How did I end up here ?

It’s the 27^th June 2010, the hottest day of the year. My wife and kids are at the in-laws house having a barbeque, other ‘normal’ people are on a daytrip to the beach or going on a picnic. So, help me out here, why am I sat on my offroad motorcycle, fighting an extreme urge to vomit, at the start line of a five hour Enduro race? How did this happen? I’m on the same track and competing against KTM racer James Giddings for crying out loud. The word terrified doesn’t even begin to describe how I feel right now…

When I left you, in my last blog post, at 35 years old I had recently passed my motorcycle test and had been on a few ride outs when a post appeared on the forum of the training school that I attended. The post was with regards taking a trip to the Spanish Mountains to try offroad motorcycling. I hadn’t needed any persuading, I was going and that was that. I was nervous of course, as were many of the fifteen of us that were going but it had been a childhood dream of mine to ride a dirtbike, this fortunately for me converted any nervousness to excitement.

After six months of waiting the day finally came and we all met at Gatwick Airport to head off on our epic adventure. We really did have the most amazing time, some got on better than others but everyone enjoyed themselves. We crossed rivers, ascended and descended mountain sides, dodged goats and also fell off our bikes a lot but fortunately laughed even more. The views were fantastic and I remember being sat on my motorcycle on the top of one of the mountains that we had climbed feeling more alive than I had ever felt before, if someone had asked me how I felt at the time I couldn’t have explained it. Although looking back now I’d sum it up with one word, complete.

As soon as I got back to the UK I trawled the motorcycle ads, ebay, biketrader, mcn. You name it I searched it. Within a fortnight I had a KTM 450 EXC sat in my garage, all I had to do next was go out and get some offroad gear (helmet, armour, boots etc). Soon I was trail riding.

Now this was an eye opener for me, when we were riding in Spain we rode wherever we wanted, along tracks, through fields, it didn’t seem to matter. Here in the UK things are a little bit different, the only place you can enjoyably ride an offroad motorcycle over here are on ‘public byways open to all traffic’. I found this out the hard way, the horsey lady told me that I couldn’t ride on a bridleway when she shouted at me quite rudely and tried to hit me. To be honest I was about to put the KTM up for sale when a friend told me out about ‘byways’, which to all intents and purposes are unsurfaced roads and tracks of which we have a reasonable network of in most English counties. All of these byways are indicated on ordnance survey maps. So I bought a few maps and I was off hitting the trails every weekend, it was like being back riding in Spain again but without the mountains, I pretty much felt complete again. I even started riding the KTM along the trails at night!

Night riding is an amazing offroad experience, you attach mountain bike lights to your motorcycle helmet and off you go, a 2am ride through the middle of the country side is really quite interesting and very difficult at the same time, particularly when some of the byways run through fields full of cows, their eyes can be quite scary at night!

Now that I was offroading regularly and as I’m always looking for something else to do I entered myself into a couple of events. The first being the British Army organised ‘Autumn Wander’ on Salisbury Plain. This event consisted of two days navigation along a 250 mile offfroad route, a kind of treasure hunt of sorts. For this event you had to be self-supported which meant tying tents and all sorts onto the back of the dirtbike. It was an amazing weekend, well other than coming last in the rankings which was easily forgiven by the other competitors due to my limited offroad experience (some of the competitors had flown in from South Africa just to take part), when will I ever learn?

Well never apparently as the next thing I entered was the 5hr Ironman Enduro that I began to write about at the start of this blog , the single most terrifying experience of my life, I hurt myself a lot taking part but to be honest i can laugh about it now but who was I kidding ? me a 36 year old, nursing a midlife crisis with two years riding experience and there I was on a track alongside professional racers!

I won’t write any more about it and instead leave you to watch the video, see if you can count how many times I fell off or crashed? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9cbwLFYUx8 In the meantime I’ll be sticking to trail riding my beloved KTM on byways and annual visits to the Spanish Mountains, that’s where the fun is at ;-) well for me anyway.

