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.
Read more. Best Mountain Bikes
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