It’s late November 2010. I’m watching a YouTube video of an extremely hairy guy with a disordered beard sitting on a bicycle that I could never hope to afford. “Look ahead on the trails,” he tells me, and then proceeds to demonstrate this technique on his marvellously impressive mountain bike. The reason I’m watching Ed Oxley show YouTube how to ride a bike? Because in a few short weeks I’ll be going on a mountain biking day-out which will be my first true experience of riding off-road...
I’ve always had a bike. My first ride that didn’t have stabilisers was a BMX Panther in glorious black and chrome. My brother had one too, bought from a catalogue, and we used to ride them to my Nan’s house and back pretending to be motorcycle cops.
A few years, another BMX and a Raleigh Tomahawk later, I found myself riding a red road bike with gear-levers on the down tube and constant slow-punctures in both tyres. One Christmas, just after university, I was presented with a Universal hybrid with rigid forks but fairly knobbly tyres. It was at this point that I started taking cycling a little more seriously. I marked out a ten mile route for myself on the roads, then later a 15 mile route that incorporated a bit of canal work and the wildlife reserve at the back of Elmdon Park. The Universal didn’t last long under that sort of beating and when the bottom bracket started to make snap, crackle and pop noises I promptly gave up. It was my girlfriend at the time, a much more dedicated road-cyclist than I, who took the dead Universal to a bike shop. They told her that the Universal wasn’t designed to go off-road and proceeded to sell her a ten-ton ‘full-suspension’ off-road bike made of big lumps of iron and a huge spring. It was called a Vertical Something-Or-Other. At the time, I thought this bike was fantastic and I took to the canals and parks with renewed vigour and a stop-watch. I had little idea what I was training for, really, just that I wanted to train...
The Vertical Something-Or-Other lasted six years and I even used it to get to work. I never cleaned it. I never considered wearing a helmet.
Through the Cycle-to-Work scheme I was able to afford my first ever decent bike: a Halfords mountain bike with hydraulic disc brakes [what the hell are those?!] 100mm suspension at the front and an aluminium frame. I remember actually laughing out loud the first time I rode it, on the way home from Halfords, because I simply couldn’t believe how light it was and how everything on the bike just WORKED without any clanks, bangs or grinding.
It was a work colleague, Deadly Dan, who suggested I might want to join something called the AMBS. I was promptly signed up to the Alvechurch Mountain Biking Society Facebook page which featured the profiles of 9 other blokes and a video of someone falling off his bike. Okay. What now? I was then informed that I was invited to take part in a day trip to Cannock Chase to do some proper mountain biking. Mountain biking? I thought a mountain bike was just a type of bicycle, I didn’t realise it was something you could ‘do’. Would I have to wear lycra?
Chats with Deadly Dan, Singletrack Magazine and YouTube helped to give me some idea of what I was in for. So in November I found myself watching Ed Oxley tell me to look ahead on the trails...
In the 8 months since I joined the AMBS I have ridden almost every day, with very few exceptions. I enjoy riding with the lads: helping each other to come to grips with a TTF, helping with repairs, enjoying the victories over a particularly challenging section [Lurch!] or the joys of some astoundingly swift and sweeping trail [Pink Heifer!]; but I also crave the thrill of pitting myself against a stop-watch over some familiar terrain, or pointing my front wheel in a new direction to see what lies over the next hill. The freedom that mountain biking has given me is the thing I hold most precious about this sport. That, and the amount of flapjack I’m permitted to eat.
By Ant
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