We Need to Weaken the Mixture Read online

  My mum and dad go in all the time. My dad loves it. He retired on 1 March 2018, after 55 years, and I reckon that one of the reasons he retired is so he can put his attention into the pub. He’s the handyman and groundskeeper. That one reason, that I didn’t consider when I made the decision at the time, has become enough of a justification for me deciding to buy the pub. My dad has my problem, or I’ve inherited his, that he’s addicted to work. In the extreme. Now he can concentrate on the pub. He’s not getting paid, but it’s enough to keep him dead busy sorting stuff out for my sister, polishing the pipes, organising the cellar, doing this, doing that, and he loves it. Sal tries to pay him, she’s fair like that, but he won’t have it. He’s dead proud of what she’s done there.

  Another good thing about the pub staying open is that it’s employing local lads and lasses, 21 staff from Kirmington or surrounding villages.

  And that’s all without me giving it much of a leg-up. I don’t believe people turn up thinking I’m going to be sat at the end of the bar doing a crossword or summat, with a pint in front of me, but having my name attached to it is enough to make some people drive out and visit. It’s the good job that Sal’s done that keeps people coming back or telling their friends to visit. Sal would never tell me if she thought she made the wrong decision and should have gone into nursing, but I think she’s happy.

  The decision to buy the place might not have been the best thought out I’ve ever had, but it’s all worked out for the best so far.

  CHAPTER 2

  ‘That ride changed me’

  WHEN THE PUB opened, I wasn’t long back from the Tour Divide, the ride that became a big part of Worms. For those who don’t know, the Tour Divide is the world’s toughest mountain bike race. The route follows the Continental Divide, down the Rocky Mountains. The definition of the Continental Divide is the geographical line that splits North and South America. To the west of the line the water flows to the Pacific, to the east it flows to the Atlantic.

  The mountain bike route starts in Banff, Canada, and ends at the Mexico border. It is never more than 50 miles from the Continental Divide and crosses it 26 times. You can ride the route as a tourist, and plenty of folk do, but if you’re competing in the race you have to do it with no outside assistance, and you’re not supposed to talk to anyone you know during the race.

  Other than people in petrol stations and cafés I only really met a handful of folk on the whole ride. One was a journalist who’d been tracking my ride and came out to interview me and take photos, another was a cyclist going east to west, some others were Tour Divide riders going in the opposite direction, and one was the winner of the 2016 Tour Divide, the Brit Mike Hall.

  I rode with Mike for half or three-quarters of a day. It was at a point where I’d ridden up a track and I couldn’t work out on the GPS where I was and I was going round in circles a bit. I had set off at three in the morning, and I could hear water to the left of me, but it wasn’t showing on the GPS. I’d read my notes the night before, when I’d finished riding at midnight or whatever, but they were a bit woolly. Because I hadn’t spent a bit more on paying for the more detailed GPS route (that would have shown the background) I was having a bit of bother. My Garmin screen just showed a blue line to follow. I thought I’d buy this cheaper programme and save a few quid. Having the background showing wouldn’t have saved me loads of time, but it would’ve made it easier on that morning.

  I’d just got onto the right route when Mike Hall caught up with me. I’d set off before the official start of the race because I didn’t want to leave in a crowd. That meant my time was being logged by the organisers, but it wouldn’t count for a place in the final race standings. If I’d have been in the race I’d have finished third, I think, so I wasn’t hanging about. But if you looked at my time trace from meeting Mike Hall to the end, I was faster after seeing him, because he showed me how he was riding. I was riding with him up hills and he was huffing and puffing, and I was keeping with him quite comfortably, even though he was on a lighter bike. He said, ‘You’re fit, you are.’ I said I do a bit of cycling, and told him I was surprised by how hard he’d push himself up hills, putting his body in what trainers and athletes call the red zone. He said, ‘Yeah, I push hard, then do it all again.’ I’d never let myself get to that point because I thought that’s when I’d be in an anaerobic state. I’d be robbing glycogen and I’d bonk out, having nothing left in the tank. Now I was watching Mike and thinking, Bloody hell, he’s bouncing the valves every day!

