep eating. Richard says he’ll need to slow the pace a bit for the night section, but he’s happy to stick together.

We roll through the South Downs at sunset and it’s quite magical. Red kite overhead, tail twitching in the air. That MacDonald’s has sorted me right out. Keep eating, keep drinking, keep pedalling, all will be well. I feel a bit cocooned as the light fades, knowing I’m about to become part of the secretive world of the night. I have layers for when it gets cold. I have good lights, spares, a dynamo, a battery pack. I am happy and at home on my bike, I’m happy to be riding with Richard, who is an experienced audax rider and an excellent wheel to follow and mercifully seems content with very little chit-chat. Quick stop to turn on lights, we’re good to go. Through woods and winding roads. A barn owl swoops into our path.

As it gets darker I take over pacemaking and we pedal on and on. Our next stop is Lewes and at 89k this is the longest single section of the route. There’s a Co-Op at Steyning and we agree to stop there to put on night-time layers and for a snack and drink. But by the time we arrive, it’s closed. We dither a bit about whether to press on to an all-night garage half an hour down the road or get sorted here. I’m beginning to faff, Richard looks a bit tense, so I make the call. Night-time garb on here. I put on a long-sleeved base layer and thicker jersey, some dry socks, adjust my legwarmers, this, that, the other. Eat some ginger cake. Richard definitely wants to get going, he’s getting cold and eating lots. Back on the road. An hour or two to Lewes.

I feel fine but Richard is flagging, he’s cold and he’s getting a slump. He drops off my wheel several times but we keep going, and then the signs for Lewes start to appear and I shout back to him - five miles. Four miles! We’re nearly there. Into the 24-hour garage at Lewes at just gone midnight, Richard smashes down two coffees, I buy some chocolate-coated peanuts, a cup of tea, go to the toilet, faff a bit. 60k to the final control at Rye where hot food, my drop-bag and a nap, if we want one, awaits. We have a brief strategy chat. Should we nap at Rye? No idea. Let’s get going.

Richard’s still tired and I don’t feel like I am but I’m aware I do better moving than I do stopping and the faff levels are shooting up, so I am obviously flagging on some level. Time to take drastic action and do the conversation bit. I start asking Richard about his kids, and the miles fly as we chat - we talk about kids, schools, work, I take a brief 20-minute break from pretending I’m a normal human to descend into Rant Mode and give him chapter and verse about getting divorced, he looks mildly alarmed but at least he’s awake. He wants to think himself lucky he didn’t have the misfortune to encounter me on an audax six months ago, he’d have had 400k of this bullshit to pedal through.

I hadn’t really noticed how flat the route had become until it wasn’t. This is very rolling, it’s pitch black and quite foggy in places so it’s impossible to judge really what’s coming up, or how big a climb is, but the legs know. There is a lot of up, and a lot of down, and the up is hard and sweaty and the down is freezing cold, so all in all we’re definitely night riding. It’s fine though. The legs are fine. The chat is fine. Outside Battle we climb Mount Everest and at the summit I feel the telltale signs of a bonk coming on. Oh, not now. I don’t want to eat, but EAT. Drop the bike, stagger about a bit, sit down, raid the frame bag. A Clif bar, will do, tip a sachet of energy drink powder Duncan forced upon me into my water, drink half of it. Richard’s at the top now, he enquires after my welfare and waits patiently while I blether, stuff food in my face, glug my drink, and then we’re back on track.

So much snot. Richard’s a spitter, he’s doing it almost constantly now, and I can’t stop firing snot rockets into the ether, the bottom of my nose is sore from all the wiping, aren’t we just the most attractive pair? Richard shouts that dawn is breaking and he’s right, to our left we can see clouds, and the sky is beginning to glow deep red. We’ve made it through the night, and all of a sudden there’s signs to Rye - SIGNS TO RYE - and we pick up the pace considerably. As we roll down into Rye we cheer and I announce that we are a pair of legends. Richard agrees wholeheartedly.

