Winning, Exploring and Wasting Time

The Tour de France showed us this weekend that one way to do well is to simply block the entire race course with a crash and allow only a few riders through to the finish. Failing that you can use the equally successful tactic of dragging someone’s bike away with your own, leaving them to walk over the finish line. Either way you can gain a significant but important advantage and allow you to be one of the first over the line.

In this spirit of competitiveness FMFT spent a very happy Saturday morning racing each other over the soon-to-be-repaired BMX track at Lordship Recreation ground. We’ve mentioned this before and the work is going ahead steadily to make a facility for off-road cyclists in North London. At the moment it’s still an overgrown track with only one line for much of the way round – but this made the racing all the more exciting as we jostled for position out of the first corner. At the same time – and on a less reckless note – cycle training was going on for a group of people next to the track. From what we could see this involved mostly riding with one hand in the air (useful for indicating your displeasure to drivers) but we probably missed a large amount as we focussed on fighting each other for space and lines.

FMFT also spent the weekend finally exploring an area that’s been on the list to check out for a while. In amongst all the no-cycling signs there is fun to be had on Hampstead Heath. A lot of walking on areas where it’s hard to see why cycling isn’t allowed and a bit of riding on the few paths where it is, led us to the famous, but hidden, Hampstead Dirt Jumps. They’re some serious jumps and some real work has gone into them, so we’re impressed, although we’re certainly not going to tell you exactly where they are (nor are we young enough, brave enough and skilled enough to jump them).

So back in work with arms tanned to the wrist and scratched with brambles - looking like a very non-committed self-harmer, I know that I wish I was back out on my bike. It’s no consolation but at least this game will keep you in the bike mood as the weekend creeps nearer again.

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