13. GET OFF YOUR ARSE PART 2....

You know what the trouble with exercise is?

It hurts. This is not any kind of shock disclosure I’m sure. The super fit lunatic fringe even gloat about it. No Pain – No Gain.

I described in one of my first posts how much fun I had the first time I climbed back into the saddle and tried to ride to the front gate and back. Well I did the same ride today (actually it was that ride plus to the school and back so actually a fair bit longer....cause I’m a ‘kn athlete) and while it is clearly obvious to me that I’m a hell of a lot fitter now than I was then, it still hurt like a bastard grinding up the hills. It’s just that the period for which it hurts is slightly less.

Possibly because of the whole pain thing, I’ve never been the kind of guy who can exercise just for the sake of exercising. I need to have a purpose.

When I was in Year 9 (about 14 or 15 years old) we moved house from a place quite close to my school to a place quite a bit further away. This is the point at which I started riding to school, also as previously mentioned, down the very busy Pennant Hills Road every morning. Putting the danger to the side for a moment (with the rugged individualism that is my trademark), it was bloody good exercise.  I did it every morning because I had to (I’m trying to remember how my brother got to school during this time and I can’t – weird).

Worst thing that happened to me during that period was when I finally got my bus pass. Because once I had an option that didn’t include sweat and traffic and having to ride in grey slacks up a 4km hill every afternoon and DID include hanging out at the bus stop and a slim chance of making conversation with the one or two girls from my year who also walked in the general vicinity of my bus stop, it was all over red rover and welcome to the world of teenage weight gain.

I rode absolutely everywhere when I lived in Canberra because I didn’t have a car. Likewise once I got into Uni. When my parents again moved in my second year of University (I’m starting to notice a pattern here) I regularly had to ride 8 kms down to a nearby car ferry and then another 6 or 7 up the other side to catch a train and then another 5 from the station to the University. And then back again in the afternoon.

It doesn’t even need to be forced entirely. Later on, even when I had a car I could still talk myself into riding to work because I was riding TO WORK. Just don’t ask me to hop on a bike (or run or swim) and ride from random point A to random point B for no discernable reason. It just doesn’t work for me.

My current motivation is of course the whole wanting to see my daughter graduate high school/university/get married/elected as Prime Minister which is turning out to be an absolute cracker. Wish I’d thought of it a bit earlier really.

NEXT: That was a bit boring – here’s a photo of a tire...

12. SORRY BOUT THAT MUM....

Motorbikes. My Mum thought she had done so well. It helped of course that we didn’t live in the country but still. All the way through school and not a peep from me or my brother that would indicate either of us were inclined in any way towards those two wheeled son mangling devices that are, I suspect, the secret terror of all Mothers.

I do have some sympathy – I don’t think a month goes by up here where someone doesn’t wrap himself and his (and it’s pretty much always ‘his’) massively overpowered two wheeled expression of manhood around a tree. And these are generally older types who should know better rather than 18 year old, just out of school idiots, who know absolutely for certain they cannot be killed by anything, anywhere.

So when I rang Mum (in the middle of a downpour that was enthusiastically flooding our downstairs laundry) to tell her I had borrowed, 6 months into a new job, $2000 to buy a motorbike. She wasn’t that happy about it.

‘Hi Mum, I’m just ringing to say I’ll be DEAD in a couple of weeks. What’s for dinner.’ - Is, I’m pretty sure, what she heard, regardless of what came out of my actual mouth.

I’m not dead of course. Even after working as a courier on the thing for a year and a half in the late 80’s (which was the best job I have ever had). But as I say. I have some sympathy.

I do wonder however, why similar concern wasn’t expressed regarding my bicycle riding activities. At least I was wearing a helmet on the motorbike.

Parents never seemed to worry about what their kids were getting up to when they rolled out of the driveway on the non motorised version.

We, for example, spent one very productive morning riding our bicycles back and forth past a tree in the front yard throwing darts at it (which begs the question – what the HELL were we doing with darts at that age?) pretending we were big game hunters. We only stopped when one of us, who had dismounted for no logical reason I can think of and was standing right next to the tree, got hit right between the eyes with one of the darts.

Still, as I have previously pointed out, I am not dead (neither is the victim). And I know now that throwing darts in the general vicinity of another person’s head is likely to end in one of the darts meeting that head. So there is that.

NEXT: The School Bus Pass – Useful product of a civilised society OR Contributor to the ongoing childhood obesity problem?

11. DIRTY THEIVING BASTARDS.....

Here’s a quick generational identification test – Its beach holiday time. Pack up the Volvo, back seats down, kids tucked up snug and horizontal (and seatbeltless) in our sleeping bags for the after dark drive down the coast to the holiday house.

Is this:

A. A warm and happy picture of family contentment.

B. The first 30 seconds of a soon to be horrific road safety ad.

Things were different then. Like how exactly did my parents allow me to ride my new 10 speed down Pennant Hills Road, in the middle of peak hour, without a helmet, every day to school? Why did the Government allow it? It’s some kind of abuse I’m sure.

I rode it here, I rode it there. And lessons were learnt. I learnt for example that I could pump up the tyres in my new bike a lot more than on the dragster. More specifically, I learnt that if I didn’t pump the tyres up a lot more, I would get what I now know as ‘pinch flats’ pretty much every time I hit a bump. Mind you, I didn’t learn this lesson quickly. Many tyres were patched. Bad words were used.

I learnt that riding in the rain, or even soon after the rain, left a wet stripe right up the middle of my arse. I learnt that riding through long grass is dangerous when that long grass is obscuring a 2 metre deep open concrete storm drain and that loose front axle bolts will eventually allow your front wheel to take itself elsewhere when you ride off a gutter (and that top tubes hurt when you slam your balls into them as a result of your front wheel being elsewhere).

I also learnt that some people, given the opportunity, will steal your bike from right out of your driveway. My parents of course knew that this was the case and told me so, but were ignored on account of them being parents and therefore less knowledgeable about, well just about everything. So thieving bastards stole my bike. Not only that – they then spray painted it white and rode it around the local area in front of me.

Immediately identifying an opportunity to make a point, my parents demanded I work to get the money to pay for replacing the bike they had spent their own hard earned cash on. Lacking a handy salt mine or Conan the Barbarian style Wheel of Pain, it was the paper run for me. 500 odd newspapers delivered by hand every week (except for the ones that fell out of my bag and into the odd drain). I think the hourly rate was around the $2 mark. It was a good plan that taught me some very valuable lessons about responsibility. 

The Wheel of Pain. More effective than a Paper Run but difficult to find in 1979

It also taught my parents some lessons about the employment of small children to deliver newspapers weighing in total many times the weight of the child. Namely, someone had to drive around and drop off all the newspapers so the child could deliver them. And that person was them.

So after a period thought long enough to properly embed in my brain the lesson that unlocked bicycles will very quickly get nicked, my parents altered the plan slightly from ‘Work until you have the money for the bike you carelessly lost’ to ‘Work to earn an amount of money equal to the amount of money you have earnt as of the time we get sick of carting your papers around. I hope you have learnt your lesson and here is your new bike.....Don’t. Lose. It.’

NEXT: Settle on. I’m thinking....

chapter 10: WHY YOU UNGRATEFUL......

I have say I feel a bit guilty that I cannot even remember the fate of my converted Dragster/BMX hybrid, especially considering the new understanding we are developing regarding the sheer amount of crap we shovel into landfills every day. No doubt it sits even now, several metres below the surface of some kid’s soccer field built with the best of intentions on top of whatever landfill it ended up in, slowly leeching chemicals into the soil.

As I may have previously suggested – sucks to be the property of school aged boys.

Whatever. At some point both it and my brother’s bike became too small/rusted/dangerous to be ridden any more, and as Christmas rolled around sometime in the early eighties we were both the recipients of brand new two wheeled transportation.

Here’s another thing that sucks – being the parents of ungrateful school aged boys. See, in choosing what type of bike to purchase each of us, my parents mistakenly attempted to apply logic to the situation. They noticed that I had been riding my bike all over the place as time went by and quite sensibly decided that since I seemed to quite enjoy this, the best option for me would be a 10 speed road bike. So I could do more of this thing I seemed to enjoy doing.

My brother on the other hand, while still riding his bike, was less concerned with long trips to the shops or whatever and so they got him an actual proper BMX.

To my parents, who spent not a small amount of money to purchase me a very nice, gold, 10 speed, Apollo 2 road bike, at a time when they might quite legitimately have spent the cash on say, paying off the house they had built for me to grow up in, I am very very sorry for the expression that slipped onto my face when I realised my brother had got a BMX and I had. Not.

Bloody ingrate I was. And of course they were entirely correct. I rode that thing everywhere. Shops, movies, school. Everywhere. It had actual gears you could use to make it go up hills fast and other ones to make you go down hills even faster.

And 30 years later I’m about to try and build my next bike whilst riding my current one more days than not and my brother’s last bike is sitting out back of my parents house rusting away.

So good for you Mum and Dad.

NEXT: Dirty Thieving Bastards.....

chapter 9: WHO ARE YOU CALLING A SISSY?

Dragsters. Sparkly metallic paint, more steel than the US Navy and so 1970’s that just thinking about mine makes everything I look at go all washed out skivvy clad and moustachioed (didn’t know moustachioed was a colour did you? Well it is. It's a brown. A particularly browny shade of brown).

And sissy bars? Really. What was the message there exactly. ‘You are a sissy if you ride this bike’. Or was it just if you leant back against it you were a sissy. I have no idea. I’m not trying to pretend that I wasn’t totally into the bike mind you ‘cause I completely was. It’s just that this part of the 70’s was, I suspect, a lot like the rest of the 70’s – seemed like a good idea...at the time.

The 3 speed dragster (either metallic orange or purple, I can’t quite remember) was my second (and as it turned out, third) bike. My brother and me got ours shortly after our neighbours got theirs. James and Robert were always about 6 months ahead of us in terms of getting cool stuff. I think they were watching absurdly expensive rented VHS tapes that you had to leave a $50 deposit for long before us also. That is of course, totally unrelated to my pushing James off the staircase onto his head that time. Totally.

I suppose they (dragsters that is) were inspired by the whole ‘Easy Rider’ biker thing. Which makes me wonder what would happen these days if a bicycle company tried to sell our kids bikes with an Outlaw Biker theme. Extra thick top tube for the stashing of methamphetamines? Quick release seatpost for quick access in case of a gang fight?

We lasted about a year on these before BMX burst onto the scene and our much loved dragsters became totally naff, social liabilities requiring immediate destruction lest we suffer the full horror of, um, I’m not exactly sure really. So, overnight our brightly coloured, two wheeled, rolling disco balls lost their long seats, sissy bars and long drop style handle bars, gained knobby tires and BMX handle bars and were spray painted a very tough looking matt black after being stripped down to the frame and strung up on the hills hoist like so much slaughtered game.

It was on this extremely faux BMX that I first started riding further than up and down the driveway. I’m pretty sure I made it to school and back a couple of times and on one occasion I peddled what Google Maps has just assured me is a whole 3.7kms to the local public library (which is a total load of bollocks because I remember quite clearly that it was at least 120kms and possibly passed over the top of Mt Everest at some point). Not bad on cranks that measured maybe 20cms long.

NEXT: Why you ungrateful.....

Chapter 8: THE KNEE BONE’S CONNECTED TO THE...ISCG 05 MOUNTED E THIRTEEN LG1 TRAIL CHAIN DEVICE....

I like living out in the sticks. I really do. You won’t even catch me bitching too much about the complete lack of mobile phone reception or the two, count ‘em two satellite dishes I need stuck on my roof to ensure I can watch TV and access the internet (at the glacially fast speeds and ridiculously uncompetitive prices supplied to me by the Optus Satellite Broadband division). 

I knew where I was moving when I asked the bank for the money and I would like to think I am not the kind of person who, for example, might buy a unit right next to an iconic Sydney family entertainment landmark and then demand they pull down the roller coaster that was sitting, right there, underneath my balcony when I did my final inspection.

Does make it difficult to shop around though. See, while you can’t walk a hundred meters along Clarence Street in Sydney without stumbling over a bicycle shop, the most you’re going to stumble over walking a couple of hundred meters down one of our roads is a dead and rapidly decomposing piece of the local wildlife.

Happily for me (not so much for the local retail industry) we have – The INTERNET. Seriously, you can buy just about anything on that baby. And not just buy either. There are literally hundreds of people just waiting to help you out with any questions you may have about just about any aspect of just about anything.

Admittedly, there are quite a few more people just waiting to call you an idiot and compare your intelligence to that of prehistoric oxygen generating bacteria for having the temerity to be unaware of the difference between a 1 1/8’ and a 1 1/8’ to 1.5’ tapered head tube but fuck it - it’s not like I’m ever going to meet these people in the street right? And besides, if you don’t feel comfortable asking the questions yourself you can be pretty sure that someone has asked the question before you did and that someone else has already answered it.

Putting aside the unfortunate ease with which it is possible to make sometimes ill advised impulse purchases at 4 in the morning, the whole thing is just genius.

The short version goes – I need to pick a frame. ClicketyClickClick. Readread....read. That looks cool. Short email discussion with the very helpful Dan at Stanton Bikes in England (anyone who says the internet is killing customer service is shopping in the wrong part of the internet). I present to you – The Stanton Slackline 853 in Electric Blue...

 



as soon as I save up just a little bit more money.

NEXT: Bikes I have known No.2.

Chapter 7: I’M GOING TO BUILD WHAT NOW?

See, even once I’d made the decision on what type of bike to get (see here) the choices available remained quite extensive.  The terminology alone is enough to make your brain bleed. What for example does it mean when a bike is described as having a ‘slack head angle’? Is 120mm of travel a good thing or a bad thing? Is it necessarily good for a bike to have 87 different gears and am I less of a man if I have any gears at all?

Should I give a shit, or just Google ‘What is the best bicycle for a 45 year old man desperately trying regain a modicum of fitness before his body completely collapses between $2000 and $3000’ and buy whatever turns up as result no 1......Ok. I just did that and it turns out it was completely useless to me. I only got 13 results and none of them mentioned a bicycle at all. One of them even seemed to be in another language. Possibly Finnish. Arse.

Happily for me, the restrictions I placed on myself in order to ensure I don’t just buy a new shiny thing that gets parked somewhere and never used (see here) meant I had some time to spend on research. So research I did. I was able to discover for example that ‘slack head angle’ referred to the angle that the forks and head tube have in relation to the rest of the frame being less steep than on a bike with a ‘steep head angle’. If you want to go down hills very fast you want a slack head angle because it allows for greater control at speed and so on and so on. Makes it harder to go up a hill apparently. I quite like going down hills but have a philosophical issue with the idea of putting a bicycle in a car or a chairlift (of which there are precisely none in my local area) to get to top of them so this presents an issue for me personally.

See. Educational as.

It also turns out that more gears is not necessarily a good thing. My current bike has 21 gears but it seems that running a drive train with only 20 or even 10 gears can be just as effective when you look at the tooth spread available to you on modern and OH GEE is that the sound of left clicking mouses as my 15 strong readership abandons ship on account of not understanding what the hell I am talking about?

In short – there are lots of things to be taken into account and the more I read the less able I was to find an off the shelf bike that ticked all the boxes (can NOT believe I just wrote 'ticked all the boxes'. Matt'll be referring to Matt in the third person next.....dammit). 
So why not, (I thought at work one night at 3am in a building full of mentally ill people) build the thing myself?

Because I totally kick arse at making Lego.

And have you seen the new front door on our house.

This is an absolutely f**king BRILLIANT idea.

NEXT: Quick. Put down a deposit before you change your mind....

Chapter 6: CRAZY? CRAZY LIKE A PSYCHIATRIC NURSE.

I've never understood the difficulty Psychiatric Nursing as a profession has had drawing recruits from the ranks of ‘normal’ nursing. I mean, I get why someone might not want to be a nurse in the first place, what with the faeces and the urine and the phlegm and the vomit and the people yelling at you all the time, but once you've made the decision and become comfortable with all that nice stuff why would you want to spend your whole career running around blue arsed fly style doing the same tasks over and over again.

I’m sure the glamour of standing next to the guy (or girl) mucking around inside some poor bastard's guts for 4 hours to save his (or her) life is very ‘ER’ the first 40 or 50 times but after a while it surely just gets to be a messy, stinky, boring chore. Maybe that’s why they’re always having steamy affairs on those hospital shows (or being blown up by lunatic ex-staff members – another reason not to be a normal nurse).

Now Psych Nursing on the other hand. Every day if different. There is no such thing as a ‘standard’ case of schizophrenia. You get to work in all sorts of different environments, with all sorts of different people and you will never get as much autonomy in any other area of Nursing (save for those Nurse Practitioner types who choose to work out in the middle of nowhere where they have to fly out Doctors at gunpoint every 2 months or so).

Sure, I have to put up with more death threats than the usual working man (usually after having to tell someone who really wants a smoke that they can’t have a smoke and also, no you can’t leave whenever you want and this law that no one ever told you about says so...) but so far 100% of the people who have threatened to kill me and dump my body in the bush somewhere have decided not to once they have been convinced that I do NOT work for the CIA/Satan/Our Alien Overlords and that the Hospital WILL discharge them once they have even a little bit more control over the thoughts passing through their temporarily untrustworthy minds.

The upside is that when the unpleasant stuff isn't happening, you do get a fair amount of time to think. On night shifts, you often get a lot. So it is useful to have something with which to fill that time (preferably something that allows you to maintain your concentration on the people you are being paid to look after). Mind you, once you start shooting down various thought related rabbit holes you can end up coming to some fairly interesting and somewhat unexpected conclusions.

Which is how I ended up where I have bicycle wise (just when you thought I would never get to the point).

NEXT: Where I ended up bicycle wise...

chapter 5: BICYCLES I HAVE KNOWN No 1.

A short break here to build tension and all that stuff as I lack the ability to suspend myself from a tall building (or similar) in this entirely text based format.

What is it about kids (and I assume that this holds true today), that whenever you provide them with something that rolls, they have a drive over which they have seemingly no control, to build a jump and direct their wheeled conveyance over it.

My first bike that I actually count as a bike, was one of those you buy your kid thinking it’s going to last them for years but that they then grow out of in about 6 months (which admittedly at the age I’m talking about often seems like years...). It was made out of solid steel and really unsolid plastic and it rusted like absolute magic if it was even on the same continental plate as any kind of moisture. Its cranks were attached directly to the front wheel tricycle style which meant if you got up any speed at all (like, say, if you were screaming down our 45 degree driveway) your legs pumped up and down like pistons. To be more precise - totally MENTAL pistons attached by crappily made linkages to an engine totally unsuitable for the kind of work being asked of it and therefore likely to explode at any moment. That, or you held them out to the side, which was handy really because if you were going that fast you were going to need your feet as brakes anyway (I love the smell of burning sandshoe in the morning. Smells like, childhood). It never got a flat tire on account of them being made of solid rubber. Or possibly asbestos. It was the 70’s.

I’m pretty sure I brutally murdered that bike by repeatedly throwing it over one of those jumps I mentioned earlier.

That, or it met a sad end in one of the dumpsters the Council used to put on street corners every couple of months in order to boost the immune systems of the nation’s children by exposing them to the various rubbish based pathogens and 50 different types of tetanus that lurked within their enticing, treasure filled depths.

I prefer to think it was the former. Better a glorious death in battle than the slow rot of the landfill. Or a glorious death in battle and THEN the slow rot of the landfill......Sucks to be the property of a primary school kid.

Ungrateful ingrates the lot of them.

NEXT: You don't have to be crazy to work here.... 

chapter 4: SOUNDS A BIT RUDE...BUT ISN'T.

Used to be all bikes had fully rigid frames. This means no suspension on the front or the rear. It’s simple, cheap, strong and quite hard on your arse when you start riding on anything that is not a nice flat road (and I should point out that flat road is a concept with which our local council is not well acquainted). 

There is apparently a sub-movement in mountain biking that is re-embracing the simplicity and purity of fully rigid frames meaning it is possible to acquire one that isn’t cheap as chips and jam packed with crap brakes and drivetrains that will not stop or make you go (in that order) with any kind of certainty but I am fairly certain all of these people are masochistic hipsters so I will have no part of them.

At the other end of the scale you have full suspension bikes.  As previously mentioned, it is possible to spend simply obscene amounts of money on one of these and the options available are simply staggering. From huge Downhill bikes with massive amounts of travel (the technical term for this being ‘bounciness’) to lighter and less extreme options that can actually be moved, by the rider, in an uphill direction. They look fairly cool, cause far less arse damage and generally come with fairly decent bits and pieces at my chosen price point.

On the downside – they have lots of complicated components all of which, given my record with machines of all types, would no doubt break at the most inconvenient moment possible and/or become totally non-compatible with more or less everything I attempt to attach to it 5 minutes after I get it home (does anyone remember the Apple IIC? I didn’t think so).

I also suspect parking one of these in the middle of a modern city or town without 5-10 kilograms of locks and chains attached to them is almost just exactly the same as saying ‘Hey, disreputable looking young person. Come and steal my bike.’ Which possibly says more about me than today’s young people but there you go.

Which leaves the third option. Hardtails are so called because they have suspension on the front fork but none on the rear (once again bringing the arse into play). Here’s the thing though – I just like them. There are some good reasons for going in this direction. Nice logical reasons. You get more for your money component wise with a Hardtail (unless you head into full carbon cross country territory where you can once again start paying prices that would make a banker blush....some bankers....ok I’m exaggerating here) and there’s a lot less to break, service or constantly have to smear grease all over.

And while all of those arguments contribute to my decision making, for me, it comes down to the idea that a bike should be as simple as it can be. It shouldn’t look like a motorcycle that’s engine fell off somewhere and it shouldn’t have so many cables and levers and switches attached to it that you end up ejecting the rear wheel when you thought you were changing into 2^nd gear.

So a Hardtail it is.

Mind you, 7 paragraphs does not really reflect the reality of this decision making process. It took me literally 6 months of constantly switching back and forwards to come to this conclusion (and frankly it might still change again cause I’m fickle as). I feel for example that I owe an apology to the very nice man at Drift Cycles in Newcastle whose time I wasted to the tune of probably about 1 and a half hours. Sorry about that.

NEXT: A short break.

chapter 3: A FEW QUESTIONS....LANGUAGE WARNING...

Right. Buy a new bike. How hard can it be? Several obvious questions present themselves.

1. How much? Now. I’m going to say right here that I am not the sort of person who resorts casually to the use of obscene language and it is certainly not something I will be employing on a regular basis in this Blog as it is neither funny nor clever. Having said that - Did you know it is entirely possible to spend $5000.00 on a bicycle that several writers in the bicycle related magazine sector have the temerity to describe as ‘entry level’.

Fuck me.

I will not be spending $5000.00 on a bicycle. And not just because the suggestion of such a figure would result in my wife literally laughing herself to death. I am thinking more in the area of somewhere between $2000 and $3000. Still a figure I will have to raise quickly, indistinctly and at the end of a conversation possibly unrelated to bicycle purchasing (‘Just popping out to get some milk dear, I’ll do the bin while I’m at it.....can I spend $2000.00 on a bike? Bye. LOVE YOU’) but not so outrageous that I’ll feel a need to lie about it to all my friends afterwards.

2. Mountain bike or Road bike? This is not really a question – physiologically and aesthetically I’m just not a road bike kind of person. I think it’s the lycra. And possibly Lance Armstrong.

3. Trail, Cross Country, All Mountain, Dirt Jump, Downhill, Cyclocross, BMX etc etc? The fact that I am not 14 with my underpants sticking 40cms over the top of my very tight jeans immediately eliminates BMX and Dirt Jump. Cyclocross is a bit too roadbikey and Downhill (and to a certain extent All Mountain) bikes, while certainly impressive in appearance, what with the MASSIVE nobbly tires, MASSIVE suspension and MASSIVEly outrageous paint jobs would require me to use terms like ‘Gnar’, ‘Sick’, ‘Bomb’ and ‘Cranked’ (possibly spelt with a ‘K’). Also, it turns out that making a bicycle tough enough to throw off cliffs and down rock strewn mountainsides makes it so heavy you can’t actually peddle one up a hill. Which seems silly to me.

So - a Trail or Cross Country Mountain Bike for somewhere in the region of $2500.00. This is EASY. Why haven’t I done this earlier.

NEXT: Rigid? Hardtail? Full Suspension? Upgrade? Build?....

chapter 2.5: RAIN RAIN GO AWAY COME AGAIN...oh screw it it's not listening to me...

Like most sports these days, Mountain Biking has a fairly well developed competitive element to it, right from small locally based clubs running weekend competitions on tracks they have dug out of the bush themselves, through to the UCI (that’s Union Cycliste Internationale in case you were wondering, the sport’s governing body, currently catching heaps for doing such a good job nailing down Lance Armstrong over the last 15 bloody years) run World Cup and World Championship extravaganzas.

I’ve had a look at the tracks they build for the top level Cross Country and Downhill competitions on some of the many videos YouTube make available to us for the purposes of reminding you how many certifiable lunatics there are out there willing to risk life and limb for personal glory and what is almost certainly not enough cash money. There are rocks and trees and holes and jumps and more rocks. It’s just insane what they come up with.

After the last two weeks of rain out here I reckon they could quite happily run a World Cup Downhill round along the length of my driveway and no one would be any the wiser.

Will you look at those holes for Christ’s sake. How am I supposed to drive a car up and down that mess. Not that there’s any point because both the bridges I need to cross to even get onto the main road are currently under water. Soooo glad I spent a week shovelling decomposed granite onto it, BY HAND, in 35 degree heat 3 months ago. Enjoy my road base, rapidly flowing river that did not even exist until it started pissing down rain like it’s the end of the FREAKING world last week.

NEXT: .....ahem. Normal service resumes.

Chapter 2: THE SELL....

This whole thing would be a lot easier had my wife not been present for the last decade to see my current bike sitting motionless in a succession of garages, decks and spare bedrooms during which, I am willing to admit, I expressed on several occasions an intention to get in the saddle with the goal of riding it in a dedicated manner off into the land of perfect cardio-vascular fitness and rippling physique not seen since my very brief stint in the army. Not stupid my wife. Can spot a pattern. I’ve also stated on more than one occasion that this time, the time we’re talking about NOW as opposed to all those OTHER times, this time, will be different.

But they weren’t of course or we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

So in the interests of keeping me honest - here’s the rules to start with.

1. Ride the bike I have: From right now and on a regular basis for let’s say, 6 months (or slightly less if I really hammer it). Regular basis means AT LEAST the distance from our house to my daughter’s school and back 3 times a week (that’s about 13kms). Over 6 months that should add up to (4 weeks a month x 6 months is 24 weeks x 3 times a week = 72 times to school and back).
2. Special challenges: Do a longer ride, at least 30kms, at least twice a month (6 months x 2 rides = 12 big rides).
3. Ride to my parents house at least once from home. That’s about 85kms.
4. Ride to Sydney at least once. That’s.....quite a long way.

In total that’s 72 rides of 13+km, 12 rides of 30+kms, 1 ride of 85km and 1 ride of I think it’s close to 120km before allowing my arse to grace the saddle of a new bike. May as well attach a weight goal to the whole thing as well..

5. Weight’s got to be under 100kg (which is still pretty heavy but to put it in perspective, I was 127kg about 2 years ago and I haven’t seen double figures for quite some time).

If I’m lucky the level of my demonstrated commitment and the clearly accruing benefits to my health will so impress my wife that it will not occur to her to ask the obvious question – ‘Why do you even need a new bike in the first place when that one seems to be perfectly ok to me?’ With a probable addendum of – ‘IT COSTS HOW MUCH?!’

The problem here is that while I have answers galore to this question including but not limited to  - it makes squeaky noises, the gears keep slipping, the travel on these 90’s era forks is woefully inadequate and can’t you see the geometry of this frame is all wrong for my riding style – my wife knows me really quite well and is fully aware that a not insignificant part of my motivation that remains unexpressed in a deep part of my psyche goes – ‘Because it’s shiny and new and look at all the cool bits and pieces I wants it I wants it my precioussssssss....’ And the only response I have to that is – ‘At least I’m not into cars.’

NEXT: Decisions decisions.