New Rider (battery provided)

A new reader and rider sent us this piece, before he’s even hit the trails. Welcome to mountain biking, Gareth, we hope you like what you find.

So I’ve just bought a mountain bike, my first one, that I have no idea how I will ride, where I will ride or how often I will ride it. 

I am 49 years old and weigh 107kgs so obviously my new bike has a motor.

I can’t quite shake the guilty idea that this is cheating and I am justly worthy of your contempt but I figured it was an e-MTB or nothing and I am telling myself (and more importantly my wife…) that this is the start of something new, a new regime – good for me, good for my mental health and that I will get fitter despite the electric ‘push’ I will be getting.

I am an outsider in this world. The technical aspects, the lingo (and God knows this has been the hardest part so far) the fails, the falls, the exhilaration, the views and the views of others are still to come my way.

Inspired by a certain Mr Wiggins I bought a road bike back when it was cool and re-lived my childhood sense of freedom, of flying, in the country lanes and by-ways that I am privileged to live amongst. I bought bib-tights and chamois cream and expensive glasses and embraced my MAMILian status with my MAMIL mates and generally made a nuisance of myself on local B-roads on Sunday mornings. I got fitter, cycled further and logged Strava segments comparing times with myself and with others – I achieved my 100 mile ride certificate and raised money for local cancer charities by riding coast to coast, up hills (slowly) and down Dales (scarily quickly). Eventually I realised I had covered many miles over a few summers but couldn’t really tell you where I had been, I could show you the stats and the segments the orange lines snaked on green maps but rarely had I bothered to ‘look up’, to get off and really see, smell and behold the nature and beauty I was in. 

And then, one by one, the accidents started to happen – a broken hip here, a collar bone there, one serious wipeout on a local dual carriageway left a mate hospitalised for six weeks. Each of these was never a funny clipped-in pratfall, each was a collision with a vehicle and almost never a vehicle that stopped and apologised. Close passes sound romantic, almost erotic. They are not. When never a week went by without half a dozen of these frighteningly intimate experiences I started to lose confidence. I was a freelance consultant at the time and could not afford time off, more so when the lockdown happened and work dried up – I had many fellow cyclists in the same position and so, one by one, the roadies put away their expensive toys and started to consider alternatives.

I don’t get gravel bikes. The fat tyres make sense, the one-by drivetrains and dinnerplate sized gears I understand – but the drop handle bars, road bike geometry and lack of any suspension seem like an obstinate exercise in refusing to admit that MTBs sometimes are just the best tool for the job. I watched an online video posted by a road cycling network a couple of years ago comparing road bikes, gravel bikes and hardtails over the same stretch of the Paris-Roubaix cobbles – rather embarrassingly the MTB won by a mile. This stuck with me and so, when I decided that I needed to get out of the house, that I wanted to feel the thrill of a ride but no longer on a B-road amongst the cars and cattle trucks a mountain bike seemed obvious.

I had gained 10 kgs whilst pondering my options which made an e-MTB the preferred starting place – it would mean I could actually get out somewhere over the horizon without worrying that I will have to get off and push most of the way. It would mean I can actually get up a few hills to somewhere interesting, it would buy me time to enjoy myself while learning new skills. It has at least convinced me (and my wife) that I won’t just be consigned to flat tracks and tow paths and that calories will be burned after all.

On a deeper level making the decision to go electric has been an existentially significant turning point – it is an admission of weakness, a self-recognition that I am in decline, past my best and will never be as I once was. This has been both soul achingly disappointing but also liberating. Having looked at myself in the mirror and concluded the Lycra has to go…I find myself with butterflies of excitement at the thought of what awaits. Baggy shorts and tees, trainers, no clips, beanies and best of all muddy, rutted nature – the smell of freshly broken mud, moss and petrichor mists. 

The harder part is yet to come – how to actually ride a mountain bike? Where? With whom? Am I too old for this ‘gnarly and rad scene..’? What does most of this stuff mean? What are the rules of engagement? What even is a berm? I am using Singletrack Magazine as my gateway and am slowly immersing myself in the language, the issues, the tech, the fashion and, this weekend coming, my first ride. So far, so good, on the podcast I’m hearing voices I like, talking about issues I relate to (yes the marketing in the industry is awful, I want to keep both wheels rubber side down and ‘Bridleway Bimbles’ sound like just the thing for now!)

So wish me luck as I head out onto a new cycling adventure, I will try not to get in your way and hopefully will be catching up fast mainly thanks to Singletrack Magazine, a bucket load of enthusiasm and my trusty electric motor.