The control is warm and people are asleep. I don’t think I need to sleep and neither does Richard so we both do a bit of staring, and drink some tea, and faff a bit, then beans on toast, and then I look at the time. 4.50am. ‘Leave by five?’ Richard’s game. I get changed out of the spare clothes I put in my drop-bag in case sleep was required. Faff. We go outside to get going. I need the toilet. FAFF. Back inside. Time trial guy was asleep and has just woken up, blinking, along with a few others. Somehow there’s quite a lot of naked chest going on. Back outside. Let’s go.

It’s cold, and foggy, but it’s light and it’s glorious. Thick blankets off fog rolling across fields, mist rising from the ground, a perfect dawn, a perfect day. I’m losing Richard up the hills and there’s plenty of them, there’s still 80k to go. I soft pedal for a while to let him catch up, then more climbs, and I eventually decide to just push on because I feel strong and I want to get as far up the road as I can, and the night is over and he seems fine and so off I go.

It’s all a bit of a blur. Tiny village after tiny village, left here, right here, fog, Downs, up, down, big climb, little climb, cardboard box. Am I there yet? DON’T check your GPS. You don’t want to know. Don’t check the time either, you’ll be disappointed if you’ve only been riding an hour and you think you’ve done at least two. More villages. More climbs.

Bloody hell this is a lot of climbing. I’m slowing down now, average pace is dropping, even my climbing pace is dropping but I’m still going, I still feel OK, my legs hurt and I can feel my knees but oh look, here’s another monster, god am I going to be climbing forever? But I’m still going. I’ve come too far now, I’m going to make it, am I there yet? DON’T CHECK YOUR GPS. Sign for Meopham. That’s only 5k from the end. Why am I climbing? Why am I still climbing? IS THERE GOING TO BE A FUCKING RAMP UP TO THE TOP OF CYCLOPARK AT THE END? Sign for Cyclopark. Huge roundabout, get out of my way, speed hump, here I am, 426K later, 4,140m of climbing, 24 hours and 16 minutes, everybody all smiles, sit down, might never get up again, somebody brings me a cup of tea, am a completely bloody legend, fucking knew I could do it, thank u, next.

(Richard gets in about half an hour after me and is magnanimous about me blatantly dropping him. Time trial guy gets in about half an hour later, just as I’m getting ready to go. ‘Did you sleep?’ he demands. I say no. He looks incredulous. ‘How did you not sleep?’ Mate, I say, I’m a parent. I haven’t slept in seven and a half years. Richard nods with the knowing of a man who has fathered teenagers and hasn’t slept since the turn of the century.)

A tale of three 200ks

Bristol, March 9

I am horribly nervous about riding Wells, Mells and Broader because I don’t know anybody, although I am staying with a friend who is womanning the first checkpoint. This will be my first 200k, officially the furthest I will ever have ridden on a bike in one sitting, and it’s windy and drizzly and I have a cough and a cold and I bottled a 200 a few weeks ago because my GPS wasn’t working and don’t make me, Mum, I don’t wanna.

As soon as we all set off I settle in for a good hard worry. I’m in a small, fairly slow group and I want to pass everybody but I’m anxious about going too fast and blowing up late and being that idiot who shot past everybody at the start. It’s raining a bit harder now and the wind is sort of sideways. My bike is a bit on the lame side, I took it to Duncan at my LBS yesterday and he tutted and sighed and said it ‘might’ get me round and did a few tweaks but there’s lots of metallic grinding and crunching and I only have about three silent gears. There’s snot everywhere. Is it finished yet? Christ almighty where did that hill come from? You’re not in Surrey now, petal.

El is waiting at checkpoint one, smiley and lovely, and I have a cup of tea and hook up with Neil, the granite-like stalwart of the Bristol long-distance scene and his young padawan Mark. Mark and I are silly and youthful and leave Neil to head off together, and then I lose him up a hideous hill, then at the bottom I pick up another Mark who comments on the tailwind making the ride much easier from this direction. I wondered why it felt like I was riding into treacle a few miles back. Mark gets a puncture and I stop and wait with him and we’re soon joined by Other Mark and Mike, who comes bearing ginger cake, and all of a sudden we are a group and everything is quite pleasant, really, other than the bastard wind. Also remembering everybody’s name is super easy. If in doubt, Mark.

