The Biker

There’s a popular idea that artists are not supposed to be into sport, but mountain biking is a huge part of my life. It gets me out of my studio, and into the countryside. But more importantly, racing along as fast as you can leaves you no time to worry about anything that’s going on in your life. You’re too busy concentrating on not crashing. The only things you pay attention to are the pain in your legs and the rocks on the path in front of you.

I’m in my sixties now, but I started cycling when I was a kid. In the summer my friends and I would ride our bikes into the woods and see who was brave enough to go down steep hills, or do big jumps. The bikes we had then weren’t built for that, and often broke, so I used to draw pictures of bikes with big thick tyres that would be strong enough for what we were doing. They looked just like modern mountain bikes. However, it wasn’t until many years later that someone actually invented one. By the 1980s, they were everywhere.

At that time I was into skateboarding. I did that for a decade until falling off on to hard surfaces started to hurt too much. Mountain biking seemed a fairly safe way to keep fit, so I took that up instead. I made a lot of friends, and got involved in racing, which gave me a reason to train hard. I wanted to find out just how fit and fast I could get, which turned out to be fairly quick. I even won a couple of local races.

In the end I stopped racing, mainly because I knew what it could mean to my career if I had a bad crash. But I still like to do a three-hour mountain bike ride every week. And if I’m out cycling in the hills and see a rider ahead, I have to beat them to the top. As I go past I imagine how surprised they would be if they knew how old I am.