On War & Lycra

If I must die, let it bring hope, let it be a tale. Refaat Alareer

There’s a multitude of surprises when taking up cycling at the age of sixty, one being a whole new range of people and things to hate.

· Motorists, notably BMW drivers, Mercedes drivers, other car drivers, buses, trucks, vans and SUVs.

· Pedestrians, especially ones lost in cyberspace who step blindly into your path on their phones with their earbuds in, or ones who wander aimlessly in bicycle lanes in pairs and groups like it’s some kind of designated rambler’s highway.

· Other cyclists, especially Deliveroo riders, electric phone snatching roadmen, Lime bike riders (with a sub department reserved in hell for those who haven’t paid their bike rental and sound like they’re being pursued by squawking canaries); cyclists on antique or shit pushbikes slower than me; cyclists with the full Lycra rig on handmade racing bikes who don’t even look at me because they’re so much better.

I hate, all of these people.

Then there are the bugs, the dust, the fumes, the pollen, the potholes, the heat, the cold, the wet and most of all, the headwind. Oh, and broken glass and punctures. And the ever-present possibility of injury and even death.

And the gear. The bottomless money pit of gear, of padded Lycra bib-shorts, helmets, gloves, windproof, rain proof, nature proof Gore Tex, not to mention the mentholated ass goo that you’re supposed to slather all over most intimate parts to prevent butt sores.

When someone mentioned to me that the hardest part of distance cycling was ‘the Gooch’ I imagined they were describing a particularly challenging mountain pass, not my perineum.

Worst of all, you look like a dork.

The racing boys and MAMILs (middle aged men in Lycra) think they look cool, but…

They don’t.

They look like paunchy scuba divers who got beached in central London.

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When did this all happen anyway? A bike used to be something worth about twenty quid that was left leaning against railings that we’d help ourselves to when drunk. Now you can get measured for one that can cost thousands of pounds. And that’s before you buy the wetsuit. And what’s the collective noun for a group of cyclists? A herd? A flange? A murder? Probably a flock. It’s certainly a recent thing, these shoals of slippery middle-aged road hogging entitled motherfuckers swarming around the home counties and clogging the furry arteries of suburbia.

I imagine many MAMILS are much like me in that they don’t consider themselves MAMILS, there’s a degree of denial, similar to that which comes with the aging process and death. It won’t happen to me.

But it has. I… am a reluctant MAMIL.

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It all began in much cooler circumstances two years ago when I was running a very cool retreat in Nepal, dressed in very cool hippie boho chic apparel. You get the vibe. The walk back from the camp is a beautiful two hour stroll up and down the valley, through paddy fields and picturesque hamlets. No big deal for a fit person.

I am not a fit person.

By the end of the hike, I’d torn something I never even knew I had, the meniscus, a tendon that runs behind the knee, and suddenly walking without pain became a luxurious memory.

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At school most of the non-violent punishments involved running. And because I was resolutely anti team sports they made me do cross country running. That, four times a week, plus the multitude of punishments, meant that by the time I left full time education I was so fit I could comfortably smoke four or five cigarettes during a ten-mile run.

It also meant that punishment and exercise were irrevocably intertwined in my psyche to such a degree that I never wanted to get off my ass ever again.

Obviously, when I returned from Nepal barely able to walk… I did nothing about it. I’m a man. We don’t respond to health crises. They go away by ignoring them. Six months later ‘barely able to walk’ had turned into literally could not walk. Rather than go to the doctor, I did what any sensible person would do and asked my knee what it was trying to tell me.

It was very forthright.

You haven’t been in your body since you were five.

Which was absolutely true. The shock of going to school made me split from my body so as not to feel, and my injury was my system’s way of trying to get my attention.

And if that sounds a bit woo-woo, that’s because it is. But it works for me. I tend to endure, and so when I ignore the stop signs too many times, my organism has this wonderful way of getting my attention called illness, burnout or injury.

So now that it had my attention, it was obvious that I’d not only have to do some physio, but in order not to completely fall apart - an option clearly available as my newly discovered sixty-year-old body was happy to remind me – I’d have to get over my exercise-phobia.

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So, did I join a gym?

Did I fuck.

No, I decided to cycle across France.

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The Western Front Way is a route that follows the trench lines from WWI, running 1100km from the Swiss border to the Belgian coast. It is the result of a letter sent by a soldier named Alexander Douglas Gillespie, a young British officer in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. Written to his parents shortly before his death in 1915, he imagined No Man’s Land being turned into a sacred path where future generations could walk to reflect on the cost of war and the value of peace.

The Great War ended almost half a century before I was born, but it formed me. In many ways you could say it shaped us all, the echoes of that cataclysmic horror show rippling through the world still to this day. My maternal grandparents were children when they watched the young men leave in their droves for the front, and they were incensed by the meaningless slaughter that meant so many never returned. They raised me never to trust the ruling classes and to always question those in authority.

My grandmother used to tell me stories of my great uncle Bill who’d originally fought in the Boer War, bringing monkeys and parrots back from South Africa to our farm in England. In the Great War he was in the Gordon Highlanders, coming home on leave with mud still wet on his kilt. He was in a mining company, an especially horrific and terrifying form of warfare which involved digging beneath the enemy lines to detonate huge explosions. Until one day they got him, and he became nothing but a story told by an old lady to a young boy who would one day ride across France in a semi-conscious act of remembrance.

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An estimated twenty million men, women and children died in the Great War. For every rotation of our pedals over the entire 1100km, three soldiers lost their lives. The route will take us through the Vosges mountains, down through Alsace and Lorraine to ‘the meat grinder’ of Verdun, across the Champagne region to the Somme, Arras and Ypres and up to the Belgian coast.

Originally when I conceived the idea about eighteen months ago I’d wanted it to raise awareness of men’s work, but now I don’t care. Fuck men’s work - this gentle, subtle thing that I’ve been involved in for thirty years seems to be becoming overwhelmed by old school masculinist outfits promising old school masculinist bullshit, the very rhetoric that we could argue started the fucking war in the first place.

We don’t need more weekend warriors. We need more full time poets.

Because what captivated me about the Great War wasn’t guns or tanks or epic battles, it was the poetry. In a post Romantic era war of censorship, euphemism, and propaganda, poetry became a space for truth-telling, with outpourings of male vulnerability as never seen in any conflict before or since. That’s my model of what is at the heart of men – tenderness. It makes me wonder what would have happened if that generation of young men had survived? Would there even be a need for my work?

Much like the war, our ride will likely achieve nothing. It will certainly impact the ten of us riding, but beyond that will probably change little. This doesn’t trouble me. It’s a gesture, an honouring of those who did not have the chance to live life, a pilgrimage by a small, inconsequential group of gentle men.

Needless to say, I won’t be posting much here over the next few weeks.

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I wrote a short piece to be read aloud before we start our ride.

This pilgrimage marks the culmination of twenty-five years of devoted companionship between a group of men who have gathered, every other week, with no aim but to grow - in wisdom, in peace, and in harmony.

We ride with gratitude, knowing that such a journey has only been possible because of the era into which we were born. Behind us stand the countless men, women, and children who died, who suffered, and who lived lifetimes of bereavement in the wake of the Great War.

They are our ancestors in grief and courage.

We remember them.