September

The trouble with September is it’s an in-between month. Every day feels like it might be the last opportunity to wear sunglasses and short sleeves on your ride to work, so you want to make the most of it. This almost inevitably means the odd day late to work as you keep riding rather than turning into the bike sheds. It also means lunch hours where you wish you had just a mile or so of smooth singletrack just outside the door at work to run down in the last of the summer, or somewhere fun, and a BMX to make the most of it.

Having said that, it’s also too early to start moaning about bad weather and lights on the way home. In fact with the end of the grand tours and much of the racing this season, and with the hire bike thing having been done to death, the only thing really going on at the moment are the trade shows where nearly-ready ideas are showcased to the world-wide press. The FMFT budget doesn’t yet stretch to a trip to Las Vegas, and we’re not important enough to get comp tickets, so we’re just left, like most of the riders in London, already mourning the loss of summer and approaching the winter with mixed feelings of quieter roads but far colder and wetter rides.

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