The road to 130 kilometres began with a split testicle
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When Valtteri Bottas recently made headlines for riding his gravel bike some 400 kilometres from Malaysia to Singapore, I felt a mix of admiration and inadequacy.
The lean and chiselled 37-year-old Finnish Formula One driver completed his journey over four days, including two 161-kilometre stints. Meanwhile, in south-eastern Australia, I’d just put my relatively unremarkable 52-year-old frame through its paces, riding 130 kilometres in a single stint. This was my longest distance ever and only my second “century ride”; it left me – at least at the time – feeling rather proud of myself. Then bloody Bottas came along and made my achievement look like a school run on training wheels.
But perhaps the problem isn’t that Bottas makes my achievement look insignificant. Perhaps it’s that we’ve become so accustomed to measuring ourselves against exceptional people that we’ve forgotten how to value ordinary achievement. In sport, and especially in the age of social media, we are encouraged to chase bigger numbers, faster times and more impressive milestones. Yet if you’re a middle-aged bloke who once thought he’d never ride a bike again, 130 kilometres is no small thing. It might even be more meaningful than 400 kilometres through Malaysia and Singapore.
I was 10 years old in 1984 when I was showing off my BMX skills to Mum, riding along at speed with no hands on the handlebars. I veered off the footpath, my front tyre slipped on some loose she-oak needles, and the handlebar swung around and caught me square in the groin. I felt an agonising pain in my right side and, when I inspected my white underpants in some nearby bushes, saw a dark trail of fresh blood from a split testicle. My panicked parents rushed me to Emergency in the back of Dad’s brown Cortina ambulance, uncertain of the damage I’d done – to both my balls and, potentially, the family bloodline. I somehow avoided surgery and any further complications, but the accident was every bit as traumatic as it sounds.
Fertility wasn’t exactly something that any 10-year-old thought about, but the possibility of one day having my own children was suddenly entangled with doubt and fear. Would everything still work as it was supposed to? Not even the grave-faced doctors or my anxious parents could give me a definitive answer. It was an altogether peculiar thing to contemplate at an age when my chief concerns should have been mastering BMX jumps, smashing my top score at backyard cricket, and getting through primary school.
As it turned out, I was lucky. I’ve since fathered three sons, so whatever damage I did that fateful Saturday in 1984, it wasn’t enough to curtail that particular adventure. I sometimes wonder what the 10-year-old version of me would make of that: the young boy who thought he’d damaged himself beyond repair, confronted decades later by the frazzled middle-aged father who had somehow chalked up 130 kilometres.
For decades, my accident left me wary of biking. Eventually, around 2006, I hoiked my leg over the top tube and climbed back in the saddle, determined to regain my confidence. Living next to a steep nature reserve, I took up mountain biking, starting on wide fire trails before graduating to tight, winding single track: blue square (moderate), black diamond (difficult), and finally the most challenging double black (extreme) runs. My chariots grew more capable, too: hydraulic disc brakes, 29-inch wheels, tubeless tyres, dual suspension, dropper posts, clipless pedals, carbon fibre frames. With better components, my bikes got lighter, but my wallet got lighter still. Entering some mountain bike races in 2019 made me realise I wasn’t a racer. Breaking my finger in 2020 after a calamitous crash on a double black downhill trail made me realise I wasn’t much of a mountain biker, either.
It turns out that buying the equipment and adopting the vocabulary of serious cyclists doesn’t necessarily make you one. I could spend a small fortune shaving grams off my rig, but no component could compensate for my lack of racing talent or keep me upright when careering down a double black trail. There was a limit to how far I could buy my way into the sport, and perhaps a limit to how seriously I needed to take myself.
More recently, I bought my own gravel bike, which has encouraged me to venture further and rack up the kilometres across both tarmac and trail, drive and dirt. Lighter and faster than my mountain bike but not as featherweight or pacy as a roadie, it offers the best of both worlds in terms of speed and capability. As a result, my distances and elevation have grown, but so have my composure and comfort. With little kids still at home, my rides are largely local, but one day I’d like to take a cycling holiday through somewhere like Switzerland or Japan. Until then, almost without noticing, I’ve left behind the injured little boy who thought he’d never ride a bike again. And I managed to do all that without ever needing to don a superhero cape made of Lycra.
My 130-kilometre ride was satisfying partly because of the distance, of course. But it also represented something harder to quantify: the distance between what I’d once feared and what I could now do. No personal best leaderboard could capture that. Nor could it tell the story of the years in between, the false starts, the crashes, or the simple pleasure of discovering that something you’d once avoided had become part of your life again.
On my recent long ride, I didn’t have to dodge pythons, outrun dogs or leap over lizards like Valtteri Bottas. But I did have to brake hard to avoid a brown snake basking in the spring sunshine, dodge aggressive swooping magpies and bounding mobs of kangaroos, and pass a rather sad-looking turtle. The colours at sunset were spectacular. It took me just six hours and I needed a break to refuel my tank with calories. My total riding distance for the week was a personal best 303 kilometres; for the fortnight, 521 kilometres. I went through an entire kilo of Epsom salts in the bath for recovery.
Of course, I still enjoy a personal best. Who doesn’t? My wife rode with me and managed 70 kilometres, which was her own PB. Numbers are satisfying, they give us something concrete to aim for and a reason to get out of bed, or onto the bike, when the weather is bad or the legs feel heavy. There’s nothing wrong with ambition or with admiring people who can do things the rest of us can’t. The problem comes when their achievements become the yardstick for our own, leaving us feeling inadequate about something that should bring us pleasure.
There are certain childhood experiences that lodge themselves deep inside your memory – not necessarily because they define you, but because, for a while, they seem to define what’s possible. For me, the bike came to be something to fear and avoid rather than to love and embrace.
I’m never going to be able to ride like Bottas. I’m not an ultra-fit F1 driver, a professional athlete, or even a particularly remarkable cyclist. I don’t have a crack team of trainers, physios, nutritionists, and other specialists keeping me in peak condition, nor any sponsors, and never will. For the price of his gravel bike, you could buy five of mine. But I still regularly ride with my family, with mates, and on my own. It’s for both fitness and fun. And, at this stage of life, I’m beginning to appreciate something: the distance between who you thought you were and who you turn out to be can be considerable. Sometimes, you only discover that distance one pedal stroke at a time.
And perhaps that’s the trouble with comparing ourselves to elite athletes: we end up measuring our achievements against someone else’s extraordinary circumstances instead of our own meagre starting point. Not every ride needs to be epic, not every jogger needs to run a marathon. Just getting out there is the achievement.
So Bottas can keep his cobras and his 418 kilometres across dense jungles and international borders. I’m happy with my own efforts, even knowing there are blokes my age who regularly clock century rides. The 10-year-old boy checking his underpants in the bushes would never have believed how far I’d come.
