Cleats and Life

I was beginning to realise that it was a paradox at the heart of my attitude to cycling. I wanted my bike for leisure, not for sport, or so I thought. But there is an eager small man in me who accepts physical challenges, presumably to counter a fear that he is less of a man than those closer to average height or above it.
When I am, say, helping out with other men, lifting boxes or suitcases, I always pick the heaviest one to pre-empt anyone tempted to suggest I couldn't manage.
Not that I am actually a strong man; I am not.
And if I had been dedicated to proving myself physically equal to those bigger than me, I would have trained hard and maintained my strength. The whole pattern of my life, with occasional flurries of enthusiasm for health and exercise against the general background of aging, slackening and fattening, betrays a slothful indulgent core. Indeed, maybe this new commitment to cycling fitted that pattern rather than any new resolve to be a fitter man.
I had provided myself with a narrative to explain my cycling and it included a desire to enjoy it in a casual way. I wanted to carouse on a bike. I wanted to roll along country and coastal roads, breathing fine air and enjoying the surroundings.
I knew that I was not yet fit enough to do this. So, the paradox was that I would have to become strong enough to cycle at ease. And how was I to do that? By cycling hard. But would I enjoy that?
My brother-in-law Mel told me one evening that he was training for a triathlon that included a 20 km cycle race. He would be going out that evening for a spin on the bike. Perhaps I might join him? But I said I wasn't into speed. My cycling was easy, natural, go-out-and-enjoy-yourself cycling. That was fine, he said; he wasn't into speed either. Except that, in my terms, he was.
I cycled over to his house that evening, close to the Comber Greenway and we said we'd just do the length of it and come back. Even to me, that seemed now a slight challenge.
When we got onto the main path we found our way obstructed by about 20 youngsters on a sunny evening club outing of some sort, and they were so spread out -- the wee hard competitive ones I understood so well, pushing ahead -- that it took us a mile to get well clear of them. Then Mel bolted and I raised myself off my saddle for a bit more push on high gear to keep up with him.
He moved like a real racer. He was riding the horrid wee bike I had borrowed from him at the start of my exploration, but he was banking on bends and weaving round obstacles, like the gates at intersections, and planning ahead to be in low gear before he reached steep hills. He was great and when the strain told on me I reasoned with myself that this wasn't really what I wanted to do. The Greenway had never seemed so short.
On the way back I stopped to talk to a photographer who told me he had found 14 Black Caps breeding in that area. You saw all sorts of things on the Greenway if you took the time to look around. I was all for that. Once I saw group of women in a field practising their line dancing steps.
But Mel was waiting for me and when I caught up with him he shot off again, setting a pace that would make us breathless, since training is no use unless it gets the heart rate up and if you only have an hour for it on the Greenway, then it makes sense to go as fast as you can.
'Well, he does have 20 years on you,' said Maureen when I got home.
Then, next day I talked Maureen into coming out on her bike along the cycle path to Whiteabbey and this time I was conscientiously going slower for her and realising that finding a partner whose natural pace was the same as my own might be difficult.
Matt Seaton describes in  his book, The Escape Artist, how meeting Mick, who raced at the same speed as himself, was a breakthrough in his own development.
But even for a slow casual cyclist, speed is important. You have a pace that is natural to you. And if you're a wee man trying to be a big man then you're always tempted to go faster.
And even if you are just a sane mature person getting fitter, you will become an abler and stronger biker.
It was time now to try a longer trip, comparable to the ones I had made with Tony on Saturday afternoons in the 1980s.
I would wear my padded undies and my cycling shoes with cleats and try 50 miles, up to the Carryduff roundabout the hard way then south to Downpatrick and home through Killyleagh, Comber and the Greenway.
I stuffed my pockets with cashew nuts and sunflower seeds for nutrition and left the pannier at home. Puffing up the hill, I used the side of the pedal without the cleat device, not feeling confident yet about using them in city traffic.
I was soon so hot that I regretted wearing my leather jacket but I had nowhere to put it so I kept it on.
The road to Carryduff is mostly struggle, 5 miles of stepped incline with fast traffic on it and no cycle lane for the first couple of miles.
But it felt shorter now than before, just as the Greenway with Mel had.
I stopped at the roundabout and gorged down some nuts and about a pint of water. I was aching in the thighs but I was going to stretch myself on this trip. I would get to Downpatrick even if the effort wrecked me, and then I would get back at whatever pace I could manage for I would have no alternative.
On the road to Saintfield I slipped into the cleats and pedalled hard downhill. This felt great. Now I was wearing the bike; it was an extension of my own body. It was my shoes.
I reminded myself to remember to disengage the cleats before stopping, so that I wouldn't fall over. Then I forgot. I had already developed reflexes for stopping and dismounting and these stayed in play.
I realised too late that I was falling over onto the footpath. My feet were attached to the bike and my spontaneous efforts to break my fall achieved nothing. I clumped over like dead weight with nothing but hope to protect me. I grazed my left knee and lay there, entangled with the bike as with a lover, caught out. I had to plan my extrication then examine myself and the bike for damage. By a pleasant surprise we were both fine. The leather jacket I had wished I had left behind had saved my elbow and shoulder. It was as if the one who had caught me entangled enjoyed the joke.
