So it will come as no surprise to those who know me that I'm rather keen on bicycles, to put it mildly. Done a few (sprint) triathlons, various sportives; currently training for this year's Etape Caledonia; feel probably a little bit too comfortable in skintight lycra; constantly working out how many bikes one small flat can accommodate - you know the sort of thing.
I can still recall the precise smell of the wrapping paper concealing that first Raleigh Budgie, a particularly lurid shade of 1980s metallic copper (the bike, not the wrapping, alas). Graduating via a blue and yellow Raleigh Burner BMX (yellow/blue) to an even more lurid Emmelle MTB (fluorescent orange and green). Inheriting my first 'proper' drop-handlebar bike from an uncle, a heavy old lump of pig iron by modern standards, way too big in the frame for a teenager, but it made me feel like Greg LeMond. I can't even remember the brand but it was red and had a luggage rack, if that helps?
There's something about cycling that feels forever young, evokes powerful childhood memories of that sense of adventure from setting out alone, back when kids could still do that sort of thing safely. That heady whiff of independence, more so even than the day I passed my driving test. Much as I love cars (disclaimer: guilty secret, yes I work in sustainability), there's something Zen-like about the silence, the efficiency of bicycles, a feeling that all is right with the world, for a few precious minutes at least. However steep the hill, however long the route, every ride contains at least one moment of pure, blissful calm, a state of grace. Something I don't feel that often in this rush of days, making it all the more special.
Like life itself, cycling can be a cruel mistress - quite probably, behind all the marketing slogans and failed drug tests, road racing remains the toughest sport on the planet. Often a headwind, occasionally a blessed tailwind; grinding up hills that never seem to end, always with the faint glimmer of hope for a glorious, freewheeling descent the other side. A kind of raw, elemental beauty in masochism - broad, sunlit uplands the occasional reward for brutal hard graft and gallons of sweat. There are lessons in life to be had in the saddle, which may be scant consolation when you're toiling into work in the rain, playing Russian roulette with bendy-buses on your knackered old Brompton, but there we are.
I'll stop before I disappear up my cod-philosophical tailpipe completely, but it's this Zen-like feeling that for me makes Tim Krabbe's 1978 novel, The Rider, such a beautiful read. Even for those with not the slightest whiff of interest in bikes, there's a magical quality to Krabbe's book, a metronomic fascination akin to that famous Guinness surfing advert. Tick follows tock, follows tick, follows tock. Crank follows crank, mile follows mile, in almost hypnotic fashion. The premise is actually simple - Krabbe puts the reader inside the mind of a serious amateur rouleur competing in a mythically-tough, one-day race somewhere in SW France - but the overall effect is mesmerising.
Krabbe's novel is lionised by the cognoscenti, thanks in no small part to the retro-marketing muscle of brands like Rapha and Condor, but it remains criminally unrecognised outside the narrow confines of the cycling world. I can't recommend the book highly-enough - it's rare that someone with my attention span... sorry, got sidetracked there... it's rare that someone with my attention span reads a book in one sitting.
Here's a particularly celebrated example of Krabbe's purple prose - a quote that will be familiar to Rapha customers, but which captures the magic of the book, and indeed the sport itself: -
"The greater the suffering, the greater the pleasure. That is nature's payback to riders for the homage they pay her by suffering. Velvet pillows, safari parks, sunglasses; people have become wooly mice. They still have bodies that can walk for five days and four nights through a desert of snow, without food, but they accept praise for having taken a one-hour bicycle ride. 'Good for you'. Instead of expressing their gratitude for the rain by getting wet, people walk around with umbrellas. Nature is an old lady with few friends these days, and those who wish to make use of her charms, she rewards passionately."
Krabbe is not a famous writer, not outside his native Holland at least (although he did also write The Vanishing and his brother is the actor Jeroen Krabbe, trivia fans), but like many an aspiring racer, for one fleeting moment at least, he achieved Zen-like perfection.
