.. or just past it. 2020 went <— thataway and I’m sure I’m not alone in giving it both the finger and a boot up the arse. We do not wish to see it’s like again.

Still some traditions endure. The fad diets, the frozen morning runs, the frankly insane abandonment of alcohol. And of course the internationally recognised* Hedgehog of the year awards.

We were socially distancing before it became a thing.  Which considering all they are are a re-hash of last years content and some impossible logical gymnastics spinning the need for new bicycles, it’s was never going to be a sold out event.

I turned up, poured myself a beer, reviewed the meagre 2020 content,  mentally lasso’d the shedofdeams(tm) switcharoo and created some links. As I say not the most prestigious event, but I’m glad I turned up. As all the beer was for me.

Without further ado:

2020 articles that make some sort of sense on a second reading

The bike page. As with many things 2020, great plans but not much happening.

Oh and the picture ^^ up there. Titled: Worst boy band reunion ever. No reason to post it other than every time I look at, it makes me laugh. And by Christ we could all do with a bit more of that in 2021.

*we do have many readers from far flung parts. I cannot imagine trying to parse my nonsense as a second language. It’s hardly English to start with.

Blimey,  a post.

It’s been a while. Most of which has been filled with cold, wet and a semi-busted shoulder. Current events were depressing enough without piling on the misery pre-winter inevitably stomps it’s depressing size 10s all over.

Taking the last first, that’s a frustrating injury taking far too long to heal. Some of that is age related decrepitude, a bit more smashing it down and then onto bumpy trails. That was such a stupid crash right at the end of a fantastic autumn skive ride.

I watched Adam make a proper hash of a steep rooty corner. Him being a far better rider than me in no way highlighted the possibility that personal calamity was in the offing. I confidently struck out on a higher line festooned with slick-blacked tree nurturers.

Grip deferred to gravity as was obvious to anyone not called Alex, and that person suffered a precision strike where four weeks of physio had been painfully enacted. Did it hurt? Shit, yes. Did I whine? Of course, what did you expect? Did Adam laugh? Yes*, but that’s how schadenfreude works.

Said physio gave me a bit of a telling off when I returned to the clinic a few days later. To whit you’re playing a young man’s sport and, well how can I put this, you’re not rocking that particular demographic. Stop riding or stop crashing for a bit. There’s only so much medical science can mitigate serial stupidity.

Appropriate chastised, I retired to the shed. There is no place to hide with a turbo trainer. No really, it is <–> far from the desk I spend my virtual days. Mocking the corner of my eye with its it’s been a day, get your spawny arse back on here, or are you too weak?‘

15 sessions later, it would appear I am. Worse than that – much worse – is I’ve started to almost enjoy it. Careful use of the word ‘almost‘ there but even so it’s not so much the thin end of the wedge, more the end of the beginning. Let’s go back and review the wet and cold outside this cozy world of cartoon graphics and weird internet-spliced friendships.

Even a cursory reader of this blog is cognisant of my pointless hatred of winter. Specifically slogging through the four month festival of slurry while failing to measurably improve my low-baselined mud riding skills. Every year I promise myself will be the year endless commitment and careful tyre choice shall  bring forth a seasonal epiphany.

Nope. Watch some youtube vids. Nope. Fit some expensive tyres. Nope. Give myself a serious talking too. Nope. Nope. Nope. Plan B then – if you are struggling to succeed, redefine exactly what you mean by success. By lowering the bar under which even a professional limbo dancer would consider unplayable.

No longer shall I pretend I might be confident in the slop. At no point will fast enter my vocabulary unless speaking of others. The whiff of disappointment shall be met by the stench of tiny expectations. Just getting out and staying upright will be considered more than enough.

And it really is. This mad world we find ourselves in is brought into focus by back to back Zoom calls, but graduated by a fuzzy boundary between work and home. What with both being co-existent, and the former stealing hours from the latter.

