Mind-yips.
Stupid head, stupid steroid-cream not working hard enough in the saddle places, stupid fear. I got all up inside my own head this morning. I rode the reverse of Friday’s bingle, which is to say exactly the same route. I have done this ever since my youth, and I’ve been doing criss-crosses of Ashdown all summer long. This week, I didn’t have the heart (or the bike) for Ashdown, so stuck to the Weald. I’m on the fixed thinking, this time next week I’ll be caning it to Dover to catch a boat. THEN I start thinking, shitballs, is this a good idea?
A fixed tour, I mean. I say to myself, almost yearly, that I’ll do a short-tour on the fix gear, and that it’ll be right spif. I’ve got 28s on the Neo-Weapon, officially my widest tyre width since childhood. They’re alright, eh. It was slippy as all christ this morning, having bounced it down overnight and left slug spuzz all over the place; I stupidly uni-braked it down Tandridge Lane, which is a monster bobsled run at the best of times. One disc brake is plenty, stops the skids, but on some of those hairpins near the bottom I was a bit tentative. Some dudes overhead were creaming down the off-road trails on kids’ bikes. Kudos to them, but they’re rocking tyres wider than my most shit-eatingest grin.
So to Dover is hilly. I wonder, carrying luggage across the Weald, will that be just too much? When you get to Dunkirk it’s pancake-flat and the Belgians built all their cycle routes alongside canals. It’ll be pretty friendly terrain up to Bruges and Ghent and to the sweet arabian delights of Bruxelles. I will be living on frites, baklava, cherry beers and smugness for two lovely days. OR will I be eternally cursing my decision to rock a bike-pack rig on a fixie and having only gone for a 65″ gear? Am I going to spin the fuck out, or be churning across the downs into a grim melt of panic and indecisiveness? I have a week to make a choice - nay, I have six days - and I wonder, as ever, would I have been even remotely bothered by this three or four years ago?
I sold the Weapon Mk I. to a nice lady from the forum. She wrote a text to me on Monday and said she’d “taken the weapon out on a 120km bikepacking weekend”, making me think that I should put on a skirt and ride like a girl, which is to say, like a fucking superhero. Why am I fretting like some old donkey? Does it matter? Course it doesn’t. If something breaks, it gets fixed; that goes for me, too. Imagine the glory of riding past those Belgian hard-stuff legend-spinners and puncheurs.. I’ll be all like, yo. They’ll be all like, piss off.
