Why I Ride
As a kid back in the early eighties the world was a different place. We were allowed a degree of freedom that kids these days would never be afforded. You could tell your parents you were going out with your mates and disappear for the day. Hop on your bike, build shonky jumps, play on building sites, get up to all kinds of shit that these days would probably end up with social services or the police getting involved. Nobody's phone buzzed. Nobody knew where you were. That was the entire point.
Bikes were always part of my life. Escaping with friends, riding to school, before eventually being led to racing cyclocross, then MTB, then jobs bike shops, guiding all over the world, and to where I am today. Looking back, none of it was a plan. It was just the thing that was always there, the constant underneath everything else.
I remember being 7 or 8, going round to a friend's house because his family had a bigger telly, and The Tour would be on. Laurent Fignon, Greg LeMond, Bernard Hinault, fighting for supremacy in a way that felt genuinely dangerous even through a TV screen. Looking back it wasn't just the racing that entertained me, it was the imagery, the stories, the landscapes. A kid in a pebble-dashed English suburban town watching men suffer up mountains he couldn't have pointed to on a map. I was hooked, and a lot of my travel since has been influenced by watching grand tours and racing.
That's really where the romance starts for me. Not the podium, not the result, but the idea that a bike could put you somewhere that looked like nowhere you knew. Cycling was the first thing that made the world feel bigger than my street. It still is. That's the whole trick of it — a bike is such a plain, unglamorous object, and yet it's the thing that's taken me further, physically and otherwise, than anything else I own.
I've always been and am still drawn in by the same things. As a kid watching the racing, or spending all day outside with my mates, it's the escapism and freedom. I'm not, and have never been, into the performance side of cycling. Watts, yaw angles, FTP, none of it has ever interested me. I've raced but never been hooked, I've worked for teams and been to The Tour numerous times, but it's not the racing that gets me, it's the atmosphere, the circus, the noise and the imagery. From Camille McMillan and Graham Watson to Jered and Ashley Gruber, to the new generation of photographers whose work captures the emotion of racing. We're lucky as fans that our sport isn't in a concrete stadium but the mountains and roads of Europe and beyond, and it's that which drives my sense of escapism and need to travel with my bike.
Riding does something numbers never will. Get far enough into a long ride, alone, and your head empties out in a way that almost nothing else manages. No emails, no notifications, just the road and whatever you're thinking about, which after a couple of hours usually isn't much at all. That's the romance nobody puts on a start line banner. It's not suffering for the sake of it, it's the by-product of suffering — the quiet on the other side of it. I've had some of my clearest thinking on climbs I was barely getting up.
A theme that's run through The Road to Respair Podcast is that need for people to escape, and the newer genres like gravel and bikepacking create that same inspirational and aspirational imagery that makes you want to go to places, ride, and create experiences and memories that last a lifetime. It's the same impulse I had at 8 years old watching Fignon suffer on a mountain, just with different bikes and better waterproofs.
Speaking to Doug Baker of Shift Active Media on the podcast, we got onto this exact thing — riders at the Transcontinental covering thousands of kilometres, people racing 560km at The Traka. Not everyone watching is going to sign up for either. But more people are looking to ride further, and now there's a ton of information out there on YouTube and Instagram, so riding 200 or 400km may not seem as challenging as it once did. The bar's moved, not because people got fitter, but because they got braver, and access to the imagery did that.
I don't need to ride a certain distance every day. Numbers aren't important, experiences are. Getting lost in my own head, riding in new places, listening to other people's stories, seeing incredible images shot in amazing places, watching bike racing on TV purely to scout the next place to ride, that's what drives me. It's a slower kind of ambition than a training plan, and I think that's exactly why it's lasted this long.
While I may have a few issues with social media, even I have to admit that the information and inspiration available has kept me hooked. With a little bit of research it's easy to get advice on kit, bikes, places, and even tips for finding food and water in the middle of nowhere. Over the last few years I've made an effort to try new things and ride in new places, it helps with the reset. I've challenged myself and ridden further, learned more about myself each time, whether I wanted to or not.
I'm sure some of the emotions are the same today as when I was a kid, but instead of parks and building sites it's now the mountains of Europe, France, Spain, Italy and more. Same freedom, same escapism, just a longer commute to get there. Whatever the bike, whatever the terrain, that's still the whole reason I do this.