When the screen feels like most of your life, I find a hearty ‘fuck this, I’m outta here‘ works well to nudge the dial of wellbeing. I abandoned a Friday in the virtual world for a skive ride in the real one. The kind of decision we all need to be making more often.

2 degrees. Cloudbase zero. Even the birds were walking. Dank, damp and desolate. Late autumn colours lost to the iron grey sky.  Trails lost to mulch and mud. Fitness gained going nowhere fast lost to brutal plasticine climbs.

It matters not. I was rubbish. That doesn’t matter either. I got lost. That mattered a little as we dropped into stupidly steep trails best thought of as a mud slidey accident ready environment. I could hear the physio cursing. Although she’d have had to go somewhat to drown out my own ‘fuuuuuucccck, shiiiiiiit, boooollllllooooox‘ as I fell down the hill occasionally accompanied by bicycle.

Adam – yes him again – was loving it. ‘Hey Al, thanks for showing me these trails, they are brilliant‘. And they are, or they will be under April loam or July hardpack. I was annoyed at how well Ads rode those trails, fully committed and troubled not at all by self-doubt. I was angry with myself for not getting within 50{45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2} of that.

Then after besting the greasy horror of the 15 minute climb to the top, the fog briefly cleared, the low sun burst through illuminating the dank. Shards of late autumn light pierced the leafless trees. The gloom lifted as did my spirits.

This is what being outside is all about. Those moments when the natural world plasters a smile on your face. When the unexpected makes you pause. Think a bit. Maybe all this will pass. Maybe it won’t.

But you’re unlikely to be watching from the right place if you’re staring at the wall of your shed. Riding bikes when conditions are shit isn’t really about riding bikes. Not for me anyway. It’s about sharing those little wins with those who know how special they are. It’s about giving the finger to the idea we are largely powerless.

It’s about making a choice. Is the fog really lifting? Maybe. Maybe not. But you’ll find me outside wondering if any of that really matters.

*in his place, I’d have asked him to do it again for the camera. It was that lame.

Probably worth clarifying a couple things right off the bat here.  There’s a post barely socially distanced from this one declaiming that writing about bikes was so over. Behind that are few more throwing shade on the need or indeed want for any new bikes.

And yet here we are. Well I am for sure, can’t speak for the rest of you.  If you’re still here then I can offer both excuses and lies.* Let’s do neither and pretend we’ve been overtaken by events. Yet I see that raised eyebrow and accusing finger pointing at the ‘best hardtail I’ve ever owned‘.

Hmm okay but let’s not dwell on the past. The future is right here. I accept it’s hinterland evo. Another steel frame, a similar niche manufacturer, a confusion of wheel sizes,  a slackness of angles, a lowering of stance. The future appears to be nothing more than new colours and pointless tweaking.

Well there’s that. But we can also celebrate the differences. It’s heavier for a start so we’re already winning. Slacker at the front, steeper at the back. All of which demands a longer fork, sadly missing a similar upgrade to the organic suspension out back.

Summary is if the old bike didn’t hold me back, this one won’t either. And it’s marketed as enduro. So again, winning. Not different enough to prevent a components heist on the Cotic** to harvest almost every component- so turning a frame into something rideable.

Second hand 29er wheels and a raid of Matt’s parts bin finished the build. And regardless of the stupidity, let’s all enjoy the end result. That’s one pretty bike.

Best go ride it then. This side of the hill has me reaching for my full suss. It’s steeper, rockier and a whole lot nastier to the west side. Still new bike and all that so best just get on with it. An hour in from Ross and we’ve established it’s a better road bike than one of those FS’s, and whatever hardtail skills I honed over last winter are long gone.

Riding the first proper trail has me running out of excuses. If not blood, which is surprising considering the volume being pumped out of my calf. Flat pedals and shit technique inevitably ends with hard pins lacerating soft flesh. On the upside it’ll match the other side similarly tattooed in Finale last year.

