Ride that bike like you're a kid again

Why do we lose that 'all-in' spirit?

**You can listen to this, via my voice recording, here:**

When I picture my childhood, I can see myself, heading off on a bike….

Weaving around the small streets of the small town I grew up in, which seemed to sprawl for miles back then.

I was master of my universe on that bike. I was anyone I wanted to be. Riding around, a make-believe world playing out in the imagination I realise now I so often escaped to. I was a pro cyclist pulling ahead in the race of their life. I was an adventurer, miles away from home on bleak terrain, surviving. I was the driver of my dreams, I was in charge, I was someone, on that bike.

I was a kid. Seven, eight, 10, 12….

It was the late 80s, into the mid nineties. I’m sure cycling helmets existed but I’m also sure I didn’t have one. I tore along on my bike like a bat out of hell, pumping my legs, willing myself to go harder and faster. I zig-zagged. Squeezed through tiny gaps, too fast. I took corners so fast that I had to catch up with my stomach somewhere ahead on the road. My head fizzed at the furious whizz of it all. My ears burned, wind whipped and battered.

I flew down pavement curbs, bunny hopping, jumping, recklessly, probably from one side of the road to the other.

I was free and my mind would open up as I headed away from the streets and out onto some of the overgrown country paths and lanes that surrounded us. I rode through clouds of musky spring and summer, whipping along, lost somewhere deep in my thoughts. Getting closer to who I was. Finding out what went on in my head when nothing and nobody was around to muddy the picture.

I didn’t think about what I wore when I went out on my bike. I just had the thought to do it and headed off. There were no particular shoes or tight, bright clothing that had to be pulled on. It was a bike. You got on it. You headed off. You were free.

Riding my bike was an escape. It was a way for me to be alone that didn’t seem odd to anyone around me. A way to find calm. To have a chat with myself without interruption. It was the place I came up with stories. It was part of how I learned that nature made us feel good. Watching the shimmer of water on a lake, the flitty dance of birds from tree to tree, the quiet miracle of a curled up caterpillar in dappled light, under a tree far from home.

Early on I had a Raleigh bluebird - light blue and dainty, with tinny mudguards and a storage box on the back. It came with a set of bluebird stickers to customise it.

Then there was the Raleigh Coco, a purple-pinkish mix of a colour that I always felt was a bit too girly for me (though I probably chose it myself). And my last childhood bike was a navy blue Giant mountain bike. My sister and I were treated to those bikes in the summer of something like 1994 and that’s what we chose. We picked the same ones, which makes me smile.

I can’t recall exactly when I stopped riding a bike. But I did. It might have been to do with having borrowed one, from a really tough kid in my secondary school and not being able to bring it back in one piece. For some reason or another. he leant me the bike one summer evening to go home on, The chain snapped on the way back and at home, we couldn’t fix it. I lay awake all night worried sick about what he’d do the next day. I had to be driven to school with it, where I left it, broken in the bike shed and awaited my fate. But nothing like what I’d been dreading happened. I think he just shrugged. I can’t remember riding a bike much after that though.

In London, in my mid twenties I splashed out on a hybrid mountain/road bike that was sleek and a bit too prim for me. By then I preferred doing all my daydreaming on the tube and a bike, for me wasn’t about getting from A to B. No, a bike was for pushing your legs to burning point up a hill and feeling the rush the other side. It was for losing - and finding yourself. So I sold that bike pretty quickly and didn’t bother again.

As my thirties rolled to a close, I owned a scratched-up second hand cycle for pootling around with my kids.

I never even thought to head off, bunny hopping and street-racing like I did when I was a young. And if I did, I dismissed the idea with a ‘what the hell would people think of me? A grown up, weaving around no-handed!’

A friend asked me out on a bike ride one afternoon. A lunch time cycle to catch up and blow off the cobwebs. It sounded great. I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t thought of it before. Then, when we met, wheel to wheel, I burned with something a little like shame. She had a serious looking helmet and a bright sports raincoat. I had a hoodie on and no safety gear whatsoever. Bloody hell, Penny, I thought - why can’t you be like everyone else? Who rides a bike like this at 40?

Then, last week, something switched.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had countless great bike rides with my kids in recent years and we love nothing more than getting to the country lanes and declaring ‘bomb it!!’ before tearing off together. I ride that bike low, off the seat, hips back legs racing and I don’t care.

But I hadn’t done it on my own, not really, since I was that child lost in my own world.

Why does that happen?

What once seemed like the perfect, most explainable way to be alone, became something I felt I’d be judged for, for going off on my own, to do.

‘But people go off on their bikes alone all the time!’ you’re thinking. ‘There’s nothing weird about that’.

And you’re right. But I think it was because I’ve seen the way grown ups ride bikes. Slow and careful*. Sensible, on shiny bikes bought with good salaries. Women, my age, on those ladies bikes, high and upright, perfectly positioned. They’re lovely and all, but they’re not for me. I knew I didn’t ride a bike like that.

*(And I’m not talking about those with all the gear who head off in twos or packs, Lycra clad and intent on 20 miles plus - that’s a whole other kind of cycling).

But anyway, last week I did rediscover the joy of riding my bike the way I rode it when I was a kid.

It was a sunny afternoon and I was frustrated with my work. And the thought came to me.

‘Sod it. I’m going out on my bike.’

And it gave something back to me I didn’t quite know I’d lost.

Because as I raced along, faster and faster, the overgrown paths whacking at my legs, my thighs burning, I pulled my hands away from the handle bars, arms lose by my sides and my mind opened up. Like wheels lifting off the runway. Everything seemed so clear. I knew where I was headed. I knew what I had to do. And the best part about it was that, I knew that when I got off the bike I could stay in that powerful space.

So it was biter sweet.

I’d stretched my fingers out to meet the little girl who used to ride her bike just to try and be herself, for a little while.

And it made me ache a bit for her. I knew myself back then, in those moments out on the bike but I lost who I was when the noise tuned up again. I didn’t know that I could take that imagination and turn into something real. I hid it. Kept it safe from being laughed at, or judged or told I wasn’t good enough.

Getting out on my bike has been like time travel. And it makes me see that I haven’t changed much.

It makes me wonder why we stop riding our bikes the way we did when we were so little.

It makes me see we’ve got it all so wrong.

Don’t grow up….they say….it’s a trap…..

And how we laugh.

P

x

PS: Reader…I do now, reluctantly, wear a helmet….most of the time.