I’m very stoked on bikes at the minute.
This isn’t something out of the ordinary, I’m stoked on bikes all the time. But as we come into the twilight of the summer and I can already feel the days drawing in and the wind having that little extra sting to it, I’m supermegaextra stoked on bikes!
My level of stoke for bikes ebbs and flows throughout the year but come the end of summer I’m usually left feeling a bit burnt out with how busy we’ve been with sales in the shop, not to mention the crazy workload we have going through the workshop. But not this year, this year the stoke level is higher than ever before and showing no signs of dropping off as we head into winter.
I’m a very VERY lucky guy. My whole life started slipping into place in 2018 when I first visited Sowerby Bridge when I met my amazing girlfriend, Emily.
The fact we even met in the first place was dumb luck. I’d been at Slam Dunk festival in Leeds so my location on the human meat market app, er, I mean Tinder had changed from my usual Peak District locale and Emily had been to watch Stiff Little Fingers in Leeds the night before so her location had changed from her usual Sowerby Bridge. If we hadn’t both been away from home on that specific night my life would be very different to how it is now. (That sounds like a Pulp song). I won’t bore you with the details of our whirlwind romance but my regular trips to Sowerby Bridge introduced me to my future workplace, Happy Days Cycles.
I went in the shop a few times to get a few odd spares so I could fix up Em’s old bike and left thoroughly unimpressed. The shop was dark and grimy. The workshop was an under-equipped mess and the staff were… kind of rude. I did however love what the shop did in terms of charity work and community enterprise. There was so much potential for this place to be amazing with the right people running it. But the shop was fully staffed and I still lived 40 miles away so back then it wasn’t to be.
I kept dreaming though and ranting on at Em at how much I’d like to put my own twist on what they were doing there. Fast forward a few years and Em and I had bought a house together in Sowerby Bridge I was still working back in Derbyshire in a factory making wall ties. Not very stimulating work but it paid the bills and kept me out of trouble. They also let me make sculptures out of scrap wire while my machine was running operations, and I could blast my speaker as loud as I wanted, so my daily punk rock karaoke sessions and wire crafting kept my brain from melting at the monotony of the actual work. It also didn’t hurt that there was a set of dirt jumps we’d spent the last decade building in the backyard of the factory so lunchtime was always fun.
Anyway after about a year of me only visiting the house that we’d bought at weekends, Em told me that Happy Days were looking for a full new staff. This was perfect! The chance to work less than a minute (by bike) from home for a bike shop that is actually there to make a difference before a profit was a dream come true. I sent an application in straight away and crossed my fingers! After I got the interview I decided I was having this job whether they liked it or not.
Thankfully they liked it very much and I got a call 15 minutes after leaving offering me the manager’s job. That’s not for me though – I’m no good with numbers, reports, targets or other managery things. I struggle to even check my emails with any kind of regularity, so my skills are much better utilised in the workshop. I’m so happy i didn’t take that manager position because then I wouldn’t have ended up teamed with my most excellent compadre, Jonny! Me and Jonny finally made the perfect team that the shop had needed since it opened. We’re both proper bike people through and through, both with a love for retro bikes, left wing rants and both thoroughly on board to make this shop the absolute best that it can possibly be! I’ve told you all before about how the team grew with the addition of ace volunteer Noah and Saturday boy turned full on apprentice mechanic, Jack, so I’ll get back to how insanely lucky I have been since starting work here!
The shop had a BAD reputation when we took over. There were repairs waiting to be done that had been in the shop for months and for the first few months there was a stream of bikes coming in that had either been sold with serious faults or hadn’t been repaired correctly. All these bikes came with frustrated customers, and we did our best to explain to them that this wasn’t the type of service they could expect from Happy Days in future, while we speedily fixed their problems. Slowly word started to spread that things had changed at Happy Days and the workshop started to get busier and busier and the level of bikes coming in for repairs was beginning to rise above the Sports Direct/Halfords specials that we’d been pretty much exclusively subjected to until this point. A turning point in my eyes was when Paul, a local roadie, came in for a tube and I mentioned to him that he also needed his headset bearings replacing on his Ribble with fully integrated cables. I could feel that Paul, who’d had bad experiences with the shop previously, was trepidatious about leaving his whip with us again but I talked him round and got his bike sorted for him super fast. He was stoked, I was stoked. He left us our first google review and since then has become a loyal customer and friend of the shop. ( I know he’s a Singletrack member since he’s now turned to the MTB dark side as well, so big ups Paul!)
As the shop’s reputation was getting better and better and our customer base was widening to more mountain bikey folks I quickly started making a whole new bunch of friends as well. This is one of the lucky bonus perks of working in a bike shop: you’re presented with an endless stream of people that share the same interests as you all day long, so it’s a great way to make friends. There’s Callum who used to come in on his squeaking, rattling shonky old 26″ Cube with his skateboard strapped to his bag, who now comes in with his non-sqeaking and rattling, much less shonky old 26″ Cube and the whole group of riders he introduced me to. Mark, Chris, Kier, Ethan and more who all enjoy the same kind of rides I do. Sessioning spots in the woods and exploring places we’ve not been before, no Strava or any of that business, just bikes for bikes sake. Then there’s Craig and his mutant electric kind of a bike type thing! Craig is kinda weird , I’m also kinda weird. Craig’s bike is very weird, I like very weird bikes so that’s another friend added to the ever growing stack!