Other than the bleeding, it’s all going surprisingly badly. A long forked, slack-angled hardtail only works if you ride it over the front. Which suits my 90s technique of hanging off the back when the going gets steep not at all. A tentative prod of the bars, while hanging out behind the saddle, emits no directional change at all. Hello Tree, can we be friends?

Time to get a grip. Winch myself over the stem, throw some body English at the next corner and remember how bikes pivot from the back wheel. I’ve always rated myself as an average rider, but I’ll fight refuseniks spreading false gospel decrying quick turning bikes and 64 degree head angles.

This thing rails. I’m embarrassed to write that but it really does. In a way the Solaris didn’t. Not with me on it anyway. It has a calmness more suited to a short travel full suss. It drags grip from the perfect dirt, rotating the world around a sticky 2.6 front tyre.

Three minutes into my first proper trail and we’re faced with the somewhat over-marketed ‘double drop‘. It’s not that big and it certainly isn’t very clever, but fucking it up has all sorts of splattery consequences on the fireroad 20 feet below you.

I’ve ridden it on a HT once. It didn’t go well. But the Bardino is so stupidly good, I passenger’d my way down there with barely a kick in the arse. New school geometry works brilliantly if you commit to the front half of the bike. Right now I’m getting it, come mud and slop, maybe things will be different.

Today tho this thing is so fast. I loved the Solaris on 27.5 chubbies but they would just hold this bike back. I spend the rest of the ride failing to fall off all sorts of lairy ledges. Close calls for sure but too much fun to stop. Or even slow down. I’m not sure why this is, but it’s something different from every hardtail I’ve ridden before. And there’s been a few.

Ah another raised eyebrow. New bike thing you mutter. Maybe there’s something in that, but a second ride in the dark did nothing to dispel the feeling of over-confidence. It looks like a hardtail but it rides like something else. Except when you back off at which point the whole pointlessness of 160mm travel difference between front and back smacks you up the arse.

Still not lacking that commitment we finished our ride on the notorious ‘Bunker‘ trail. Steep, rocky, relentless. In the dark with full leaf cover, it’s riding in nature’s cathedral. There’s a beauty to that displaced by the rather less spiritual act of staying upright.

While I’ve ridden it many times I’ve never ridden it in the dark. Or on a hardtail. And of all those times, I’ve never felt quite like I did riding it last night. It should have been scary, but instead it was joyful. It made my realise there is stuff still to be ticked off, things to be done, reasons to keep pushing.

Raising the bar? Maybe not. But I can pretend. For a little while longer.

* John Mason is your touchstone here ‘When you’re good at making excuses, it’s hard to excel at anything else‘. Sure, but let’s all acknowledge it’s a skill of sorts.

** it isn’t being sold. Rebuilding a lighter version for Jess has already started. I could never sell that bike.

High outside elbow. Hips canted to the inside. Outside foot hard down.  Eyes scanning the exit. Shoulders forward, hands relaxed.  This is not – as it might appear – a late appendix to the Karma Sutra nor some kind of personal Feng Shui. No this is what passes as ‘best practice’ for navigating a bicycle round a corner.

“Oh really, fuck off” I hear you sigh. I’m mostly with you because that very best practice is somewhat subsumed by the axiom that any task is ‘as easy as riding a bike‘.  That’s problematic though because ‘riding a bike’ launches itself across a physical spectrum in the same way that tentatively strumming an ‘E‘ chord celebrates you as a great guitarist*

Riding a bike is easy. Riding a bike quickly is hard. Riding a bike off-road quickly is really hard. There are so many things to go wrong. And most of those are hard as well. Except for the squashy breakable bits attempting to ride round that corner.

It gets worse before it gets better. Similar headology suggests brain surgeon hand eye co-ordination is required if you’re keen to jump or drop off things. At least if you want to complete them without needing the skills of that head doctor. Having hoovered up every YouTube channel we’re still found lacking with serious talk of ‘pumping for speed’ and ‘pushing for grip’.

