More, more, more

Give me more, I say.

In our attempts to make the women's after work ride a regular Wednesday spot, two of us committed to the ride yesterday.  This time, I meant business.  This time I took the road bike. Not the cross bike of the high volume knobbly tyres with the flat pedals and the disc brakes but the mincing minnie road bike with its precious skinny wheels and tyres and colour co-ordinated detailing.  I like my road bike.

Speculatively, I thought, Caroline asked me at the start of the ride whether I had any time constraints. Oh, I thought, she's working up to telling me she can only play out for a couple of hours.  Not at all, it turns out, for on confessing that I have nothing to go home for any time soon, it turned out she was gently putting out feelers for my potential for a pub stop.  It was agreed.

Oddly, we did the same ride as last week, and not oddly, we did it faster, it being easier to organise two riders than it is four.  There's less waiting for folk who haven't made it through a green light, there's less waiting for folk who can't filter through traffic or can't descend or can't climb or can't ride a bike (ok that's a bit harsh).  This left plenty of time for the pub stop.  And if it hadn't, that's what lights are for.

It's a lovely part of the world, the Delph and Uppermill.

Arriving here always feels somehow a bit special in a low key way ...

Hartshead Pike

Quite special with a gentle climb in the summer evening sunshine.

We ride

A couple of the women at work have started adding a bit of a loop to their commutes home on a Wednesday evening.  This Wednesday past I realised half way through the morning - ooh, it's Wednesday, I wonder if they're going out, I wonder if I'd be welcome, and the e-mail query was sent. I confess, I was a bit euphoric to discover it was game on for that evening.  Imagine, a lovely sunny day, all the time in the world (lights were packed) and four women with bikes ready to ride together in the evening sunshine.  Lovely.

Genuinely, I was excited about it.  I don't often get to ride with women, or if I do it's mixed groups on mountain bikes.  There was a certain amount of special about the idea of this on the road.  Women, not girls.  Women doing their thing, uninfluenced by blokes, no supportive spouses offering to carry stuff, no men being asked for advice on routes, in fact, no fuss whatsoever, just women and their bikes.

It was lovely.  Hannah in charge of the route and each of us in charge of ourselves.  There was a mechanical, we sorted it in a nonchalant self sufficient manner.  No fuss.  There were undulating ups and downs and whooshy bits, there were riders on the other side of the road, some of whom nodded, smiled, waved and others who were far too serious to acknowledge us.

It makes me smile, how road riding folk view others.  We were just women on bikes.  Happy.

Material Girl

My nesting instinct is having to find some balance.  I acquire new stuff, but this means old stuff must go, and consistently for me over the years, I can't bear to throw stuff out.  Useful stuff.  But not to me.   I'm embracing the challenge of working towards moving house, and it's made me really think about how I want to live, and it's made me feel guilty and capitalist.  What right have I to be so acquisitive? I feel guilty about my one person space requirement turning into yearnings for other things, kitchen diners for example.  It seems my nesting urge is leading me into some interesting places.  

When did I ever actually look for a home for me? Never.  I've never sat down and considered me, and me alone and what I want.  I've had rented rooms, rented flats, and I've bought in conjunction with another person, but never looked at what I'd like, just me.  

Turns out I want a kitchen diner. Is that incredibly avaricious of me?  Also turns out I want a garden, doesn't have to be a big one, but I want green stuff in it, not paving stones and not decking.  I want to grow herbs and to sit on the grass and read.

To make this dream happen I'm freecycling once again.  If I can keep getting a couple of items a day out of the loft then maybe by the time I come to sell I won't be carting accumulated crap of years around with me.  Goodbye router, goodbye third sheet sander, goodbye mitre saw, goodbye old vax, goodbye double air bed, goodbye dual action pump, goodbye fisherman's shelter, goodbye campinggaz coolbox that plugs into a cigarette lighter.  Goodbye to these things which haven't seen the light of day in nearly a decade.  And hello.  Hello to my future where I only take me with me.

Pivotal moment

We never see them at the time and we never see them coming, those pivotal moments.  Sometimes it takes years for us to realise what just happened, the significance, that moment.

When was your last pivotal moment?  When was mine?  When will the next be.  It's one of the odd vagaries of life, the pivotal moment, one of the things you can't predict but yet one which memory cannot bring back either, not without some serious mulling over of Stuff.

Is your life what you want it to be?  Stepping back, is it, is it really, is this existence the result of conscious choices.  If you stepped back, just a mini step and saw yourself through the eyes of, well you, but younger, or older, is this it, is this the life you want to lead? You have choices you know, you don't have to await that pivotal moment where chance takes you one way or the other, and because pivotal moments are all bound up in memory, you can change them anyway, make them into something else, lessen their impact.