Then there was the day that the mystery man of Utah, Fahzure, came through the door. This began my journey to writing these words that you’re reading now on an actual proper mountain bike website (13 year old Dieter would probably explode if he knew this would happen, 36 year old Dieter is still very excited that he gets this privilege!). Hannah offered me this column after only having met me a few times, but each of those times the stoke was high! First was on a ‘RideDrinkPie’ Tuesday night ride from Hebden that was one of my first rides in Calderdale. I was overloaded with excitement at the end as I’d not ridden much ‘proper’ riding since moving here and Hannah likes people being stoked on bikes because she’s also pretty stoked on bikes. I’m sure Fahzure had also been talking me up to her and telling her about my slightly different approach to bike repair. For that I’ll be eternally grateful to him because at his next leaving party for his annual migration to his homeland across the Atlantic, Hannah offered me the chance to do something I’ve wanted to do my whole life, this! So how lucky am I that Fahzure came into the shop that day? More friends and the chance to have my stupid words on a real mountain bike website! Crazy!
The bike related luck pushing the stoke level ever higher continues though! A few years ago while Emily and I were in Slovenia during our own annual pilgrimage to the Punk Rock Holiday festival, we met a dude from Norway called Henrik. Henrik was looking at buying a new bike, a fact that he maybe slightly foolishly let slip to a fairly inebriated Dieter who proceeded to have what I’d like to believe was a nice thoughtful discussion about what type of bike Henrik would want. Emily tells me that rather than a measured even conversation, what Henrik actually got was a non stop rant about what bike Dieter thought Henrik should ride including detailed descriptions of why this was the right choice! Anyway for some reason Henrik was quite receptive to my insane ranting and another friendship was formed through a rampant passion for bikes…
Henrik celebrated his 40th go on the galactic nascar track around the sun this year and to celebrate he decided to have a mini festival in his garden featuring the finest Norwegian pop punk band in the world Twominuteshate which was already reason enough for us to make the trip, but the icing on this already awesome cake was that Henrik lives in Voss, Norway’s extreme sports capital. A town where every second person you speak to is just on their way to jump out of a plane or off a cliff. A town where people like me and probably you could fit in quite easily!
It’s also home to one of the newest and fanciest gondolas in Europe so it would have been rude to not take advantage of the opportunity presented to me during our brief trip. One of Henrik’s friends had an old Scott Genius that I could use during the trip, so I spent an hour or two tricking it out and doing a VERY rudimentary fork service and a few fresh cables. It definitely rates highly on my list of most beautiful spots I’ve worked on a bike.
An old 26″ Scott is one thing, but there was a real mountain here and I wanted to be able to get the most out of it! The Scott made a sweet way to get down into town without have to walk for 30 minutes, but something more capable was calling my name for that mountain. I hired a sweet Merida 160 from a local place called Outdoor Norway that specialises in all kinds of outdoor adventurey trips around Voss. After a bit of sweet talking to convince them to let me swap the brake hoses over to UK configuration (hint, taking your own bleed kit and oil helps convince them you know what you’re doing!) I was ready to hit the mountain.
Eight minutes later I stepped off the lift at the peak of the mountain, man I love a chairlift! What followed was five hours of smashing down some of the most awesome natural trails I’ve ever ridden! It was like descending in my beloved Peak District but on steroids. Twisty little goat tracks feeding out onto rocket fast gritstone slabs followed by the odd slog across a marshy bit. Then blast back down into town rinse and repeat. After a full morning of destroying myself on the mountain it was time to return to Henrik’s for his birthday extravaganza!
So why am I telling you about my holiday? Because in a kind of roundabout way the only reason I was presented with the opportunity to have such an awesome time raising my bike stoke level even higher than normal is because of my enthusiasm for bikes in the past. If I’d never gone on my impassioned rant at Henrik when I’d first met him we may not have become such good friends and may never have got an invite to the extreme sports wonderland that he lives in. I think the lesson is that if you meet someone new you should probably start shouting at them about bikes, you never know where it might lead you!
Anyway there’s even more been going on to raise the stoke to otherwise unheard of levels! I recently built up a new (to him) bike for Hannah’s Kid2 after a sudden growth spurt had turned his previously well fitting hardtail into a jump bike and then had the privilege getting to share his stoke for it on it’s first outing. We sessioned some corners and a little jump for a while and then he suddenly took off into the woods on his own! After 20 or so minutes Hannah, Fahzure and I started to conduct a bit of a search for him. We located him locked into a loop of shredding down a straight into a couple of rollers, turning round pushing back up and doing it all again! It was time to get going really, we were going for birthday tea but Kid2 had to have “just a few more runs!”. Who are we to refuse, dinner can wait…
I don’t really know how to conclude this one. It’s not really about fixing anything, I’ve mostly just ranted about luck and stoke for a few thousand words but they’re important words to describe how insanely lucky and grateful I feel to be able to do all this cool stuff! I didn’t even mention that I got to go and rant about bikes at the Malverns last month and people enjoyed listening to it! This is INSANE to me. I am so LUCKY!
So what am I trying to say?
Not really sure maybe that working in a bike shop is a really good way to make new friends?
Maybe that you should emphatically evangelise about bikes to everyone you meet?
Maybe that working for a non profit driven business is much better for my soul?
Maybe it’s more existential than that. More of a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon changes the weather halfway across the planet type thing, but twisted to a bike mechanic rants about bikes in a forest opens opportunities to ride bikes halfway across the world…
Maybe I’m saying you should go and work in your local bike project! I guarantee it’s some of the most fulfilling work you’ll ever do. You’ll never make millions doing it but boy will you feel rich!
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