I feel we may have jumped the shark here. Mountain Biking must be the most over-coached sport on the Internet. Whatever happened to learning by crashing? It’s served most of us well while providing excellent vocational experience for trauma specialists across the country.

Easy for me to take the piss. But I’ve watched all those videos and attempted to place myself in the frame. With – let’s be charitable here – mixed results. Mostly because I’m a bear of little brain and there is far too fucking much going on to remember which limb is which never mind how it should be articulated.

Instead I fall back to bad habits.  Mostly falling off because I’m too far off the back and I won’t lean the bike far enough over. I take refuse in micro braking and then desperate pedalling to cover for my inadequacies. It’d be over-deprecating to say I’m really rubbish and slow but that’s not the point.

I know I can be better. Even a month short of my 53rd birthday.  And just occasionally I am. It’s mostly a one ride epiphany snatched away when it all goes to shit the next time around. But if I’ve learned anything it’s to live in the moment you have rather than worry about those you missed.

Wednesday night we’re riding local trails. Summer rain has raised hero dirt from the sand. My bike is working perfectly and I’ve got my ‘get it done‘ head on. This time last year I tucked my terror of crashing into a quiet place and launched myself over the biggest gap jump on our local hill.

Confidence since then has been mixed. I pretend to laugh at the priority of progression. That I cannot do the things I used to do. That getting out is as good as getting better. That decline is fine and I can look back on past achievements over a beer and a fat belly. Fuck that. The fire still burns a little.  We’re all going to die of something. Might as well enjoy the experience.

So I’m chasing an aged-matched Matt and a far younger Adam on a favourite trail. The whole best practice thing passes me by as the speed increases. Because now I’m in essentially survival mode. I’ve handed the whole thing off to muscle memory and instinct. Which to be honest hasn’t ended well in the past.

Here’s why.  Anyone who rides mountain bikes at any pace has a safe speed. A velocity well in their comfort zone. Margins for error and coping strategies. It moves a bit depending on your confidence level but it’s a window through which you rarely crash. Rarely take real risks. Rarely feel properly scared.

This makes sense. All of us have to go to work in the morning. However fast we are, there will always be those who are faster. However many metres per second we push it, we’re a million miles from our limits. This is a hobby not a race. The older you get the less you can afford to lose a summer. Or maybe every summer from now on.

And yet. And fucking yet. Mountain biking is a pretty stupid way to spend your time so you might as well embrace the madness. Both wheels sliding, eyes squeezed almost closed as you rush through narrowing trees. Suspension hammering as you leave the brakes alone. Pushing past that safe zone, heart racing and arse twitching.

I’m still in touch which is great for my ego. I’m still on the bike which is an even bigger surprise. I’ve already ridden the two big gaps so it’s no surprise when I finally clear a big table that’s mocked me the previous 100 times. But I am absolutely not living in the moment. Everything is happening at great speed, and I’m mostly a passenger because after 30 years of riding my body knows what this gig is.

Brain tho, it’s basically shitting itself. End of the trail it reasserts control, I try and play it cool with a breathy ‘Brisk that run fellas‘ . But they can see me for the charlatan I am.

That’s fair. I’ll probably be rubbish again tomorrow.  Right now I just need a beer and some life affirmation.  And maybe to trust myself a little more than those offering snake oil on this tube 😉

*which if you were a member of Status Quo wasn’t far from the truth.

.. a clickbait title mirroring recycled ad-laden content desperately seeking bored eyeballs. This is something else. A weary pun nodding towards broken suspension and false hope.

Sure I’ve told fibs. Some mighty whoppers. But that’s hardly shocking for any reader who has stuck with me for even a few posts. This was also something else. Somewhere between self deprecation and lying to myself.  Hard to believe I’d get fooled that easily.

I was blinded by pretending the problem was me. Although that’s a hypothesis with an almost 100{45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2} success rate.  Failing that it wasn’t clear to me if the issues were front or rear related. On reflection I should have started with ‘both‘ and worked back from there.