Riding in a group is good because you get to chat lots, and it’s fun and everybody helps each other, even with Mark’s second puncture about half a mile down the road. Also ginger cake. As the miles fly by we lose Mark who rather wisely decides to follow Neil’s steady but relentless wheel instead, and after lunch Mike, who is training for the Transcontinental and clearly much faster, zooms off and it’s just me and Mark for a long sloggy sort of section that involves a hill so brutal I have to get off and push at the very end. THE SHAME. Mark kindly blames my inadequate Eastway and talks about something called 28t. I’m already mentally chastising Duncan and demanding he solve this dilemma for me. We’re getting tired, and the checkpoint is 25km away, then we ride 25km and it’s an info stop and the checkpoint is STILL 25km away and now I’m not so sure group riding is a great idea, because Mark seems to know when the hills are coming up and how hilly they’ll be, and frankly I’d rather not know. But I’m glad of his company.

At the next stop we reunite with Mike and eat lots and there’s talk of more hills and I really wish I could just plug my ears, but instead I ride in dread, lifted only by my companions and their patience, as they’re clearly all in far better shape than me. Halfway up Mount Everest at 190km I have to stop and eat the entire contents of my Carradice. I think I might die, I certainly can’t get up the rest of that hill without a LOT of Hotel Chocolat, and by now it’s dark and Mark and Mike and whoever else was with us went on ahead, but because he is sweet, Mike comes back for me, and because he is also sweet Mark is waiting for us in an audax hotel (bus shelter) about a mile down the road, and there’s another hill and another walk of shame and then we all finish together and I am absolutely thrilled with myself and I have no idea how I’m going to ride 400km in two months time.

Petworth, March 31

I am so up for this. My legs are actually twitching, that’s how much I want to ride this distance today. The route is split into five sections, the longest of which is only 35 miles, and we are basically riding two big loops around Petworth and I know most of the roads and will never be more than 30 miles from my parents’ house where I’m staying, so it all feels completely manageable. It’s bright and clear.

I don’t know anybody and I don’t care and I set off and everything is lovely and I ride past the house I am currently in the process of buying and my heart feels like it might burst. The first checkpoint is the boot of a car and the second is a service station. I could use a bacon roll, but all that’s on offer is pasties. ‘I’m not pasty-ready yet,’ says a nice chap next to me. I’m not either but I need to eat so a 10am pasty it is, and we have a bit of craic before it starts to get a bit cold and drizzly and off I go again.

Things go downhill. I am suddenly cold and lonely, and my head is full of the dark thoughts, the sadnesses, the losses, the humiliations, that have encompassed the past eight months and a fair few prior to that too. I have a good old cry, miles fly by and tears pour and the bike keeps rolling. It at least feels amazing, I took it to Duncan after the Bristol audax and Made Demands and I now have a new-to-me Liv saddle, a shorter stem and an extra spinning gear (32t if you’re interested) and there are less crunching grinding noises as he re-riveted my slippy mech. There’s still a bit of noise though. This bike has always had slippy gears, I think it’s just part of its DNA. I’m still crying and my legs keep going and I suddenly notice i am swooping down the most gorgeous road, next to a stream running through a wood with a carpet of emerging bluebells, and the surface is smooth and there are gentle ups and downs and rounds and abouts, and I’ve completely forgotten what I was blubbing about because this is just joyous. I must remember where this road is. I’ve got no idea where it is, maybe I dreamed it.

I catch up with pasty chap, whose name I don’t get but we’ll go for Peter because he looks like a Peter, and he’s good company. He’s an ex-cop, retired, has ridden LEJOG every year since he was 18 - he’s now 57 so that’s a lot of LEJOGing. We pace together for a good long while but I am faster than him up hills and I think I’m fitter than him, so after a while he says to leave him behind and I pick up a new companion. Gerry (or Jerry, we didn’t discuss spelling) is also good company and is at the same stage of divorce as I am - we exchange a decree nisi high five and a great deal of deep and meaningful reflections on life, the universe and everything.

