For a joyous few years in the not so distant past I had the honour of writing a column for Cranked Mountain Bike Magazine – one of the finest embodiments of the community of mountain biking put to print. Seb Rogers, the editor, gave me the encouragement to write from my heart about what mountain biking meant to me, and somehow even found the confidence in me to put those words into print alongside some of the best outdoors writers’ work out there.
When Seb laid his editor’s pen down for the last time and closed the pages on the last ever Cranked, there was a palpable sense of grief in the mountain biking world for a jewel lost.
Seb being Seb, his driving force was the celebration of mountain biking and the love of the community, and with that ethos he has been so wonderfully generous as to grant me the copyright to those few columns I had written for him, and allowed me to share them here. A true gent.
Over the coming weeks and months, I’ll run a series of the columns I wrote for Cranked, and hope you enjoy them as much as I enjoyed spending the time living my mountain biking memories once more, albeit on paper.
Anticipation
My tyres are red with yellow side walls. Grips: yellow, with red spots poking through their torn perforated rubber. Frame: red, with yellow decals. Up front: an unmistakable red and yellow heron badge. Saddle: moulded plastic, red again, with slots along its length for a little bit of flex.
I am 8 years old and sitting astride my Raleigh Burner, psyching myself up to do “the drop” 50 metres ahead of me where a small group stand, waiting. And a drop it was. For a four foot tall kid, anything higher than a plank on a couple of bricks was a big deal. And this was certainly bigger than that. Admittedly only about 10 inches bigger, but bigger all the same, and I was going to ride it.
A two foot drop from the grass verge on the side of the road to some old broken tarmac left over from when they were building the estate, it was an enticing sunken section. Amongst my friends, I was usually the idiot who had a go first. My dad remembers stopping me as I was mid 200 yard run up to the aforementioned plank and brick jump outside our house, dashing out just in time to block the ramp and prevent yet another trip to the local A&E department where I was rapidly becoming a regular.
But mum and dad weren’t there this time, and my friends were willing me on. In my mind they were awaiting my undoubted glory and confirmed brilliance. In theirs, they were clearly waiting for me to come a cropper. Hindsight is always 20:20.
And so off I set, milkbottle legs cranking the pedals towards the edge of the drop.
But now it’s 25 years later and instead of pushing my Raleigh Burner towards a small dip on my estate, I’m sitting at the top of Raise, with the summit of Helvellyn behind me to the south. It’s mid afternoon and we have spent the hot summer day riding the Lakeland fells to the highest summits in the country.
In all directions the landscape rolls away below us, and on the warm grey moonlike rocks we’re sitting waiting for four or five walkers to pass on their way to the summit so we can begin our descent. The path is steep, rocky, and loose. Switchbacks in it tease an uncertain ability to turn without a washout and in the distance we can see the enticing start of Sticks Pass, with its promise of sublime singletrack, natural jumps and a waterfall of cascading slate through an old quarry to take us back to the floor of the valley.
As the walkers pass they say their “hellos” and “thanks” and “you must be mads” and we all rise to our feet, step over our bikes, click camelbaks and cleats in place and begin the uncertain, but certainly sketchy descent down the hill in front of us.
But now it’s two years before and we’re shrouded in mist at the top of a Scottish stane. Perhaps the most well known. Certainly one of the most popular. After a long crank up through regiments of pine standing stock still, shrouded and silent atop a carpet of brown fallen needles, we sit together in an open gravel spot beside a picnic bench adorned with spider webs.
The path drops away from us, the first tabletop just an appetiser for its larger friends down the hill, one of which we can see, its top fading into the murk like the path the naïve teens are warned against going down in the movies just before the monster starts picking them off. Revealing previously unshown skills, Adey goes first with a small kick up before a much bigger jump from the lip of the second tabletop – and vanishes. His cheer and crunch of tyre landing on gravel let us know he’s fine and with raised eyebrows we dig deep to find similar untapped veins of expertise and throw ourselves into the unknown.
There is no feeling like a perfectly ridden berm; the recovery of a back wheel kicking out on loose stone; a drop timed so accurately that it almost feels as if you never left the trail. It’s why we ride. It’s why I ride. But to get to there, there’s a split second, a moment where the mind takes the snapshot that becomes the memory. Where you take – and hold – the breath before starting off. It’s that one moment that sticks.
It’s the anticipation.
The tipping point between waiting for, and doing. Where the build up becomes the pay off; and a hope of satisfaction and reward.
I don’t remember the drop on my Burner, any of the small jinks and moves needed on Sticks Pass, or how well I rode any of Glentress’s berms. But I can still feel the sensation of being set, ready to go, poised in that moment; a single breath held at a single point on a thousand different paths.
And there’ll be one on the next ride too no doubt.
I can’t wait.
Keeper of the peak - @kofthep 