A guest post by Ellie Brown.
A couple of weeks ago, I overcame something of a bike riding hurdle that I had come up against over the past year: cycling at speed. For the first time since getting a bike last summer, I found myself going faster than I had before, cycling at speed but also at ease. As I whizzed along—through an old apple orchard, beneath cavernous underpasses and down the Milton Keynes Redways in not inconsiderable heat—I found myself unlocking a memory of riding a bike from a very long time ago.
In fact, it was a memory from such a long time ago that it was one of my earliest memories: no more than four years’ old, cycling at speed along the seafront where I first grew up, weaving in and out of people, and no higher than their legs. This bike had a pink frame, white tyres, a white saddle and white stabilisers to match. It’s possible that the bike also had white tassels at the ends of the handlebars, though I might be misremembering. In any case, it was Barbie adjacent. I had a real Need For Speed on this bike, and I really prided myself on shedding the stabilisers way in advance of my peers. There I was, gliding along the smooth surfaces of the promenade, at speed and at ease.
I quickly outgrew this little pink bike and, if I remember correctly, my next bike had a red frame, black tyres, a black saddle and absolutely no tassels. I was a little thrown off by the size of this new bike and it took me a while to readjust. Not only did I need to learn how to manoeuvre this bigger bike, I also no longer lived by the seaside, and so the smooth surfaces of the seafront promenade had been replaced with the uneven gravelled surfaces of the back alleyway where my rides were now confined. Where once my only obstacle had been people’s ankles, now there were cars at each end of the alley and potholes to contend with.
But I was not deterred. Over the next few years, I rode my bike on weekends and over the summer—going on bike rides with my family and with friends, along the river, on the redways, learning how to ride with care along the road when my bike got too big to cycle along the pavement. I was, by all accounts, not athletic or sporty as a child (lacking eye coordination and wearing glasses does not a netball player or footballer make), but I really loved riding my bike.
So much so that, around the age of around eleven, I asked for a BMX for Christmas. And oh boy, it was a wicked bike—all black and complete with stunt pegs. It was a bike that perfectly suited by preteen surliness and nascent emo tendencies. But as it happened, this preteen attitude was also matched by a waning enthusiasm for being outside. Why ride a bike when you could, I don’t know, play The Sims? I never even put the stunt pegs on.
For pretty much the next two decades, I did not ride a bike. There wasn’t a specific moment when my bike riding days seized, or even a real reason. My bike remained in the shed for a while and at some point, it was got rid of or given away… It’s possible that it was passed down to one of my younger siblings—I don’t recall.
By my early twenties, the thought of riding a bike filled me with a little fear. I tried out a friend’s bike, but having never ridden an adult-sized bike, I was not at all at ease. By this point, my self-preservation had really kicked in, and the thought of falling off a bike (let alone getting on one) was all-consuming. I’d hear stories from friends or colleagues about coming off a bike and getting injured (!!). Even tales of bike theft were enough to cement the fact that I was Not A Bike Person anymore, or ever.
Moving to London in my mid-twenties only underscored this point further: the thought of riding alongside the 243, delivery drivers riders and just about any London traffic was not something I could seriously contemplate (and to be honest, I probably still wouldn’t). By this point, my life was so detached from riding a bike that I barely gave them a thought. My exposure to bikes was limited to novel encounters, I guess: trying the exercise bike at the gym and feeling unmoved by the offroad mountain trail simulation I selected from the screen.
There was the summer when the kids learned how to jump Lime bikes and the city was abuzz with the sweet sound of clack clack clack clack clack as resourceful riders figured out how to break the wheel lock and hack the bike(in fairness, the sound of the appropriation of privatised bike travel that has taken over urban and residential spaces and created problems of access along pedestrian pathways etc., was music to my ears).
Then there was the actual music being blasted by the tourist pedicabs that descended on central London, carting tourists around in fluffy pink carriages, soundtracked by only the best early-2000s Europop. And I have nothing to say about the bike-powered beer bars, other than: why? All of this is to say: bikes were pretty much everywhere I went, but they were not part of my life.
Until last summer. Having moved out of London and to Milton Keynes for the foreseeable, getting around and about soon emerged as a something of a problem. See, having left home to go to university aged 18 in a city where public transport was cheap and walking was free, I hadn’t got round to learning to drive. And this was never a problem. I finished uni, I worked for a couple of years commuting by bus (okay, sometimes by taxi—I was never very good at waking up on time). On moving to London, I would, again, commute to work either by bus, or most likely on foot (the commute was almost entirely along a Cycle Superhighway and would have been infinitely quicker on a bike, but, alas and as above, the thought of riding through London was not something I was prepared to seriously contemplate).