Other riders drop in and out, one tells me he thinks I’m strong, he’s wearing fancy sunglasses and some kind of racing kit and I am flattered. I start to notice that a few men overtake me, then I pick them back off at the next hill, then they overtake me again, then I pick them off on a hill again, and after a while they drop back. Are they trying to race me, or is this just the flow? Am I just a bit fitter? My legs feel like they could go on forever.

There’s a bit of a climb at about 170k up Farthing Down - it’s really quite a climb, if I’m honest, but after this it’s just Chichester and then back home on the A283 and I have ridden that road soooo many times. I decide I will time-trial it (I’ve done ONE time trial practice, reader, but get me with the strategies) as it’s undulating but fast and I still feel like I’ve got lots in the tank. I had reckoned without a headwind that reduces my ‘speed’ to about 7mph. It’s a slog and I see G/Jerry, who had eventually pulled away, up ahead of me. I catch up with him. He’s tired and happy to see me and we roll back together grumbling good-naturedly about the sloggy windy bit.

We are home way before sundown. That was - god, that was easy, if I’m honest. I ride home slowly, but by the time I turn into my parents’ road I have already started to pick up speed again. My legs have lots left in them, this is good, this is promising.

London, April 7

The Shark is billed as ‘hilly’ and I’m not sure I’m up for it. I’m even less up for it when I get to the start at Cutty Sark and am confronted by reams of Rapha and Castelli. Where, please, are all the old men on steel-framed tourers? Where are the scratchy pre-merino wool jerseys and faded bibs? Where are the Carradices? Where are my people?

I don’t know anybody and I’m anxious and miserable about it because everybody looks pro af. I’m blinded by all the bling. I am not in Rapha or Castelli, I am in black leggings with glow-in-the-dark love hearts on them and a black jacket from five years ago and my shit helmet because I left my pro one on the train a while back and I look like a chubby Hell’s Angel. We start and it’s one big group and I hate it. I don’t know where to be, I’m not sure how fast to go, everybody is talking loudly and laughing and going what feels exceptionally fast to me and getting too close and they all know each other and seem supremely relaxed and confident and nobody else looks like a chubby Hell’s Angel. Riding out of South London is horrible, and I seem to be trapped between two couples on speed dates. I can’t cope with 200k of this.

Eventually the groups string out, and then the first hill is upon us. It doesn’t feel like much to me, then I round a corner and it’s mayhem. The hill suddenly sharply increases in gradient (I find out later it’s 25%) and all across the road people are weaving around on bikes, grinding to a halt, and getting off and pushing. I settle down as I pass two of the speed-daters who dropped me earlier. Perhaps this will be OK after all.

As we head out into Kent I pace with a guy with a Carradice (MY PEOPLE! MY PEOPLE!) who I christen ‘Audax guy’. He climbs like I do, he’s fairly steady and consistent, not one of those ‘go flat out on the flat then stall halfway up a gentle slope’ riders. There’s also another chap on a steel-framed tourer who is super efficient up hills and sits quite upright. He’s one of mine for sure. And finally an older guy behind me whose neon yellow MTB jersey keeps catching my eye round corners. We don’t talk, but we all ride together and take it in turns to lead and it’s nicely companionable. We all roll into the first checkpoint together, and I sit with the older chap whose name I don’t get but I suppose Mark will do, and he says he’s with some friends who have already dropped him. I say it’s a bit rolling, as all we’ve done is climb and descend. He looks a bit shellshocked. ‘I wasn’t expecting this,’ he confesses. ‘My mates just asked if I fancied a ride to the coast.’

Audax guy heads off earlier than I do, but as I set out from the checkpoint despite all the hills so far, and knowing there’s lots to come, I feel pretty strong and I catch him quickly. He seems happy enough to ride together but we don’t really talk which is if I’m honest, perfect. i don’t feel chatty, I don’t have small talk, I just want to keep going. We do chat ahead of the South Downs, because we’ve got a bit of a climb and I’ll probably get up it faster than him but he’ll catch me on the descent, and we make this known to one another with few words and up High and Over we go. Somebody is on all fours at the top. Audax guy catches up and introduces himself as Steven and we go and look at the sea.

