My friend Bernard is not a man for all seasons. He is a man for one season. That season is winter. His perfect day is cold, around freezing, ideally with a threat of sleet, and daylight in as short supply as possible. He excels in these conditions, as long as the metric for excellence is not speed, but a sort of miserable contentment.
It wouldn’t be quite fair to say he feels cycling is there to be endured, but he does like some grit in his oyster. Let me put it this way, winter offers more opportunities to display a certain amount of carefully manufactured toughness. When you finish a ride on a chill winter day, people give you credit for your dedication to your sport.
When you finish a ride on a summer evening, with the golden sun dipping low and the evening shadows lengthening across the wheat fields, people say terrible things like, “Lucky you. That must have been a lovely evening for a ride.” That’s not his style at all.
But thunderstorms are not frequent enough to rescue the season. In any event, even if he manages to avoid the downpour his insistence on waiting till the roads dry so he doesn’t get his bike wet is boring even if you’re Bernard.
There are other possibilities. On a July weekend this year we had arranged a ride. We were to meet at 9 am. At 9.05, as I waited at a crossroads reading the ingredients list on an energy gel, he messaged to cancel because, “It’s going to get quite hot later.”
I suggested rescheduling for 6 pm. “No. It’ll be chilly by dusk,” he said.
“Bring arm warmers,” I suggested.
“I hardly think so,” he replied.
This is another eccentricity. He’s got a firm belief that putting on or removing kit to regulate your temperature shows what he refers to as, “Southern Softness.” (He’s about as Northern as Boris Johnson, in case you’re wondering.) You may, in winter, take a rain jacket, which you must always refer to as a “cape”, as long as you only put it on or take it off while moving. Nothing else. That would be making life too easy on yourself.
In winter, you get cold, and that is noble. In summer you get hot, and that is decadent. Unless it gets cold in summer, in which case you’re cold like you are in winter, but somehow without the nobility.
The only way out of it is the one you’ve probably already worked out. If it’s really hot, really really hot, he blossoms again. A couple of years ago we had a 40 degree heatwave, in which he insisted on doing long rides. I’m pretty good in the heat, so I went with him.
His main ambition on them was to make café stops. He took a real pride in walking into a café, ordering a coffee, and sitting down. About 30 seconds later every pore on his body would pop open and sweat would gush out, like a grotesque water feature.
“Gosh,” the proprietor would say, reaching a long arm over a lake of sweat to put the cup on the table. “You must be quite mad riding in weather like this – I couldn’t possibly do it!”
I’d say he would glow with pride, but it would have been hard for him to glow any harder.
How To… Forget Things
We speak here not of forgetting the horror of that 200km ride you did where you bonked at 50km and had to do the rest on water and prayer. We speak more literally, of the food you forgot to stick in your pocket before setting out, and of other objects essential for riding a bike.
There is nothing that one or other of us has not forgotten at some point. Riders have forgotten bikes – more often than you’d think. This is not so bad – at least forgetting the bike when you go on a cycling holiday is something you can work up into an anecdote. Plenty of people have ruined trips by forgetting wheels, thru-axles and (worst of all) shoes.
There are several essential techniques to forgetting things. The most useful thing is to put the object in question somewhere you won’t forget it. Ideally this will be somewhere weird – put your pedals on top of the fridge. Put your shoes in the dog’s basket. On no account leave them with your bike or bike bag, or by the front door.
But wherever it is, make sure it’s somewhere that you’ll suddenly remember with a gasp of horror on the flight, or as you’re checking into your hotel.
A way to jazz up forgetting things is to leave them where the unscrupulous can steal them – abandon your best wheels in a car park, abandoned while you fussed over putting the bike in the boot.
The other way to ruin your day is to remember everything, then forget that the bike (the one that you remembered) is on the roof-rack as you drive into a multi-story carpark.
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