Back in Milton Keynes—unofficial Car City© of the British Isles—travel is something of a different proposition. Public transport exists, for sure, and, crucially, it does work better than many other towns and cities, but in a city whose roads are ever increasingly congested with private cars, it needs an infrastructure overhaul (fwiw, it seems like the City Council has Big Plans to massively improve public transport). I digress.
As has been covered in another post already, last year brought with it something of a ‘wheel-based epiphany’ as Mr Hands® and I found our footing in Milton Keynes. We learned so much about the city that we called home and realised how little we actually knew this place at all. Going on walks in the early summer, we were increasingly aware of how much Green Space™ existed in Milton Keynes (over 6,000 acres).
Like the redways, the city’s valley parks (plural!) are all nestled away from the hectic grid system of roads (which I knew inside-out from the comfort of the passenger seat of a car or bus). These green spaces are in abundance and well-connected by the redways. However, Milton Keynes is so often traversed by car it can be easy to forget just how spread out and vast the city can be. For a while, we walked as much of the city as we could to get around. But it was time-consuming and not really convenient.
To quote Hands®, “In a jam? Get a bike.” Which is exactly what happened. To begin, I started by renting Lime bikes (yes, I criticised Lime earlier, yes, I know). It worked for a bit, but hiring these bikes is expensive, cumbersome and (rightly) subject to speed restrictions in Central Milon Keynes. Nor are they sufficiently nimble for enjoying Green Space™ at ease, not designed to navigate unexpected tree roots, etc. But it was a start. Within a month or two, and by the end of last summer, I found myself Lime biking across the city to pick up my own bike, bought online for £50.
Oh boy, was it a shock to the system. “It’s like riding a bike,” as the old idiom goes. Sure, Jan (not Hands® Jan). It was hard. My legs hurt, the saddle sucked, I hated it. During many uphill rides, I found myself shouting: “I HATE BIKES!!!” The leg cramp was intense, but so was my out-of-breathness. “See,” I found myself thinking, “there’s a reason I stopped riding bikes all those years ago.”
I’ll be honest, I can’t remember precisely when, or why, my attitude changed towards biking. As summer turned to autumn, I soon passed my newish bike over for walking. It was longer, but it was easier. I cycled even less over winter. On one particular occasion over New Year, I came so close to just abandoning the bike altogether during a ride-gone-wrong. I think it was somewhat justified: who’d have thought that attempting a first ride along the canal would be best undertaken on an icy January day? I thought I was going to fall in.
But with time, things started to change. Riding started to hurt a little less. I reclimbed hills I had sworn against and found that I could get much further without shouting. I could even get to the top. My stamina increased, slowly, but steadily. Cycling longer distances took less time: one particular route along the canal has more than halved to a sub-30-minute ride. I can even ride with one hand sometimes.
My bike conversion was also aided by getting some new parts: a better saddle, a higher saddle. A different frame (alright a totally different bike). I got some obligatory Blue Lug accessories (in lieu of the white tassels and BMX pegs of yore). A top-hat wearing alligator squeezy horn that looks funny but sounds like a dog toy. A leopard print handlebar bag to fit in little bits and pieces (a switch up from the Lime bike baskets which usually have soggy cig butts and have cans of Prime sloshing around in them, not bouquets of flowers or oysters on ice as per IG). Anway, I made the bike mine.
If there’s anything I’ve learned about this recent rediscovery of riding, though, it’s that what has made it so pleasurable isn’t necessarily the personalisation of my bike. All of this coincided with the first Hands® ride at the start of the year. When you’re riding in a group, you can find yourself riding further than you’d normally be comfortable. Chatting to people as you ascend a hill you usually detest is a great way to take your mind off the pain. Slogging uphill as you make new connections. With that in mind, I learned that cycling could also be about socialising (within reason: beer bikes should still be banned on aesthetically reprehensible grounds) as much as it was about getting around.
In little under a year—or more realistically, in little over six months—I’ve come to enjoy my bike in ways I didn’t think was possible. Here I am, gliding along the smooth surfaces of the red ways, at speed and at ease. Big Hills® still sometimes make me shout, but I’ve come to learn that there ain’t no mountain hill high enough to keep me from gettin’ thru.
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