She was saying, 'you won't be so lucky next time.'
Next time was just a mile down the road, approaching the traffic lights in Saintfield.
This time I tried harder to apply reason to an activity which was already automated in my unconscious. Step one was to detach the cleat on my left. I would do that by twisting my heel away from the bicycle. Unfortunately that foot seemed able only to free itself at the bottom of the turn. Okay, I was rolling; I'd free the right. It was out. No trouble. Now I had to flip that pedal over to use the plain side of it, lower the left and then jerk my left heel. It was all too much, simple as it sounds. The fact is a my brain had already assimilated a routine for stopping the bike and needed another automated routine to be more deeply embedded still before it could allow it to be overridden. Reason wasn't going to work. Forward planning availed of nothing. Only a lot of practice would get me to the stage where I could trust cleats. So I stopped at the kerb, yelled, 'fuck!' And fell over again.
And again I was mercifully undamaged.
As I was leaving Saintfield I was overtaken by a young woman on a bike I studied her heels to see how she managed. She was using toe clips and kept them down until she was clear of the town then flicked her pedals over and tucked her feet into them as lightly as she might have stepped into slippers from the bath. I wondered if she had to think through that movement or if it was now encoded in her reflexes.
I used the cleats for most of the rest of the journey, getting my feet free at Crossgar until through the town and locked back in afterwards without falling over.
I was beginning to feel the strain of my exertion and decided to stop in Downpatrick. There were a couple of big hills to climb first and to whiz down the other side of. As soon as I saw the church at the end of the road I disengaged the cleats.
I would call my friend the photographer Bobbie Hanvey, and if he wasn't home I would go to a chippy or the Arts Centre.
Bobbie was home and brought me in and fed me a boiled egg and toast and took my photograph with the bicycle in his backyard.
I stayed about an hour with him and he showed me his new Leica and his study and then he waved me off and urged me to be careful.
'Och, drivers have their own good reasons not to run over cyclists', I said.
'Aye, until you meet some mad bastard who's just had a row with his missus and isn't thinking straight.'
I promised to be wary of mad bastards and turn towards Killyleagh where some of the roads were marked as cycling routes and there were even signs up urging motorists to watch out for us.

It was at this stage of the journey but I lost the clarity of my distinction between leisure and sport, between casual cycling and the physical challenge.
It was about two o'clock on a sunny Saturday afternoon in June. I had all day. I could have stopped anywhere by the side of the road and chewed on a bit of grass or made a couple of phone calls.
I could have stopped at Balloo House and enjoyed a piece of smoked haddock with a runny poached egg, though a little less of the sauce if you don't mind. I had options and I reacted as if I had none but was simply compelled to cycle as hard as I could and get home as soon as possible.
And I was aware of that. I was asking myself why I was behaving like this, what momentum was driving me on.
Sometimes it just seemed to be the lay of the land. If I was going to stop, then I wouldn't do it at the bottom of a hill and have to start off again on a struggle to the top. If I was at the top of a hill, I wasn't going to stop and enjoy the view because I had gravity to take me further, and that would bring me more joy.
But the real problem was fixity of mind on my destination, sharpened by a doubt that I might make it. The only pleasure now was in seeing by the signposts how much closer I was to completing my challenge to myself.
But what sense was there in this challenge? I wasn't training to race. I was getting myself fit to enjoy using my nice new bicycle as a vehicle on which I might cruise along the coast and savour the smell of kelp on the breeze.
If I stayed in this frame of mind there would be little joy in my cycling beyond the sense of accomplishment at the end of each day. I was focusing too much on arriving, not on going. Was I to end each journey rubbing sore muscles and feeling like a real man who had defeated age and short legs or was I to derive pleasure from the business of cycling? Could I not be happy with where I was without fretting about whether I'd get to somewhere else? It seemed almost a question about all of life and not just a jaunt through County Down.
I passed through Killyleagh were a group of young people loitered on a corner as if waiting for life to start. I passed Balloo House where I could have had a beer or a feast and had neither.
A little further on I was spotted by two languorous boxer dogs who took offence at the sight of me and barked from deep within their cavernous lungs but decided not to chase me.
And I didn't stop until I reached the Comber Greenway where I sat down and ate more sunflower seeds. There I took my time to uncleat myself before stopping and landed safely. But I was tired and knew that my judgement was poor and I was like this.
There are several intersections across the Greenway path and I would have plenty of practice getting out of my cleats in time before each of them. And this worked well.
Cyclists coming the other way smiled and waved at me, perhaps recognizing the pain and fatigue on my face, the smirk of delirium maybe.
I had only one more cleat accident. I'd come out of them for an intersection, crossed the road onto a little hill and found myself in too high a gear. So I raised myself off the saddle and put my whole weight on the wrong side of the right pedal and slipped into the cleat.
After one turn of the pedal I stalled, but my right foot was on a high position and I couldn't extricate it and keeled over again, but blithely accepting now that I didn't hurt myself when I fell. My foolish brain was learning the wrong lesson from these accidents.
But in time I would learn to come out of the cleat in advance of danger and to find the right side of the pedal without thinking about it.
Whether I would ever learn to enjoy cycling without over exertion seen the fundamental question of my life, the balance between being and doing.
I expect I'll be working on that one right to the end.