I suspect as I get older and things dull, things aren't as bright or as shiny or as important as they once were, perhaps pivotal moments lessen in frequency, perhaps because I now have more conscious control, I accept chance but don't always believe in its influence over the smaller things in life. There are many things I can't change, those exert that pivotal influence.  But most things I can affect, I'm not a victim accepting her unwitting fate.  If this isn't the life I want to lead then I know, with an absoluteness of knowledge, I know that I can change it. I might not be able to immediately create the life I want to lead, but I can move away from a life I don't want to lead.  All it takes is recognition of that fact.  Maybe that recognition is in itself a pivotal moment, but I don't think so.

Pivotal moments include a walk in the pouring rain with raindrops disguising the tears coursing down my face, and the action of walking side by side hiding the face to face recognition of the tears.  It was a long time ago, crossing the bridge over the M11 but it was a bargain I made with life.  And I lost.

Genesis 8

And after forty days, Noah opened the doors to the ark and lo he saw freedom, for no longer did he need to get out on his bike and mount up the requisite kilometres in order to complete the Strava Specialised Spring Challenge.  40 days of cycling.  40 days of challenge.  30 of it feeling fine, 10 of it feeling exhausted.

I note that a year or so ago I was riding the flatlands of Belgium, happily trotting out 30kph.  Now in the flatlands of Cheshire I am trotting out around 20kph.  I am tired.  I am looking forward to rest and recovery, beer, sleep, books, sunshine, legs not in lycra, bum not sat on a saddle, neck and shoulders in normal alignment.  I am looking forward to equating the bike once again with fun.  It'll all be over soon.  111km to go and 3 days to do it in.  Amen to that.

My obsession

Strava has become an obsession.  Let's just add it to the list of obsessive black and white but completely harmless to anyone but me behaviours.

I don't understand.  Let me explain.  The Strava Spring Classics challenge popped up onto the dashboard at the end of March.  It suggested that during the forthcoming 40 days folk take on the challenge of riding the arbitrary distance of 1266 km.  This apparently in a world of clever statistics adds up to the distance ridden by a theoretical rider who takes part in all the so called Spring Classics; the one day epic events in Europe at this time of year.  They are a glorious, spectacular and beautiful dance, these one day races which specialise in routes of particular "interest".  This can mean cobbles.

So in the spirit of something, of exploration, of solidarity, of curiosity, of rising to the challenge, I signed up.  After a very short time, I did the maths.  It would mean averaging 32km per day on the bike.  Hmm.  Not a problem, I reckoned.  If I added bits into my daily commute and did that four days a week and used the weekends for longer rides, it seemed do-able.  But there wasn't much room for slippage.  And slippage there has been.

I am now staring at a 400kilometre target to make up in ten days.  That would mean 40k a day, and no rest days.  Yet today I did just 10k and tomorrow I can't see a way of getting a ride in.  Oh.  I'm in a bit of trouble now. I think it means every commute next week is going to need to mount up to 50k.

I have, however, a new bike which is making it easier.  It's a cyclocross bike so it's quicker on the tarmac than a mountain bike but also allows me to take routes the road bike doesn't love. Hard packed grit, gravel, mud, tree roots, rocks, tow paths, linear routes, and it's been quite a joy to explore.  There's a way home from work which is 30k of off road fun as I ride alongside canals and through bluebell woods.  It's not all bad, really it's not.

Brought to you by you're my obsession, who do you want me to be?

Rough Stuff

My club do an annual or possibly so it seems a three times a summer road ride where people bring out their play bikes and their weird toys and we hit the trails, the bridleways and the cobbles.  I went on this today and took the hybrid, an odd choice, it would seem, judging by the 80% turnout of cyclocross bikes along with a smattering of road bikes, hard tails and as incongruous as my own, a full suss.

It was just so much fun.  Abolishing the required lycra, giddily sporting rucksacks, baggy clothing, all the things you wouldn't normally see on our oh so serious image conscious rides.  The hybrid is a fairly heavy beast compared to some, and it was oddly interesting to see how it handled life in grupetto of road and cyclocross bikes.  It wasn't bad.  Once it got up to speed it wasn't bad. It made me work hard to regain the group should I lose it (ever corner, must look at that ...), but once I was back on then everything was fine, warp speed maintained.  I worked hard, and the bike worked hard.  By the end of the ride (well, in honesty at the cafe stop) a bit of experimentation led me to the assessment that my back brake had given up making any effort at all.  It maybe slowed me a little but I suspect that unless on an uphill it would never in a million years stop me.  A few years ago that sort of behaviour would have me worried and panicing.  Nowadays I just take it in my stride, figure out how to manage a combination of slight slowing from the back along with judicious use of the front brake, and mostly it worked out.

I have, now, however, ordered a new bike.  A cyclocross bike.  It's steel and it has disc brakes.  That'll show 'em I think.

And to close with a phrase used by one of the old wizened skinny dudes in my group.  I know where I am, but not where I'm going.  I kind of like that.