  From that point on I thought, Bugger it. I surprised myself. I saw that I could push myself harder and still make power for up to 20 hours a day.

  It’s easy to say all I’ve got to do to beat Mike Hall’s Tour Divide time is to sleep less and ride more, very easy to say. He is a special sort of boy he is, or was …

  We emailed each other after that. He complimented me on the fact that I wasn’t mucking about, I was serious about riding, and told me of some races he had coming up. He was going to do the Arizona Trail Race in April 2017; this was another race in America like the Tour Divide, but a lot shorter, only 750 miles. Then he changed his mind, saying he was going to do a new event, called the Indian Pacific Wheel Race, instead.

  That year, 2017, was the first running of this big, unsupported, backpacking bicycle race. Like the Tour Divide, the competitors were expected to carry everything they needed themselves, or buy it on the road. There were no back-up trucks or teams. Mike carried next to nothing on a race like this anyway. It started in Perth, on the Indian Ocean on the west coast of Australia, then went more or less along the southern coast, detouring into the mountains before finishing on the Pacific Ocean in Sydney.

  The route was 5,500 kilometres, just short of 3,500 miles, and made a point of calling in at cities along the route, which was a big difference to the Tour Divide. The American race route visited the odd small town, but mainly villages of a few houses and a diner or petrol station at the most, and only so riders could get food and drink.

  Mike was in second place in the race, coming out of Australia’s capital, Canberra, less than 250 miles from the end, when he was hit by a car at half six in the morning, on 31 March 2017, and died at the scene.

  Mike will stick in my mind. I think anyone who does well in these kinds of events and keeps going back for more has issues, demons in their head, something that makes us keep wanting to punish ourselves. I still want to but it’s out of step with where I’ve found myself in life, with Shazza, Dot, the nice house and no shortage of opportunities … I’ve worked hard for what I’ve got. Do I feel guilty, subconsciously? Is that why I get up at four o’clock to cycle through freezing rain to work on trucks?

  I was thinking about all this the other day, and realised that if I had to pick one of the moments when I was the happiest, or most content, in my life it was on the Tour Divide.

  I’d left Salida on a tough climb, up and over Marshall Pass. It wasn’t the steepest climb on the route, just an uphill drag for a good five hours at the pace I was pedalling. It just kept going until it reached the summit at nearly 11,000 feet (two and a half times the height of Ben Nevis, Britain’s tallest mountain). After that I’d come down the other side to a filling station with a café, in a little village called Sargents in Colorado. There had been snow at the top of the pass, but it was hot at the bottom. The café was just closing up as I arrived, at about eight or nine at night, but the woman was kind enough to stay open for me to buy some grub and Gatorade. While I was there a couple of pushbikes, all kitted out for solo racing, arrived. You can do the Tour Divide from north to south, like I’d chosen, or south to north. These lads were going northbound.

  I’d left Banff a couple of days before the official start, and I hadn’t been hanging about, so other than the few hours I’d spent cycling with Mike Hall this was the first time I’d met anyone in the race. I told them I was Terry from England. I’d entered under a false name, because I thought some magazines might have sent folk out
to try to photograph or interview me on the route and I wanted to keep myself to myself. None of the people who’d served me sandwiches in Subways or pizzas in tiny towns knew, or cared, who I was, but here was a chance for me to get into character. One of riders was from Chicago, but had spent a lot of time in England teaching at a university. He was explaining that his rear hub had exploded on his bike, so he needed to get a lift to somewhere to get a replacement. There was another lad, an old boy, but I got the impression he was fast. I don’t know why, but I’ve never felt as at home as I did when I was talking with them. Then the lassie who ran the café said she could make us some extra sarnies, and they were good, wrapped in tinfoil. There were so many calories in them you needed a forklift to pick them up. The northbound lads were camping there overnight, but I had another three hours’ riding in me before I bedded down.

