Do or do not. There is no ‘consult spouse’

Posted on March 18, 2012 by Joseph Coulson

“An authority on what is required for a long and happy marriage” is a sentence nobody would use to describe me.

Yet on Sunday morning a chance encounter saw me have a go.

Rolling home from a mini beam with Action I clipped off in Herne Hill to purchase items for a salad, the components of which I’d spent the last 20 miles speccing-up.

Hoping to source some walnuts I propped my bike outside the grocer. Bars and saddle, naturally, never frame and wheels (cf.  Rule #65).

As I emerged, a middle-aged man was leaning over the handlebars as if in the action of riding. He gave the brakes a squeeze.

“Italian?” he asked.

I nodded.

“I used to have a Claude Butler” he said, as if it was 70 years ago. As if Claude  Butlters were made by Stradivari himself.

“What happened to it?”

“I got a car” he said. “Two, actually.”

Keen to start toasting my nuts, I made to be off.

“I thought about getting a bike again” he added. “A couple of weeks ago.”

“I mentioned it to the wife.” His tone seemed to indicate that the reception was not enthusiastic.

Do, the advice goes, or do not. There is no try.* Think about it, or consult your spouse are steps not endorsed by Yoda.

So “Do it!” was of course my shout as I rode off. The imperative was the only form for someone who spanks more on cars in a month than I do on bikes in a year.

Your wife will find herself married to someone who is healthier, happier, and less likely to finger another man’s brakes.

*And if you ask Graeme Obree — someone who knows a thing or two about the act of doing — not only is there no try, there’s no don’t either.

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Hell is other cyclists

Posted on March 4, 2012 by Joseph Coulson

 

Sportive cyclists, spring 2012There is a place to the east of punctures, the south of drizzle and the west of lactic acid. A sacred map square, a tiny sweet-spot where three axes intersect. Immaculate conditions, the illusion of endless possibility, and that rare sensation of pure, physical efficiency.

Maybe it’s early morning, spring. Maybe it’s the zip of your types on dry tarmac, the first in months. Maybe it’s the latent strength in your limbs as they unfold under the year’s first fresh rays of sun.

Whatever it is, it won’t last long.

As Action and I rolled out for the first spring beamer of the year on Sunday (he in fine fettle, having spent his winter toiling religiously up slopes south of the city; me touch and go, having spent mine monastically on other projects) he reminded me that it was the day of The Hell of Ashdown – a hilly sportive that goes from Biggin Hill to Ashdown Forest and back.

Inevitably, our paths crossed theirs a few times. But apart from drafting the odd rouleur and dropping the occasional grupetto, we paid them little heed.

I’ve ridden and enjoyed sportives before, but I was glad to avoid this one.

Because sometimes when I ride, buzzing with endorphins and shaking with oxygen debt, I do so to find myself not surrounded by other cyclists, clipping on about gear, carbon and Garmins. Not to find myself surrounded – in other words – by people like me.

Because sometimes I ride not to finish in the middle of the pack, to have my physical mediocrity charted and found to be exactly the same as everyone else’s.

Not to be pointed in the right direction, issued with a map, clocked in and out.

But for the opposite: to leave myself and my sort behind, to forget uniformity. Precisely because nobody tells me where to go, and because it’s me who decides where the finish line is.

So next time you fancy clocking up a ton, don’t pay thirty quid to share with strangers a road that’s already yours. Pick two or three friends – ones willing, naturally, to change a puncture in unseasonable hail, and likely to come equipped with enough jelly babies to share – and ride it yourselves.

And if by some unfortunate storm of happenstance, you intersect a sportive, and a marshal points you leftwards, go right. You won’t miss a thing.

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How @CaptainRFScott made Scott’s story current, real, and moving

Posted on January 17, 2012 by Joseph Coulson

As I arrived home yesterday evening I glanced at my Twitter feed and read something that stopped me in my tracks.

“January 16 1912…” it read. “the worst has happened”

I scrolled frantically up for new tweets. “What?” “What has happened??”

For months I’d been following @CaptainRFScott’s ‘live’ tweets – excerpts written a hundred years ago in the journals of Captain Scott on his final expedition.

At 6am I’d looked bleary-eyed at my phone to read “We should start one hour later tomorrow i.e. at 4 AM”

After what I’d thought was a pretty chilly bike commute I’d read “We awoke this morning to raging, howling blizzard”

And brushing my teeth before bed I’d learned solemnly “We kill another pony tomorrow night”

@CaptainRFScott in the Twitter feed of @josephcoulson

@CaptainRFScott in my Twitter feed

Scott started to come to life because he was in my life: there, on my screen, the kitchen table, in my rucksack. His story started happening not a century ago, but now. Why? Because it was happening now – it said so: “tweeted 43s ago”.

I wasn’t reading the diaries of a dead, mythologised hero but hearing a man’s voice shouting over the wind in the desolate whiteness of the Antarctic plateau. I’d eaten with the polar party (“plum pudding, then cocoa with raisins and finally a dessert of caramels and ginger”). I’d marched with them.

So yesterday evening I wasn’t standing in a doorway in SW2 in 2012. I was at 90 degrees south in 1912 and it was minus 23.5. And this guy turns to me and he says “The worst has happened”.

I already knew the story of the 1910–1913 expedition. I’d read the biographies. I’d read a good chunk of the journals. I knew Scott’s party had endured years of freezing, brutal hardship in pursuit of a goal, found out that someone got there first, and then watched each other and themselves die.  But it was only at that moment that I felt – for a fleeting moment – a tiny fraction what that might actually feel like.

So how did he do it?

It wasn’t the story itself – that was the same: a dream, a stuggle, glorious failure.

It wasn’t how he told it: a sequence of pieces of information with every successive one significant for what comes next.

It was where he told it, and when. @CaptainRFScott told it here — in the palm of your hand — and he told it now.

What that meant is he could do the thing that all good stories do. He made you care deeply about what happened, and the results were heart-stopping.

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Black ice and black swans

Posted on December 28, 2011 by Joseph Coulson

It wasn’t the difficulties which were holding us back; it was the uncertainty nagging at our nerves [1]

Ask a turkey to predict its future wellbeing based on its experience up to the 23rd of December and it might forsee a long, well-fed life. Come the 24th however, this generalization will probably turn out to be wrong – an inductive collapse of the sort sometimes known as a black swan.

It is nonetheless possible to predict that if you combine a pair of velonauts with an ice-blue New Year’s Day, the odometer will rise. And so it was that Action Jackson and I layered up and mist-breathed our way south, the new year having been chapeaued with a grande depart of 0830 hours.

Action Jackson sees three and a half black swans

Like all movement, cycling calls for the application of intuitive physics. Action, reaction, traction: the opening savlos of the year soon saw us dispatch Route 66 in the reverse direction.

But temperatures dropped. And then a treacherously dipping right-hander – polished with a veneer of skater-slick verglas – had Action downed in a stroke. He had seen a black swan.

It’s a mistake in such conditions to put down your cleats. Bereft of grip at the best of times, the apparent shifting of the ground seems to ape even the basest of physical certainties. Like the Christmas turkey reassessing it wellbeing, Action’s ice-crobatics saw me recalculating my own version of Newtonian mechanics. When at Bough Beech he measured his length for the third time, millions of my synapses were reconnecting themselves to accommodate the new physics.

For a while, confidence was a barren country.

But temperatures rose, and so did the ‘nauts. Ide Hill went the way of all cols. Clark’s was soon to follow. And my thoughts turned to relativity in cycling. Regain circulation in one’s coldest digit, and the mind simply turns to the next. