WEEK 4: Thighs of Steel vs. Headwinds from Hell

I was struggling up a very steep bridge near Gatewarth Tip which must have a gradient of something like 3:1. I was heaving myself along at all of 3 metres per minute into the ever present headwind, oblivious to the fine view of the huge, flattened mounds of my communities collective waste that stretched away on either side. So engrossed was I by my physical exertions that not even the breathtaking vista of the early morning sun glinting off the slab sided monoliths of Lever Bro's and Zeneca impinged on my internal reverie of lactic pain. Most people, upon witnessing the heavenly shafts of sunlight burning through the thick, gungy smog emitting from said monoliths would be transfixed by the exquisite refractory qualities of this months Illegal Emissions... but not I. I was engrossed in witnessing first hand the disintegration of the human patella under extreme torsional stress. My mind was a dull blank, my vision blurring at the edges, my breath heaved in gasps, my knees and thighs transmuted into jagged saw blades rasping across sand paper. Everything in the Universe was reduced to one single point of clarity. My arrival at the top. There it was, ahead and above me. A hemisphere of dark grey tarmac bulging upwards to meet the light grey sky. And I was consumed by that single purpose. I could not stop, I could not slow down. Gravity clawed at me from behind like an insatiable beast. The wind pummelled me from in front, smothering me like a drowning man wrapped in a heavy, clinging, waterlogged sheet as he sinks deeper and deeper into darkness, further and further from the bright light of the surface.

Then I was overtaken by Sunday Cycling Poof.

Sunday Cycling Poof is a little like Poncey Cycling Git, except that Sunday Cycling Poof only comes out on sunny weekends and Bank Holidays. He is a strictly casual cyclist who spends his spare time day-dreaming about yellow shirts and watching DVD's of long convoys of sweaty, lycra clad men with shaven legs and bronzed complexions streaming along the roads of rural France. Like Poncey Cycling Git, he has all the gear, but unlike Poncey Cycling Git, he has no idea. He has no innate purpose in life other than to show it all off to the world at large. At least Poncey Cycling Git is going somewhere. He's a bona fide commuter.

Having said that, all this pointless pedal bashing has done wonders for his muscle tone. Barely had I struggled halfway up Mount Agony than Sunday Cycling Poof creams past me, his deeply tanned shaven calves so well defined they cast their own shadows. His legs move with such a regular and powerful rhythm as to make a steam powered locomotive envious of their easy grace. The sound of his chain sighing over the cogs of his incredibly expensive, top of the range, feather light racer combines with the smooth hiss as his highly priced, over-engineered tyres caress the road to create an effect that is almost hypnotic.

And then he is gone. Vanished ahead of me. He has already crested the bridge and is free wheeling down the other side. The sweet sound of his superb machine is lost in the torrential roar of the headwind slamming into my face, overpowering my senses with the reek of decay and the chemical flatulence of the nearby monoliths as they squat among their own wastes. He is mocking me. I know it. As he so carelessly and needlessly swerved around me to overtake on this otherwise completely empty road, he was silently laughing at my high visibility vest, my lumpy, shapeless waterproof jacket and my bulging paniers drooping from either side of my rear wheel like the saggy ass of an elderly house maid. It was like a convertible Ferrari F430 driven by a New Money Super Chav, decked out according to the lastest clothing fad and sporting an Ibiza tan, overtaking a 15 year old Volvo estate driven by Mr. 2.4 kids, 2 dogs and a mortgage.

And yet... and yet, I don't envy him. I plod to work on my terribly domestic tourer each day and I plod back and sometimes I don't see a Poof, nor even a Git. Often I see another Plodder, plodding along, pushing into the headwind, steering carefully around oblivious pedestrians, dodging patches of broken glass or waiting patiently at the lights and then even more patiently waiting for the Light Jumpers before slowly, yet steadily and predictably pushing off and plodding on up the road. We Plodders always get where we're going. We don't get in anyone's way and we don't get cyclists a bad name.

And we don't show off.

Because we don't have to.