  I didn’t talk for long, but I’d enjoyed having a yarn with someone on the same wavelength and with the similar plan in mind. The moment when I biked down the road, away from the café in Sargents, the sun just going down, is one of the moments I look back on as the happiest I’ve ever been. What does that say?

  A few days later the ride was over. The last stretch, through the bottom of New Mexico, was a 60-mile straight road with a border station at the end. I didn’t know what was going to happen, or if Sharon was going to be there. I crossed the finish line and I hadn’t spoken to anyone I knew for over three weeks. When I got to the end I started crying. What am I doing? I’m a hard man, but what I’d put my brain and body through during those 18 days and 7 hours, and in the build-up to crossing the finish line, set me off. I had to have a word with myself. Nothing has ever made me cry like that. There isn’t a motorcycle race in the world that would make me cry like that.

  Even though I wrote about the Tour Divide in Worms to Catch, it’s made such a big impact on how I think about things since that I’ve mentioned it a lot in this book. On the Tour Divide you can be climbing for days. In times like that you could sit and cry or shout and swear till you lost your voice, and it doesn’t make a shit’s worth of difference, you’ve just got to get on with it. That’s what I learned. Channel your energy into reaching the finish line. That ride changed me, it changed my life.

  CHAPTER 3

  ‘The TV lot knew something wasn’t right’

  THE TOUR DIVIDE was something else, and if I could get that feeling again, from another experience, I wanted to. After I got back in June 2016, it didn’t take long to come up with an idea of riding to Magadan, a port town on the Sea of Okhotsk in the far east of Russia, but I don’t know when I’m going to do it. Especially not now since Dot arrived in October 2017 (but more about her later). It’ll take six weeks, if everything goes smoothly – 200 miles a day for six weeks, with loads of river crossings, where I could be stuck for ages waiting for a truck to hitch a lift over the water if I couldn’t cross it without being swept away. Part of me thinks I’ve got so much to learn before attempting it, while the other part thinks, Bugger it, I’ll just set off and cross the bridges, or rivers, as I come to them.

  So, with Magadan too much to take on with everything else that was happening at the time, the TV lot came up with a load of rare pushbike challenges, and one of them was riding around the coast of Britain. I looked at the record, set in 1984 by Nick Sanders, who is better known as a motorcycle distance record holder. He set it at 22 days and I looked at it, did a few quick sums in my head and told the TV bods I reckoned I could ride around the coast of Britain in 20 days. I added that I’d set off the first week in December, so I’d finish the ride on Christmas Day. That side of things was my idea.

  As part of the filming I met up with Nick Sanders. He’s definitely a doer. He’s made a job out of breaking long-distance records, mainly on motorbikes, but he was a professional cyclist years ago, I think. He has a very weathered appearance. The time he set was very impressive.

  I came back from the Tour Divide and worked like hell on the trucks, then went to China to film the Our Guy in China programmes. As part of that I did a ride through the Taklamakan Desert. It wasn’t far, 347 miles, non-stop. I did 300 miles in 24 hours, only stopping to eat and run behind a sand dune for a leak every now and then. I’d done enough 24-hour Strathpuffer bike races that I know what it’s like to cycle for 24 hours and how much effort I can put in at the beginning and still be going at the end. Plus, because this was not far off the back of the Tour Divide, it didn’t feel like much of a challenge. I had all the TV crew and all the health and safety folks that TV demands. They didn’t need to do anything, but insurance policies and risk assessment forms say they’ve got to be there just in case, so that’s the way it is. I didn’t need them for the Tour Divide, but I know the TV lot have to dot the i’s and cross the t’s. I did get a monk on when they were driving right in front of me filming and chucking up sand and blowing diesel fumes in my face. The previous record for this desert crossing was 47 hours and I did it in 28 hours and 17 minutes, an average of near enough 12mph.

  When I got back from China I was back at Mick Moody’s truck yard in Grimsby, playing catch-up, doing a few jobs on Scanias he’d taken in on part-exchange and getting stuff ready for MOTs, and doing other bits because it wasn’t long before I had to fly out to New Zealand for a week at the Burt Munro Challenge in his home town of Invercargill.

