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Dirt Rag Articles
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(A washed up pro's account of this summer's singlespeed pilgrimage to Scotland, served with a jigger of whiskey and broken bit of shortbread spread on a swatch of Hunting Menzies tartan.)
If he were a rider, Modscots poet "Robert Scorches" would declare:
Ca' the yahoos to the brews
Ca' them whe'r they win or lose
Ca' them where fat tyres carouse
My onlie gearie...
My name is Jacquie and I am a seasoned pro. I never really quit, I just stopped going to races. These last few years I just say "Race ya to the top!" to anyone who passes me riding in the local hills.
"Your honor, I plead guilty for soliciting competition in the serenity of Marin's Public Lands. My punishment? Yes, OK, I will pin on a number. Yes, I will put myself on the Line, and brave the slippery slopes of glorious unfettered mud lust with consenting adults. I will report back periodically."
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"Dja get your ticket yet? You're going, right?" asked framebuilder Curtis Inglis when we crossed paths last July. He was suggesting I put myself on the line at the SSWC (Single Speed World Championships) in Aviemore, Scotland. I'd wanted to go since Stockholm's SSWC the prior year. I just hadn't taken steps to make it happen, and now it was six weeks away. I opened my Rolodex. I clicked my computer. I bumped into an old boyfriend with frequent flyer miles. One thing that gets better with age (when your legs turn to soggy spaghetti) is your network. By evening, I had a plane ticket, and a vague idea I could stay with friends Colin and Anna near the race venue.
Ask me about whom I met, what I wore, what we ate and drank, and what the riding was like in the fabulous varied braw "heelands" of Scotland. But do not ask me who won! That's been available online since five minutes after the race on Sept 2nd. I'd rather convince you to get over to Scotland to ride your "moont," taste the air, and sample the banquet of Scots bicycle life even if racing isn't your bag.
Why should you try a singlespeed race even though you're out of shape? Because half the pack is in the same shape, and you missed your chance at Offroad-Racing-When-It-Was-"Just-Having-Fun" the first time around.
I got (re)started when two Scots pilgrimmed to Mount Tam's Fire Lookout back in 2002, where I happened to be working. From my aerie I saw two fit-like boys hauling bikes through the chaparral.
"Ye canna ride to the tippy top of Tam!?"
"No, but it cuts down on the number of tourists up here," I said. "Want some tea?" In Wombatland, a fresh cup of tea cements the bond. In Scotland, nobody turns tea down.
"We're explooring Marin before we gae t'Doonieville."
Like any American, I'm a sucker for a good accent. We swapped email addresses and I never saw heed na hair of them until 2005.
A box of tea arrived in the mail, and a note saying, "We'll be coming to the States for another nae gears World Championship." I promised to come, since State College, Pennsylvania is halfway to Scotland. I've read about the Rothrock State Forest trails out in Pennsylvania (my friend Mike Hermann built and mapped many of them). Since that initial foray on a borrowed Loch Robster, I've joined the singlespeed pilgrims, my new (once a year) tribe.
Jon Meredith and Chris Marquis (these were the two tea-buddies) succeeded at draining the most beer glasses in a crowded Stockholm bar last year, winning the "country decider" (a hallowed SSWC ritual that varies by the year) for Scotland. The day after my e-ticket arrived, I pulled out maps and murmured place names like Sgoran Dubh Mor, Dalwhinnie, and Glen Banchor. Incorrectly, I'm sure. I listened to the Tannahill Weavers. I read Robert Burns. I put plaid flannel sheets on our treehouse bed.
If you say you're planning a trip to Scotland there'll always be someone saying something lame about haggis, or warning you about the weather. This is because a) your listener is American or b) they are sick with envy. For some reason, we Yankees have issues with a harmless sack o 'sheepstomach...and rain, well, over here "rain cancels," doesn't it? Hey, not for you, right? Not all Americans are weather wimps... To be sure, Moonters claim cheap and greasy haggis supper (side of chips, naturally) cures the rainy-day bonk. I never got around to ordering it, perhaps because I was hoovering up piles of tatty scones (potato pancake) with broon sauce and scrambled eggs. Summer 2007 broke a couple of hundred years' worth of rain records, but the flooding and the rains abated the moment singlespeeders rolled into town searching for epic mud.
Day One
We reach Aviemore fried but alive. Our party (Jo Burt, of Mint Sauce comic fame, and friends Nigel and Katie) did the 10-hour drive all night from London, and passed only one smash-up. The kind where you don't keep driving, you get out and help. 'Twas a semi rig with injured driver, and a pile of people in a car towing their luggage, oh the diesel fuel on the freeway, oh the bloody faces, Katie et al were heroic. I was a zombie. Gaiety restored at the little breakfast joint (The Happy Haggis!). Half a dozen familiar faces look up from their menus: Biff (editor of The Outcast) and his entourage shove over and I Bond. Brook Bond tea to be exact...made just right. In a diner!
Spent rest of the day schmoozing with Swedes, Danes, Americans, Aussies, and finally meeting Martin Steele, the third man running the show. Code name: Naegears. The fence in front of Café Mambo is festooned with my biker fashions. See, the week before I left I sewed kilts, trimmed gloves, fabricated cashmere and naugahyde sporrans (funny man-purse that holds down kilt on windy days), armwarmers and other race day finery. My own race outfit consists of Sheila Moon wooly undershirt, homemade "crashmere" armwarmers with rick-rack trim, a butyl rubber truck inner tube fashioned into a skirt with gold braid and tartan fringe...and fanny pack, er, "bum bag." Passersby thread their way through forty riders schmoozing on the sidewalk, and eye the pile of pleated kilts in a dozen patterns heaped on the fence railing.
Mid-day I packed up and left the Mint Sauce Camp to visit the Singular Sam-ites, a few blocks away. I'd found Singular Sam Alison through the informal network of unicog penpals. Sam toils at a day job in London, and by night (when it's daylight in Taiwan) designs bicycles in his PJ's. He had agreed to loan me a "Singular" with drop bars from his product line (with the brakes reversed, so I could skip the usual stop-sign endo we Americans perform on rent-a-bikes in the UK.) I don't care about what kind of bike I'm riding, as long as it fits and is in riding order, leaving me free to gape at old buildings, and crash into unfamiliar shrubs and trees.
His crew: Kenny Lamont, Tom Cutting, David "Jonesie" Jones, and Julie Cartner, who were finishing up the afternoon's beer and whiskey tasting session. It's good form to take a bike you've never seen before on a spin before entering an international competition on it. Since the days were long, the gang escorted me out on my shakedown ride and went east in search of lakes.
Scottish "lambscape" throbs with color: green swales dotted with white specks, and mountainsides clad in nubby purple heather... a painter's dream, as well as nirvana for knobbies. The sky is a soft, cashmere grey. Lurking below the thick heath and heather are brown-yellow boletus mushrooms (porcini alert!). I dove off the bike (easy to do in the soft moss) to stuff 'em in my bag, failed to catch up and finished half-lost, circling Loch an Eilen (lake with an island!). The island had a micro-castle ruin on it, which I kept in sight from the root-tangled shoreline.
Fell into bed at ten p.m. How responsible of me. I thought I'd shaken the habit of Giving A Damn. Many riders stay up drinking until morning, and a clear head on race day is considered unsporting.
Race Day
Three hundred singlespeeders of every stripe convened at Bothy Bikes. BB is nestled on a tiny knoll adjacent to the great local trails, which were buffed and built by the shop's owner (bonus: the state pays engineers like Pete Laing to design 'em right for cyclists).
After much faffing (diddling) we embark on the seven-plus mile ride through birch and pine forest to the start. Rothiemurchus forest has rolling terrain, well-drained soil and tricky pine-root and rock sections. Most of the participants have regular jobs, and many have young families as well, which is evidenced by the kids in trailers bouncing along next to us. Everyone was yakking with somebody; the Bonding Glue was setting up nicely.
Within an hour we get to where Jon, Chris and Martin are in position. Chris Marquis makes a speech few can perfectly understand, but it ends decisively with, "...then RIDE like FOCK!" Chris drains the beer signaling a steel-shod stampede around a nearly naked Auld Man of The Forest. Considerably thinned out, we stream through the start /finish. There are no banners, no officials. They are all at the other Mountain Bike World Championships forty miles away (Fort William). There happen to be a handful of pros at the start with me. My mixed-media kilt couldn't touch Damo's duds. This be-dreaded Aussie artist dazzled all in his gold lamé skinsuit, yellow fur yeti-boots and impressive sound system, which blared out tunes ranging from Jimi Hendrix to Australian garage punk like "Slave Girl" by The Lime Spiders and "Date With a Vampyre Girl" by The Screaming Tribesmen. This pretty much sums up Damo's message. He rode toward the front from his rearward start and thus inoculated everyone with a healthy dose of I Am Glad To Be Alive energy, useful in the zigzaggy sections of narrowtrack.
The five mile hilly loop with narrow, rocky sections became a bit easier on lap two (you know what to expect) but in the successive laps I began going in slow motion. Enthusiastic spectators encouraged the entire peloton. At the base of each hill, I saw a cute six-year-old boy holding a sign saying "Everyone Is A Winner." As each rider approached, it was flipped to read: "EXCEPT YOU."