Handing the whole thing off to the professionals I dropped the unresponsive fork off to the fab Sprung Suspension. in the hope they could somehow revive it.

Two days later, I took a call from the head honcho Jake  who – knowing me well – broke down complex suspension issues into good news and bad news. Bad first, ‘Al that fork is totally fucked‘ followed by ‘Surprisingly this time it isn’t your fault and we can send the remains off for warranty‘.

Or replacement as I discovered a couple of days later at the workshop. As it was explained to me the bushings (the static tubes the stanchions slide up and down) were oversize meaning the whole sliding thing was more of a grinding thing. To the point where a designed oil lubricated interference fit was more of a milling process.

Six months of that and the forks are scrap. Some of you keener types may feel the need to ask why I didn’t notice. Let’s say I misdiagnosed the issue as a setup problem, and swiftly move on to more interesting things. To whit the other end and that ^^ brand new rear shock replacing the lump of unyielding wood disguised as the factory fitted ‘custom tuned‘ option.

I really do like Ibis bikes. For all sorts of reasons. But even the most rabid fan could not countenance fitting a clearly rubbish shock on a three grand frame. And yet here we are. The custom tuning of said shock appears to render it harsh on small bumps and useless at damping bigger ones.

I’m so very aware my riding ability is rarely held back by mildly sub-optimal components.  To be sure I wasn’t coming over all Pea/Mattress/Princess I asked Adam, who has a similar bike collection vibe as me while being far more skilled, for a second opinion.

He concluded – after less than a minute of riding – that the shock had all the compliance of an iron railing. We’ve both ridden lots of Ibis bikes and this didn’t feel like any of them. Somewhat ironic then that I’d passed off my piss-poor performance on the squidgy object suspended on top, rather than the springs below.

Leaving aside my diagnostic ability, or more the lack of it, let’s instead consider the same bike only this time riding on shiny new components. This new shock has all manner of widgets and knobs* for the knowledgable rider to tweak. Jake dialled some baseline stuff in leaving me to consider the best tuning option would be not to touch anything at all.

Up front Jake generously lent me one of his very expensive forks. Equally festooned with options for me to fuck it right up, I chose to leave that one alone as well.**

So what’s it like now? Good news and bad news again. It feels like the bike that’s been struggling to get out since I bought it. It’s given me way more confidence in the front,  while the back end has curbed its rodeo enthusiasm seemingly bent to launch me into a handy tree.

Bad news, it hasn’t stopped me crashing. I stumped myself between low lying arbetirum and a stabby pedal. The squashy foot and ankle came out worst, one bleeding, the other aching. I wish I could blame that on the new suspension but we all know that’s not the case here.

Still now excited by riding a bike I now quite liked, I invested yet more time trying to set it up properly. This time tho by attaching Matt’s ShockWiz electo-trickery to the shock. It’s a slew of accelerometers and gyroscopes secured in a hard case amped up by all sorts of algorithmic cleverness.

It told me many things*** some of which I understood. But after riding five consecutive days in the land of diminishing returns, I was keen to return to a fully analogue world. Especially if there was a beer in it.

There was, over which I attempted to convinced my riding buddies that this apparently chaotic quest for the truth was nothing more than the kind of noble quest I am well known for.  Shockingly they didn’t see it that way. It’s almost as if past experiences were held against me.

Back to the present. What have we learned? Oh I don’t know, probably nothing of importance. Let’s ask a better question. Is it a keeper? Now I’ve spent proper money on it, it’d bloody well better be.

*not counting the one riding on top of it.

**considering I’d invested never-to-be-regained time fettling both ends in pursuit of some kind of suspension harmony and achieved bugger all, this seemed the logical approach.

***most of which I couldn’t read with these old eyes. I had to ask the help of a younger rider. It was that or just guess. And that hadn’t gone well in the past.