  Burt Munro is the man whose story of record-breaking at Bonneville Salt Flats, in Utah, on his home-built special, was made into the 2005 film The World’s Fastest Indian. The Burt Munro Challenge was a week of motorbike races, of all types, to celebrate this legend, who died in 1978.

  I was only interested if I could take part on my own bike, so my Martek was shipped out. It’s the turbo Suzuki special that I’ve owned for years and raced at the 2014 Pikes Peak International Hill Climb in Colorado. Me and Shazza followed it out to New Zealand, and had a great time. I’d been a few times before, for the Wanganui Road Races that take place on Boxing Day on the Cemetery Circuit, and I love the country. The people are great and it’s so laid back. It’s a bit backward, there’s loads of open space, no one seems to be in a rush.

  We had a couple of days without bikes. One day I went out with a group for a 40- or 50-mile mountain bike ride and Sharon arranged to meet up on the ride and for us to do a bungee jump together, at the 43-metre AJ Hackett Kawarau Bridge Bungy, the world’s first permanent bungee site. Neither of us had done one before and I thought she might select reverse when she saw it but she didn’t and it was mega to do it together.

  The rest of the time I was in a shed working on the Martek. It was nothing but trouble, but I liked mucking about with it. I did a couple of track days, at Teretonga racetrack, a ten-minute drive from Invercargill. I borrowed a van, paid $40 and I had the track nearly to myself. What a life. I’d be having all this grief with the bike, not sure why it wasn’t running right, then I’d find myself on track with a new Fireblade or a BMW S1000R and I’d smoke them on this thing concocted in my shed, and it was the best feeling in the world. Then something would go wrong again, but it was all worth it for those moments.

  When I was in New Zealand I caught a right stonking cold, the last thing I needed, on top of a 28-hour journey home, before starting something like the ride I had planned. I was back for three or four days, working at Moody’s, before the start of the round Britain ride. Oh, and the pub I’d bought was opening the night before I set off. Like I said, busy.

  John, from Louth Cycles, built me another bike, a new version of what I’d done the Tour Divide on. This time it was a Salsa Cutthroat, not the Salsa Fargo I’d ridden through North America on. Salsa is a California-based company and they describe the Cutthroat as a ‘Tour Divide-inspired, dropbar mountain bike’. It sounded perfect and looked trick, kitted out with Hope parts, all made in England. It was a step up from the Fargo.

  I was bunged up with snot and cold, and the last thing I should’ve been doing was getting on a pushbike before the big ride, but I hadn’t ridden this new bike a
t all so I set off to work and back, on a cold December morning, just to make sure everything was all right. It was, so I didn’t sit on a pushbike again until I set off three days later. I just worked on the trucks, blew my nose and slept.

  The idea was to start in Grimsby, and ride the whole circumference of Britain in 20 days. When I’d helped come up with the idea I thought I could piss it.

  The TV lot had got Garmin involved and they’d made a full route plan, coming up with one of 4,866.6 miles. The current record was 4,838 miles, set in 1984. New one-way roads along stretches of coast must have made the difference. Garmin also worked out there was 69,443 metres of climbing, the equivalent of riding the height of Everest nearly eight times in 20 days. Everyone had put loads of effort in, to make sure it all went smoothly. The only fly in the ointment was me.

  Even though the Garmin route was clockwise, heading south from the Grimsby start point, I’d decided I would head north, because there was a good chance I’d get a tail wind up the north-east coast of England and the east coast of Scotland.

  The pub opening was great, and I slept in Kirmo at my sister’s, Sal, on the Saturday and got up at three in the morning to get to the start in Grimsby. I wanted to be in Scarborough for nine that morning.

  Two of my mates, Dobby, whose house I rented in Caistor when I moved out of Kirmington, and John, a potato merchant and a keen cyclist, rode with me on the first day. The route was all on road. I was doing a bit of work, but for most of it I was in the slipstream of those two boys, taking it a bit easy.