Steven and I ride most of the way back together, Mark is with us for a bit then drops away. The route is largely the same, lots of climbing. I love it. I love the steady inclines, the sitting down and getting stuck in, the slog to the top, the relief when it’s over. I love how my natural fear of descending gets smaller as I get more tired and can’t be bothered to hang on the brakes or worry too much because I need the break before the next climb. Steven is easy company, we chat a bit, he’s doing LondonWalesLondon too so we talk about that, and about our bikes, and just general stuff that I can’t really remember now but I know it was pleasant. At the last checkpoint it’s drizzling so we hit up an audax hotel with cheese twists and cake, and take it in turns to take photos of our bikes.

There’s two serious hills before the end, in quite quick succession, and I can tell Steven is getting tired. He says he’s going to stop before the final climbs for a minute or two, and I say I’ll keep going because I don’t like stopping if I can help it and I REALLY don’t like getting going again. He says he’ll try and catch me. The last two climbs are monsters. Halfway up Toys Hill I pass a girl who has stopped to smash a gel. ‘It just keeps going,’ she says in horror. It does keep going, but so do I. Long, long descent. I know there is one more big climb but I don’t know where, but all of a sudden there’s a sheer wall of concrete upon me and I don’t know what’s going on. I have to stop halfway up or I’ll die. It’s horrendous. I might do the walk of shame. Shit, there are riders behind me, I can’t do the walk of shame. I get back on my bike and heave up to the top.

Steven catches me not long afterwards, and so does gel girl, and a couple of guys who have been in the general vicinity for a while, and we roll back into London together. Gel girl has a broken elbow. RESPECT. I do not have a broken anything, and I don’t feel broken either, but that was tough. Steven is happy and so am I so we lead the group home together, I feel like a bit of a rock star, especially as I changed my soaked jersey and jacket halfway round so I don’t look like a chubby Hell’s Angel. I do look like a chubby pac-a-mac model but there is a LOT of Rapha behind me.

600k in a month is done, and now we up the distance. Some people do 600k in a one-er. I wonder if one day I’ll be one of them.

Three laps

I like threes, because they are predictably different. The first iteration is always horribly hard, the second surprisingly easy, the third has a twist in the tale. I find this applies almost universally, whether to love, losses, hills, or just laps of Richmond Park.

On the world’s slowest club ride to Richmond Park this weekend I was told about the three laps ‘challenge’. The goal is to ride it in under an hour, a feat a completely unscientifically proven only 20% of cyclists achieve.

I like threes and I like Richmond Park and I definitely like the idea of being top 20% material so I rolled up on my Eastway to see how I got on. I am exceptionally curious about what I can actually do on a bike. I think I can tick ‘get from A to B’ off the list quite comprehensively, but I want to know what else is out there. The more I ride my bike the more I want to ride it and the more I learn about what other people do on their bikes, the more I want to do that too. The more I think ‘well why not?’ and the less I think ‘well obviously I can’t do that…’

Also I need an excuse to show off my beautiful road bike, which I cleaned and fettled and taped the bars a ridiculously pleasing shade of lime green in readiness for an audax (long-distance cycle) I then never managed to attend. It’s been glaring at me irritably ever since, all dressed up with nowhere to go. I put on my nice kit to ride in so it doesn’t feel unappreciated.

I’ve ridden plenty of laps of Richmond Park and never once timed myself. However Barry, 70, my club’s time triallist extraordinaire, has seduced me with talk of steel-framed TT bikes from the 1980s with downtube shifters into wondering if I have any speed in these legs of mine. He makes time trialling sound really romantic, I have visions of first light on hazy summer mornings and that secretive silence of usually busy roads and the magical otherworld of Things People Do When Other People Are Asleep. I expect crucifying myself along the A24 at 4am in June is not quite like this, but that’s the image Barry has put in my head. The charmer.

I have deliberately not researched the distance and average speed required first. All I know is three laps, 60 minutes is the target. If I research it and find out it’s actually really hard I won’t do it, my confidence is erratic to say the least at the moment, so ignorance is bliss.