I would encourage anyone to try offroad motorcycling, it can only help with your road riding skills, it certainly has helped with mine. It teaches you so much about low speed control and reading the road and surrounding conditions, you will learn more about front and rear brake control in one day offroading than you will during a month of commuting.

If you do GetOn a dirtbike, please let me know, I’ll look forward to hearing your story…

starting riding...

Like all stories mine has a beginning so I may as well start there, for me jumping on a motorcycle started at the late age of 34 years old following the relocation of my workplace, previously the office had been just around the corner, a five minute commute in the car whereas the new office location was a thirty mile drive through dense traffic.

Now I've always loved motorcycles, adored them even. I remember when I was about 12 years old my mum sent me to the old lady across the road to get my hair cut, I recall sitting on the chair in her kitchen, tea towel wrapped around my neck and her stood there with scissors in one hand, cigarette in the other "any requests" she said (well croaked actually).

That's when I reached into my pocket and pulled out a crumpled image cut out of some magazine or another. She took one look at it, laughed and said "maybe one day son, not today though, I'm a hairdresser not a magician" then she started snipping away. I just sat there staring, slightly morosely, at the photo of Eddie Kidd that I had passed to her.

As I remember he had black hair with all kinds of blonde streaks in it at the time, he was a complete hero to me, our own english version of Evil Kneivel. There wasn't a week that went by back then when he wasn't somewhere in the newspaper or on the television talking about jumping double decker buses or the great wall of china. When he wasn't stunting he'd be in photographs, surrounded by gorgeous women.

Anyway I never got a bike at 16 or 17 years old like I intended to, time passed very quickly (cars, marriage, work, kids, dog - you know the story) before I knew it I was in my mid thirties and unaware that I might be missing out on anything. I'd enjoy watching motorcycle related programs on television such as American Chopper andBiker Build Off, but I have to admit even watching MotoGP didn't get me yearning to ride a motorcycle.

Then one evening in I think 2007 I was sat flicking channels when I came across Ewen McGregor and some other guy sat on BMW adventure bikes at a border crossing waiting to get through, they looked rough I have to say but at the same time had beaming smiles. A couple of days later I rushed off to HMV and bought the DVD of the television series Long Way Round and ended up watching all 12 episodes in two evenings, I was hooked.

This was around the same time as at work the big relocation was being planned that I mentioned earlier, I was already dreading the everyday commute, you have to know the area to understand just how mind numbing the stationary traffic can be. So that was it, it was almost like there was a huge "GET ON A MOTORCYCLE" sign on the back of my eyelids, so I did.

I booked my CBT a few days later, ordered a 125cc Cagiva Raptor and got going with it. Within a couple of months I'd completed DAS, passed my full bike test and now owneda bright green Kawasaki ER6F. Oh how I smiled zipping passed 15 miles of stationary traffic everyday, I'd even go so far as to say I felt quite smug about the whole matter, haha.

Now I was quite lucky. The training school that I took DAS with had a forum on their website, the idea of the forum was to answer any training related questions, bike questions etc but was mainly used by ex-students and instructors to organise ride outs and meet ups.

I went to a few as I thought it could only help with my own riding improvement, I kind of treated it as post test training as the instructors that went on the ride outs were only to happy to help further with any questions I might have. After a few months of meet ups and ride outs I realised the weirdest thing had happened, I'd made a load of new friends, now that's not the easiest thing to do at 34 years old, or so I thought. But that's motorcycles for you, they really are the most amazing thing. They changed my life and they'll change yours also.

I continued to use the forum and attended regular rideouts up to six months after my test. Then in July 2008 another amazing thing happened, a post appeared on the forum, it was called

"anyone fancy giving this offroad malarkey a try, wanna go to spain..."

immediately I thought of that Eddie Kidd photograph, logged in to the forum and replied,

"I'm in" :)

I'll tell you more about that trip in my next post....