Entering my bike-packing era
I suck. It’s great.
One still, soft day in late summer, having booked a Friday off work and two tickets on the fast service from St Pancras, my friend Luke and I went to Ashford for a bike ride. It was the sort of ride that’s barely imaginable if most of yours start in London traffic. When getting to the countryside normally means a half hour of dodging the Dulwich school run—watching every pedestrian and scooter and Royal Mail van to anticipate how they might brake, or undertake, or step out into the road looking at a mobile phone—it’s easy to forget that England offers another kind of riding: one of quiet hedgerows and flat, sweeping vistas.
We were almost in a bank holiday mood — except better, because everyone else was at work. Our route had just enough sea wind to stop it from feeling close. For a while, we played leapfrog with a lone rider on a steel tourer, but before long we had the roads to ourselves. We were on our next-best bikes in a special holiday of our own making, zipping through the lanes with unzipped jerseys.
Work’s been tough recently and I’ve been thinking about that day a lot. As I’ve got better at cycling, I’ve discovered the joy of being good enough at something to play with it. It’s fun to have enough bike control to race each other like kids; to take turns going really, really fast down the hills, because the hills leaving Rye are childs’ play after the switchbanks of the Port du Soleil. And if stopping for a paddle risks making you late for the train, well, you can always ride harder. It helps that Luke is a relatively new friend who already feels like an extra brother. In a society where you can feel encouraged to approach friendship simply by gathering as many people as you can when you’re young and then seeing how many you can cling on to as you grow up, making a new best friend in your thirties feels like getting away with something.
The other reason I’ve been thinking about that ride is that I’ve started swimming lessons. As I keep telling my colleagues, trying not to sound defensive, I could swim — just not well. Swimming was exhausting: I knew I was wasting energy twisting my head back and forth for each breath but being underwater made me anxious. To make it worse, my partner is a true water baby, with a mid-March birthday and an equal love of the sea and of chlorinated holiday parks. For me, a handful of lengths is tiring. Before long I get out to sulk at the side and wonder what people like my friend Charlotte see in swimming; how her steady breaststroke somehow looks both soft and strong, while I get shoulder pain.
It’s surprisingly fun, then, to be back in the world of wet cozzies and plasters on the changing room floor. Our class giggle together doing drills where we wade along the pool floor or pretend to be sharks. (I keep waiting to be told to dive for a rubber brick, or bring our pyjamas in for a special lesson on life-saving.) Every Tuesday after, as I put my suit back on and head for the train home with a few strands of hair wet where they escaped my cap, I think of how my mum used to pick me up from the local leisure centre with a TUC biscuit sandwich.
It’s only reading this back that I realise it’s about ageing. At the moment, it feels like so many of my peers are taking stock—or something considerably more anxious. The recent film Nyad dramatises the eponymous Diana’s attempt to swim from Florida to Cuba without a shark cage in her 60s. As much as the will to achieve, the film depicts her as being motivated by a fear of living a life in which she didn’t ever complete the swim. ‘Don’t you want to be fully awake,’ she asks her best friend and coach, Bonnie Stoll, ‘your soul ignited by a purpose?’ (‘Not that again,’ says Stoll.) Fast falls the eventide, basically, so better find a way to keep the sharks away.
In an endurance ride, it’s always the first half that drags. Half to two-thirds is nothing, and shortly after, you’ve three-quarters done. The final ten kilometres always fly. Plays, too, are shorter after the interval. Nyad is of its moment in tapping into a growing interest in women, ageing and performance — particularly in endurance sports — but it’s a post-pandemic film, too; a neat morality play about spending time well.
Right now, I’m enjoying being bad at something. I’m grateful to have the pool as a place where it’s not just okay but expected that you’ll feel vulnerable, frustrated and self-conscious. (Do any swimming costumes fit, incidentally? Answers by reply.) This isn’t a valorisation of suffering — that, thankfully, is one thing I’ve left behind. It’s just that so much of life demands competence.
To be a beginner again, with all your adult experience, may be the best thing sport has given me. It’s interesting, too, that finding the lightheartedness in something you’re serious about and seriously applying yourself to something which makes you feel like a clumsy child can take you to, more or less, the same place: a place where you’re relieved of the need to be important; happier to be here, now.
