First day back

First ride of 2016 - Muddy Malverns

You know how it goes. Crippling hangovers segue into vocational conformity: ‘Good Christmas?’/ ‘Not bad, quiet, you?’ / ‘About the same‘. Soends the conversational frippery leaving you with little option to take a deep breath before opening email.

This dance of desperate politeness is one of many reasons working from a single office isn’t really my thing*. Still personally kickstarting the 2016 economy through putting in a one day shift, I felt such an effort should be rewarded by a skive-ride.

Not ridden in the Malverns for bloody ages. They’ve changed. Got steeper for a start. Either that or my excuses multiplier of Christmas lethargy, undiagnosable fiery knee and squatting cold have struck the porky jackpot. Certainly a few wobbly bits were flinging themselves in a parody of Brownian Motion as unridden legs were reminded of their climbing responsibilities.

The hills have many fine qualities. Geological antiquity is amongst them – the pre-Cambrian rocks have been crumbling for 600 million years so funnelling water deep in the valley below. Where right now torrents of collected rainfall are gushing from every orifice.

I didn’t need to check, the evidence is all around us. More specifically under the tyres where the trails use to be. In eight years, it has never been this muddy. And tractionless – when my good friend and long time local Martin turned up equipped with full mud spikes, I silently congratulated myself on the decision not to bring the fat bike. That’d have got old fast.

I’m old but I’m not fast. Uphill it was mostly soggy enlivened by proper sloppy sections that rewarded a tentative prodded foot with a frictionless slide down the hillside. First descent I sent Martin out as ‘grip-sniffer‘ wherehe seemed to be going absolutely fine with his cheating tyres.

Back in the cheap seats, things were not going so well. Lost the front end three times, the last time I genuinely believed it had gone for good, and I was heading for an unscheduled seasonal head plant into the moist earth. Or a tree.

Saved by either a) cat-like bike handling skills or b) a whimpering withdrawal of the breaking fingers**, we carried on in much the same vein. Martin suggesting all manner of trails most likely to cause injury and me making excuses not to ride them.

A good lawyer – if such a thing exists – could sue the entire hills for attempted manslaughter. Still at least it wasn’t raining and the sun came out. At which point it started raining really hard. Not that this made any difference at all to the trails which couldn’t have been wetter had they been submerged in the Mariana Trench.

Brilliant to be out though. It’s been a week since the last time. My knee is no better, but I’m a sight less grumpy. That’s still quite grumpy tho as the bike is now entirely brown, my kit is being held hostage in the ‘bucket of doom‘ and denied access to the washing machine, I swapped a beer for a ‘recovery drink’ with twice the calories and it’s bloody raining again.

Even with the encroachingnight clawing away at the remaining daylight, I insisted we attempted a rain swelled summit of the beacon. We arrived there in increasing murk, but my haste to leave was stayed by having lost the front end so many times in the previous two hours, I was considering fitting a GPS to the tyre. Or a ski.

This sort of explains why Martin disappeared with his usual fearless alacrity while I tip-toed down in the shadow of the setting sun. Grins at the bottom, diaries ticked to do it all again next week, muddy bikes making dirty protests inside once clean cars.

First ride in 2016 done. And it was a good one. Crap trails and shit weather? You’ll have to try harder than that. Meeting Room Outside booked for the same time next week.

I really REALLY hope there never comes a time when a 9-5 job is something happening to me.

*There are many others; chief of which is I am basically unemployable for any length of time.

** It’s b) then. Obviously.

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