If there’s a technique to riding at speed, I don’t know it, so I just shove my bike into a massive gear and pedal. Up the hills I drop a couple of gears but not many. It hurts consistently. I don’t know how I’m going to keep this up for an hour. It’s a brilliantly sunny day and there’s loads of cyclists out. They all look much happier than me, many are faster without exerting any apparent effort at all.

I have a thrilling teta-a-tete with a chap on a mountain bike, who surely - SURELY - I should outpace on my carbon fibre dream machine and I can tell he surely - SURELY - thinks he should outpace a woman, and we back and forth until he admits defeat and slopes off to the cafe/goes for a planned cafe stop that has nothing to do with me.

Later, when it hurts more, I have an even more thrilling tete-a-tete with a red Jaguar E-Type being driven by a heap of tweed with a face like John Cleese. I think. I can’t really tell and my legs hurt.

I don’t think I’m ever going to be a sprinter. I know my legs are strong but they operate on a time delay, much like the rest of me actually. They never quite fire at the moment I need them to. Thirty seconds LATER, look out world, here I come. Only everybody else is already over the first hill. Last night I trained sprints at BMX (incidentally, did I mention my legs hurt?) and I had the same problem of that time delay before my brain connects to my legs, when I sort of windmill pointlessly with no real impact wondering when it’s all going to ‘kick in’. By the time it does, I’m at the first roller and my pedals catch.

It’s like that, but in Richmond Park.

A woodpecker flies over, low and undulating. Its red cap flashes brazenly in the unseasonal February sun.

I should be wearing a cap. I’ve got a new helmet from Liv Cycling and it needs a peak. I wonder if the helmet is making me more aero. Grip the drops, drop the elbows, I can feel my core is engaged but my thighs are bashing into my ribs. Is that supposed to happen or is that my ‘winter coat’?

Halfway round the last lap I am pondering how incredibly strong my legs feel and how amazingly fast I must be and they just go. Ping, snap. I’m pedalling through treacle with a headwind in my face and I have to switch all the way up to the top of the big ring to compensate, and I’m still slowing down. This won’t do but my legs won’t work, they’re all over the place, going in every direction except forwards and round. It lasts for a few minutes, then all of a sudden I’ve forgotten all about it and have cut up a mint green Nissan Micra and heartlessly slammed the Eastway across a set of cobbles to get round a mini-roundabout at more speed. It doesn’t mind. This bike never minds, which is more than can be said for the driver of the Nissan Micra.

Oh thank god, it’s the end.

68 minutes.

When I get home I google, and discover that a lap of Richmond Park is circa 6.7 miles which means to achieve this in less than an hour I need to ride at just over 20mph. Today I averaged just over 17mph. Directly afterwards I rolled home feeling like I got hit by a bus. By the evening, I hardly feel it at all.

I like little challenges like this because of what you learn about yourself. Today I learned I’m not as fast as I think I am. I also learned that there’s probably a better technique to time trialling than putting your bike in a big gear and pedalling hard. I never felt like I was going that fast, even though I couldn’t make the bike go any faster. This feels paradoxical and I expect there is a way around it. Google will know.

I also learned that I can recover extremely quickly, which I did suspect, and that next time I want to try a timed challenge I could pick a day on which I did not train two hours of BMX and not eat tea the evening before.

There might be other ways to shave off that eight minutes. I could ride at a different time so there’s less traffic and pedestrians to negotiate. I could try riding clockwise, to see if that makes a difference. I could get rid of some of the winter coat. Or, I could just ride a bit faster. Next time, I expect I will.

Riding the change

I want to but I don’t want to today.

Get up and wash your face, brush your teeth, plait your hair. You don’t need to shower, you’ll only get sweaty anyway. It doesn’t matter that all your usual kit is dirty, wear the fancy stuff, embrace your inner roadie. At least your bike’s still filthy from the weekend and your overshoes are plastered, that’ll balance it out.

