The Seasons

Do you remember that feeling? Yep that’s right it’s the morning balance of how much effort to put in to your ride to keep warm set against the added wind chill from going faster.

It will now be your partner for the ride for the next, say, five months.

It’s also going to be firmly the season of mud. Well, ok I know that the entire year has been muddy but it will really get going now, until it freezes which is a whole other issue.

For the London-based mountain biker this means it’s time to take advantage of that network of friends and family who you have now conditioned to think it’s normal for you to turn up covered in mud at their houses. Head off in the car, get in a sneaky ride and then arrive at their front door with a bike to be stored somewhere and promising to walk carefully through the house without dropping too much mud. The first room I often see is the bathroom and my top tip is that if you stand in the bath to take off your shorts then any mud you scrape off your legs with them will only end up in the bath where it can be rinsed away. This will make you more popular than messing up a nice bathroom.

My grandmother would have been 100 last Sunday and, even in her 90s she was excellent at meeting me in the kitchen, when I was fresh off Exmoor and liberally sprayed with mud, with a towel and sending me off to shower before anything else. It’s this sort of no-fuss attitude that I have cultivated with other people to the extent that I think they’re often surprised when I turn up not muddy and without a bike.

I guess you might not come here for stories of my abuse of my family and friends, and might actually expect some cycling news?

Well you’ve probably heard that the Australian manufacturer of lycra things, Skins, is essentially trying to sue the whole of cycling over some sort of perceived damage to it’s reputation. This strikes me as odd in a few ways and a little like them just attempting to gain some publicity off the back of the doping scandals in the professional road sport. I mean they still make cycling gear and still (according to their website) sponsor cyclists and cycling teams and doesn’t it make sense for them to do so. Also, and just as a personal point, I was not all that aware that they were heavily involved in cycling as a sponsor until they started this legal battle and so it seems unlikely that their reputation has been damaged too much.

A