Mountain biking has been a dusty thread running through my life. It
has helped keep me sane and thin enough to fit into 15-year-old dresses.
I never feel more alive than when I slip out of the studio late on a
sunny weekday afternoon, zip out through north-east London and hit
Epping Forest dirt just as rush hour begins behind me. It may not be the
Alps or even the Lakes but I enter a world where all that matters is
the twisting trail, my burning thighs and riding as fast as possible
over bumps.
A big part of sport for me is the benefit for mental health. Nothing
combats feeling depressed or anxious like a good hard workout. Mountain
biking takes me out of my studio, out of my head and into my body and
the countryside. Haring down a hillside leaves no time to ponder. You
live in the moment, you focus on not crashing.
It is a little-known fact that I invented the mountain bike when I was
14 in 1974, in the back of a biology exercise book. Like a lot of my
mates, I liked to ride my stripped-down road bike fitted with
speedway-style handlebars through the Essex woods, over bumps and bomb
holes. Riding a bicycle wasn’t a sport to me then. My stepfather and
mother made home a place of brooding violence and frightening hysterical
outbursts of shouting and screaming. My bike got me out of the house
and away from my dysfunctional family.
In the summer a few friends and I would pedal to the nearest patch of
lumpy ground and dare each other to roll down steep banks or leap off
mounds, pretending to be Evel Knievel
jumping over buses. These off-road excursions inevitably led to violent
equipment malfunction so I used to doodle bikes designed to withstand
the rigours of off-road fun.
What I drew were hybrids between a bicycle and a motocross bike and,
40 years later, you can buy one complete with sophisticated suspension
and fat knobbly tyres. I didn’t get the credit for inventing the
mountain bike because I never went on to build one – unlike the pioneers
of the sport, who around the same time were holding downhill bicycle
races on a dirt road on Mount Tamalpais, just over the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco.
By the time early mountain bikes were available in Britain, I was
heavily into skateboarding. This was how I got my adrenaline kicks for a
decade or so from 1977, until falling off on to concrete started to
hurt too much. Mountain biking, by contrast, seemed a relatively safe
way to keep fit in comparison. And by the late 80s, mountain bikes were
everywhere in Britain – in fact, they had saved cycling.
I was quickly drawn from tootling through Epping Forest into the
organised sport, and participated in my first cross-country mountain
bike race in 1992. I clearly remember the immediate visceral thrill of
being nakedly competitive (as opposed to covert rivalries with fellow
artists; who did the best in that auction? How many people went to see
his show?). Passing my first fellow racer I almost joyfully shouted,
“Eat my dirt, loser!”
I soon became obsessed and the racing gave me a goal to train hard.
One year, I took on an online coach to tailor my training. 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. I was doing two or
three-hour sessions four times a week. I would take my heart rate first
thing every morning and record it on a graph, and bore on about
anaerobic thresholds and fartlek training.
There is a popular idea that artists are not supposed to be sporty
and so this only added to the attraction for me; like pottery, sport
was, well, a bit naff. Racing also gave me an insight into a different
subculture, clean-cut men eyeing each other at the start – how lean is
he? Should I grid up in front of him, will he hold me up? After the
race, a glorious rush of endorphins, sweaty dusty men, all high on
natural chemicals, comparing notes and battle scars. In the race, no one
knew me as an artist – I was just the bloke who came fifth.
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Best Mountain Bikes
