"I didn't have a ladder high enough or a rope strong enough."
It was pretty much around now, eighteen years ago in 1992 that I decided I wanted to have a go at bike racing. Now going into my 19th straight season it has occurred to me just how much has happened in that time, and not just in cycling. For starters, at 21 years old I still had hair! I was skinny even before I started riding but I often wonder what state I'd be in now if I hadn't take up my sport. At the point I started training and racing I was eating a lot of rubbish food and drinking a lot of beer and had been since I turned 18 in 1988. Yes, there used to be a time where I could down ten pints, . . . yes ten whole pints!! before I was slipping under the table - now, alas, its four if I'm lucky before I can't handle it anymore and have to hit the wine, then I have to stop because I usually end up with most of it over my clothes.
Back then, I was able to stay up til 5am most mornings, buzzing after my shifts as a barman at a Holiday Camp, talking deeply with a small community of fellow workers and ever changing punters over topics ranging from World War 2, the meaning of life and the Dali Lama; sometimes all at the same time, I swear. This all held like a ritual, in a mates (
left pic) live-in caravan sporting a Cheech and Chong style atmosphere oozing from every corner of the smoke stained and beer smelling abode. This would go on every night, and I would walk home in bow-tie, paisley waistcoat and beer-rotten shoes, smelling like a stale cigarette stubbed out in a dirty beer, ash and tissue swollen ashtray. It has to be said though that on most of these nights I never drank and certainly never smoked, that was reserved for my days off (except the smoking, never saw the point). However, I must have passively smoked half of Krakatoa and lost a years worth of sleep. Ok, now writing this I have realised two things. 1. That is probably why I now have no hair and 2. That is also probably why I think way too deep and way too much.
But it did make me realise, maybe not right at that point, that I needed to find a meaning to my life. Head full of larger than life characters, thoughts of travelling the world on a tenner and desperately trying to hang on to one single friend that didn't run away to some far off land just as I was getting to know them; I suppose I was finding it hard to adjust to being my own person, away from the guidance of my parents and taking too much advice from drifters and wasters ten to twenty years my senior.
The Holiday camp went on for four seasons. I spent every winter signing on, wandering the streets of Shanklin and hoping that a job would fall in my lap, but all the time knowing that the following March, I'd be working again on the holiday camp. It was a rut deeper than your average Isle of Wight pothole (you may notice a recurring pothole theme in my blogs, it's a cyclist thing) and I needed to get out of it. I didn't have a ladder high enough or a rope strong enough. 1989 and 1990 went on following pretty much the same old same old but I had at that point made an escape attempt and reached as far as Selby in North Yorkshire where I followed my Girlfriend to her hometown for the winter. Maggie was a Bluecoat at the camp, a small girl with a big personality and my first love. The relationship lasted most of the summer until around November, when witnessing a drunken couple trying to steal my Ford Capri Mk1 from a Doncaster multi storey car park and scaring them off (what a stupid hero), I phoned my dad, shaken up, got into a 'discussion' about me not being able to let go of my parents, then crawling home with my tail between my legs because North Yorkshire wasn't for me and falling back into the rut of seasonal bar work and alas, no girlfriend anymore.
Most my friends were in either Berlin or Barbados - apparently - and I started all over again in 1991. Now though, I had tasted freedom and a life different from what I had experienced so far since moving from Redhill in Surrey in early 1988 when I was still 17. I had two constant friends in Martin and Lee and between the three of us we formed a strong friendship and that year, 1991, we had a great time and by mid summer I met a great girl, Lucy, who first introduced me to the world of Mountain Bikes. She eventually went away too but left the legacy and hunger to get into cycling.
I bought a Mountain Bike from Offshore Sports (an establishment that pretty much shaped my future as you will find out) for £275!! and aimed it at Cowlease Hill with the intention of riding it bottom to top without stopping. I did it . . then, promptly slipped back into my youthful drunken ways, the bike collecting dust in the shed.
There was, however, a lads holiday to be had in Corfu for two weeks. Lee and I packed our bags and sought the sun. That holiday is all a bit of a blur now I think back to it but when I returned Martin and I went of to work on a Holiday Camp in Lowestoft, Suffolk for three months culminating over the Xmas and New year period. This experience alone could make a whole chapter, but I will sum it up in some random comments. Martin if you are reading this you may chuckle at some of these, anyone else, if this interests you, please ask.
Red Lipstick and Stockings, Broken Pint Pots and bloodied hands, Water Pistols at three in the morning, Condoms in a christmas card, Condom Machine in the hallway of the staff quarters, Dead Antz, £150 Jackpot, trying to find a signal with the Ariel on a rotten roof desperate to watch 10 and Bo Dereks breasts, burning a hole in the carpet with my travel iron, washing my hair disaster with a bottle of £1 Superdrug Shampoo because I had spent all my money, 'Do you want to see my Elephant impression?', smelly socks on a date with the best looking girl I ever pulled (
pic above isn't that girl, that was just one of the bar girls on New Years eve), Italy 1990 on the ZX Spectrum, dodgy kebab, wine waiting and big tips, and finally Karen the so-called prostitute (no we didn't go to a prostitute, but someone had a laugh at our expense - (see Red Lipstick and stockings).
On my return from the far off lands of Suffolk the going out and getting drunk started again and I often cringe at the thought of my poor Dad, still up watching TV, probably waiting to see if I got home ok, trying to decipher my drunken babble about a great night out with Martin and Lee after the 'sobering' walk home from Colonel Bogeys, grin larger than Sandown Bay, trying not to fall off the sea wall into a high tide in the middle of winter before I most likely threw up and collapsed into bed trying to stop the room from moving around me. It's fair to say that there is no way on Earth I could have got away with any sport at the time, my ability to hold down a girlfriend that didn't run away from the Island was zero, and the thought of looking after anybody but myself was a long way off. I was never a frequent heavy drinker but most weekends were taken up going out on the beer. I was aware that at 21, I was not very fit and was drinking too much. Living in Shanklin and working at the Fisherman's Cottage pub meant that the holiday camp was behind me but my regular trips to the town and Job Centre in the winter continued. I was essentially still lazy, bored and stuck in a different but equally as big a rut as before. It didn't help that I seemed to have a few too many i
nfrequent friends that lived in bedsits and smoked the weird smelly stuff. Christmas came and went, I had a job lined up in a Hotel and at the Fisherman's Cottage again for the summer and it was back to waiting for work to start
It was 1992 and time for a change. I got the bike out of the shed in January, and so started a new era.
To be continued . . . .
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