When the fastest riders were through, the rest of us were "faulded in," leaving some of us with only four of the five laps completed. I was happy to have gotten four laps in...and rolled merrily back to Bothy Bikes for a post-race prize giving that beat all others. There were custom bikes being handed off to "Tallest rider with 29-inch wheels" (with a lineup for the crowd to decide who was tall), "Drunkest racer," best costume, and gnarliest crash. Our friend Kenny won drunkest racer but had his crash after this one was conferred, I believe, upon 60-year-old Gary Fifield, an M.D. from Minnesota.
It wasn't long before a grand buffet was laid, with two points of entry and the line of hungry riders soon turned into a seated picnic while stories were swapped and bruises soothed with local brews.
"Hame" for me was a good four miles away yet. Again with the weighing: stay in town and frolic, or drag ass back while it was still light. This time the irresponsible me took over, and it wasn't until late at night that I rode with a flashlight clamped in my teeth back on the darkest road I've ever ridden, a personal worst (in terms of judgement) but the sheep faeries were smiling on me and neither of the two cars that passed noticed a rubber-kilted cyclist hiding in the bushes as they went by. My night riding rule: play hide-and-go-seek whenever headlights light up the road.
Rather than leave the next day, many of the riders stayed on. Some left for the UCI Worlds, but Aviemore still hummed with knobbies, the two bars spilling over with quasi-familiar faces...and a nighttime derby later that week filled out the planned segment of Our World Championship in the Land of Heather, Red Toads, and lyric, incomprehensible talkers.
My final week was with three families sharing a deluxe hunting lodge. Every day begun with porridge, bread, jam and tea...truly, nirvana without having to die...then we'd set off every day in a new direction, on foot to climb a "munro" (hill higher than 3000 ft.), or on bike to examine the newly-mapped trails near Feshiebridge, and on one solo day I got a look at my first "bothy." That's a rudimentary cabin that hides in the woods, without water or heat, and you huddle in there overnight, at no charge. I'll be polishing my "teuchter" pronunciation, for when I return to Scotland like 33% of her visitors do each year. The centuries-old outdoor culture and well-worked-out travel and lodging infrastructure mean that you can, once you've sailed over from Boston (one less plane?), ride trains, bikes and ferries everywhere and bag a few more munros, shovel in some more delicious chips and face the dreaded haggis.
Ever off-colour, yr faithful correspondent,
"Jock Shonquetil"
| Sidebars |
Fauna note:
I had hoped to see the legendary Capercaillie, but both of them were flitting about the country on a speaking tour about endangered birds. This rare black/blue turkey with the bizarre call requires significant tracts of untouched land. I hear there are only a couple left. It was easier to find the famous monosyllabic rivers weaving coastward where ancient folk singers would put them in their songs: Tay. Spey. Forth. Dee.
Tourist note:
Aviemore, Scotland lies on the river Spey in the Cairngorms National Park, a corner of old-world wilderness high in the deeply fringed north of the British Isles. The area is full of fine houses, castles, and Victorian mill-towns like Grantown-on-Spey. Outdoors people stream in for the hiking, biking, fishing, and some stuff that involves hurting animals. Indoors people come for the wool, the shopping, the trains, the whiskey, the Walker's shortbread, maybe the haggis.
Culture note:
The British single speeders talk and think differently. Check out The Outcast, forty-eight stapled pages in a hand-sized booklet. Hideous nudity, toilet humor and gleeful bad taste. Ads are connected with long black arrows, and feature humble copy like, "We sell all sorts of nice stuff to make your wallet thinner" along the borders. The editor, like the editors of our magazine (ahem) is a real rider...by the fascinating name of Biff Yesweareontheweb. Biff's eco-credentials are all shiny and real. Automobile use is pointedly criticized, the messages not at all subliminal.
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| Comment from D Randolph on 2008-01-22 |
| Great Article - but I can't figure out which prize Gary Fifield won - can you clarify? |
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| Comment from Karen Brooks on 2007-11-20 |
| By the way, Jacquie has a weblog if you'd like to read more from her http//jacquiephelan.wordpress.com/
Shes also a gourmet cook and has another blog about food!
http//phelanfood.wordpress.com/ |
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| Comment from MacDaid on 2007-11-20 |
| Ms. Phelan,
What a great story. I won get down on the Scots weather or Haggis for that matter, even tho Im mossed over with envy.
One day perhaps Ill haul my freight over and ride in Scotland, till then Ill read, and ride on here in the Old Dominion, USA.
Thanks for writing!
Dave |
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