How I got into cycling

I lead a typical modern life, working silly hours from home as a creative consultant in London. Cabin fever is an ever-present danger to the home worker. Scruff, our cockapoo, now forces me out at least twice a day to flirt with joggers and pee on anything vertical. But I still crave the great outdoors. This first led me to the mountains, where I fell in love with the timeless, wide-open spaces of the backcountry and the split-board that allowed me to tour amongst it.

Multi-day split-board touring, about to drop into the Glacier des Grandes.

Sadly, snowboarding resurrected some old problems from my basketball days which then led me to take up knee surgery as a regular pastime. After five procedures I have now reached an intermediate level of experience with knee surgery, but I’ve lost the love for it and have no desire to take it any further. For four years I toiled away at rehabilitation: physio, hydrotherapy, 10 hours a week in the gym. My body adapted my movements to protect the injuries but it was all a disguise and recovery was painfully slow. Boarding, even cruising the pistes at dull speeds, was agony but I persisted, driven by the memory of how much I enjoyed it, though I’d continuously be left deflated by the reality.

The surgeon assured me it was quite normal for him to draw big arrows pointing to where he needed to cut and to mark each leg ‘Left’ and ‘Right’.

Then came the opportunity to renovate a property in Chamonix in preparation for my wife and I basing ourselves there for a winter season – all or nothing. I had grand plans of hillwalking every day during the build, to supercharge my rehabilitation. In the end, I didn’t. Not once. The build was all-consuming and there was no time or energy for anything else but, as it turns out, that didn’t matter. The simple act of moving around a building site for 8 weeks helped me to break through my rehabilitation plateau. My desk jockey lifestyle, it seems, is the real culprit. No amount of gym work was compensating for the time I spent sat on my arse.

That winter (2014) went as well as we could have hoped. It took me until the end of January before I could ride the terrain I’d previously loved. And by the end of March I was strong enough to do most of it pain-free, if I avoided the silly stuff, anyway. Those last three weeks into April were a real game-changer and by the end of our time in Chamonix I’d broken clean through previous plateaus and was able to manage my knees well enough to ride (almost) the way I loved to. Now, thoughts turned to maintaining this through the off-season, so that I could strap in again come December and ride as I wanted.

“Cycling is a meditative experience. Quiet thoughts drift into my mind and in the silence they become audible.”

All throughout my surgery and rehab the surgeons and physios were lamenting the fact that I wasn’t a cyclist. I enjoyed romping around on my mountain bike as a kid but now I lived right in the middle of London. Where can you ride a bike in London? I’m hardly going to drive for an hour to go riding. That’s not going to last long. Road cycling? Yeah, right. I’m 15 miles from anywhere you could plausibly consider good cycling roads. 15 miles of angry London traffic and awful roads to book-end every ride? I’d also spent more than enough boring hours spinning away on a static bike as part of my rehab that I’d never really considered cycling as a long-term option.

Fast forward to April 2014 and some of the strongest guys I was touring with were cyclists during the rest of the year. Suddenly the advantages of cycling reached a point where they overcame the perceived disadvantages and I committed to giving it a try. Not long after we returned to London my wife bought me an early birthday present. A B’Twin Triban 3. The cheapest bike we could find. I didn’t want to spend much money on it as I honestly didn’t know if I would stick with it.

Short, social rides with friends gave way to longer, faster rides.

It was the middle of May and the weather was beginning to turn. I started riding 15km, then 20km. I’d do rides out to Greenwich to climb Greenwich Park Hill. It felt like Everest. This continued for a month, until I saw a friend (another super-fit ski-touring friend) had ridden 80km. “Ah, OK”, I thought “so these 20km rides are a bit childish then”. I tried 35km and then 50km, 100km, 200km. Once Pandora’s Box was opened and I realised I could escape the city I quickly fell in love with cycling in a way I never anticipated. It turned out I was fairly competitive, logging one of the fastest in my very first sportive (the very hilly Etape Cymru) and continuing that theme in other events since.

I love competition but cycling also takes me back to my youth. To the times when a bike gave me new freedoms. It gave me child-like joy to head off in random directions and see how far I could go, exploring new places and filling in all those in-between bits on my mental map of the part of the country I call home. I also found cycling to be a meditative experience. It’s metronomic and somewhat mindless in a way that allows for a sense of mental calm. Quiet thoughts drift into my mind and in the silence they become audible, where normally they are lost amongst the noise. It gives me time and space to think sideways, to allow random thoughts to linger and percolate. That’s a precious thing in today’s modern life.