Your bike is right there, you literally have to walk past it to get out of the door, so put your helmet on, your shoes, the mucky overshoes, gloves, keys, purse, stuff them in your stupid frame bag, snacks down the back of your jersey, it doesn’t matter that your thick gloves are still wet because you didn’t put them on the radiator, you have other gloves, just put those on.

You don’t need a jacket. It’s not that cold, you’re not going to be out forever. Just get out the door.

Put your headphones in, don’t worry that everybody hates cyclists in headphones, everybody hates cyclists whether they wear headphones or not. Put that song on repeat, it’s all you’ll want to listen to anyway.

It doesn’t matter that you took a wrong turn, you need the miles, you know where you’re going, you know all these roads like the back of your hand, you know umpteen different ways to get there, just take a different route.

Stop fretting that you should have brought the cross bike instead to make it harder, just ride singlespeed for the training, bonus points because removing gears means one less thing to bother with. Just pedal, keep your legs spinning, keep moving forwards.

Don’t worry if you push too hard and blow out, you know you recover fast, all that BMX, your legs can take it, you won’t lose them.

That phonecall you need to make, the conversations you need to have that you don’t even know how to start yet, the work you need to pull in, the questions you need to answer, the plans that need to come into being, the hands you have to hold while you do it, the skills you need that you still don’t have, the things you want that might not come to you, the books you still haven’t written, it’s all going to be fine, if you just keep going.

Watch everything begin to turn.

Things are going to change whether you want them to or not.

Race day jersey and shorts c/o Liv Cycling

A loose list for 2019

If I were to pick a word to describe 2018, it would be hard to go past ‘shitshow’. A year that cost me my marriage, along with several other significant relationships, and even my beloved dog, isn’t likely to attract gleaming accolades.

But I am nothing if not an optimist and last year was valuable beyond compare in terms of finally leaving behind old and dysfunctional ways of thinking and being, and finding a version of and vision for myself I am positively and all-encompassingly excited about. It was also extremely useful for observing and understanding patterns in relationships. It’s tempting to sit and blame other people for fallout (and to be fair there’s been plenty of blaming, I’m hardly claiming to be Zen-like here) but it’s a far more useful exercise to reflect on my part in it all, and consider what I could do differently in the future and conversely, what I would not do differently. The changes of 2018 were harrowing but they were all the right changes.

I also had my first novel published, an event that sadly was completely overshadowed by the disintegration of my personal life. The book is out there in the world and hopefully remains the start of something, as opposed to a catastrophic symbol of the price of creative expression and ambition. In my darker moments I think of it as just that, but those moments are becoming less frequent.

Writing goals do remain out of reach at the moment so for 2019 my to-do list is primarily cycling related. One of the advantages of divorce and shared custody is that I have a lot more free time, and what better way to spend it than on a bike? Interspersed with the odd bit of skating, swimming and surfing. In no particular order, here are the plans for this year.

1. London-Wales-London: A 400k audax (aka ‘bloody long bike ride’) that came on my radar thanks to sports psychologist Josie Perry. I’ve never ridden anything like this distance in one go but am assured it is possible, and the second I read about it, I was pretty much in. Training for LWL will involve a fair few distance events, all of which are excellent excuses for a weekend away on the cheap, which is essentially 50% of my 2019 plans in a nutshell.

2. London series BMX: I only started BMX early last summer but it’s safe to say I’m completely addicted. I managed one race last year, at the Olympic track in Stratford where I and one other ‘mature’ female were shoved in with bunch of men on cruisers (BMX bikes with larger wheels) and I tailed around last and finished about fifty metres off the pace. Regardless, it was one of the best things I’ve done. BMX is ridiculously good fun and completely immersive, builds general bike handling skills, is excellent for all-round fitness and is one of the few things that takes me completely out of my own head, largely through blind fear, and allows me to occupy my body 100%. For a deep thinker like me this is gold dust.

3. Cycling instructor training. I have wanted to do this for years but for various reasons it wasn’t possible, this year however I have taken the plunge and will be training in February. Once the course is done I will be able to work as an instructor, ideally mainly with children but also with women, especially mothers and older women who might feel they don’t have the time to cycle or it’s just ‘not for them’.

4. Mechanicals. Along with starting BMX, learning how to maintain and fix my bike properly was one of the best things I did last year. I went to drop-in sessions at London Bike Kitchen in Hackney, where the extremely tolerant and very lovely Amy provided tea, great conversation and expert coaching in how to wrestle with various metal implements. I have also taken to frequenting my local bike shop, Wallington Cycles, where I am learning a great deal in return for tea, snacks and general banter, which seems an excellent deal to me. Most recently we built a wheel with a dynamo hub, a nifty little invention that uses the power generated by cycling to run lights and even charge things via USB (the shrieking when we were able to charge a mobile phone from it was off the chart). Tinkering with my bike setup is enormously satisfying and if you want to get all deep about it, which obviously I do, building my competence has been absolutely vital to restoring something of my rather shattered self-esteem. In short, doing stuff is super empowering.

5. South Downs Way. I grew up very near the South Downs and that landscape has a strong and profoundly soothing emotional effect on me, a bittersweet combination of home, awareness of the passage of time, and righteous suffering. The latter might be all the hills. At the moment I ride there on my cyclocross bike but even my plucky, can-do attitude is failing in the face of narrow drops, no suspension and a saddle forged straight from Hell. It’s really more mountain bike sort of territory. I haven’t been able to look at my mountain bike since my marriage ended, as it was representative of one of the few things my ex husband and I did together. However the last time I rode on the South Downs I concluded that the emotional pain of dusting off my mountain bike would still be lesser to the physical pain inflicted by my cross bike, which is progress, in a weird way. I’m less bothered about riding the whole 100m end-to-end, as it’s really a landscape I like to wander around on rather than rip through, however my cousins live in Winchester providing an ideal place to collapse at the end of it, so at some point it probably needs to be done in a linear fashion, either in part or in full.

6. Hills, hills, hills. Climbing and descending fill me with a combination of excitement and fear - or nausea, as it’s generally known. In terms of using physical activity as a way to address one’s fears, hills are a prime contender for me. I also happen to really love them even if I am prone to anxiety over heights and I worry hugely about corners when descending, thanks to being a generally off-kilter, right-handed-left-footed sort of person and the lasting physical impact of two pregnancies in quick succession. A few weeks ago I dug out a list of the top 10 climbs in Surrey and nailed four in a day, which felt like a good start.

Jersey and shorts courtesy of Liv Cycling.

7. The one I can’t even write about yet. A while ago a friend contacted me suggesting a cycling challenge that filled me with incredulous terror, so obviously I said yes. We are now making plans. I’m too worried about jinxing any of it to say what it is, but it will happen in September, take around two weeks and be Lots of Fun, Hellish and generally Quite The Adventure.

8. Stand up on a surfboard. I mean, this has to happen at some point, right?

9. Observe my response to landscapes. A bit existential, this one, but I am fascinated by the concept of a personal response to a landscape or environment. After my marriage came to an end I went on several trips to parts of the UK that hold meaning for me, and observing and experiencing my emotional reactions to these places was enormously healing and really deepened my knowledge of who I am and where I came from. Fundamentally the desire to know where we’re from is steeped in our DNA. Whether I was on a bike or in water, the way I interacted with these landscapes brought me understanding I couldn’t have gained in other ways. For example Northumberland, where I was born, holds deep associations for me with the mother bond and significant formative relationships with females including my relationship with my own daughters. This year I want to continue interacting with a range of landscapes that hold significance or curiosity for me.

10. Skate like a girl. Skating is about the only thing I do that has no purpose, goal or achievement attached other than the experience itself. As a friend observed, most skaters really are ‘just about the skate’ and in the adult world it’s rare to have something you do just for the sake of it, for no greater ambition or with nothing to prove. Skating is also what the always-brilliant Lucy calls a site of mutual fulfilment - something my daughters and I can do together that feels exclusively ours and impacts on our confidence in and unity with one another. Skating is by far the most fiendishly difficult of all the sports I do, takes the most effort for the least obvious gain, and holds that fear factor that renders me unable to think or process anything other than the moment.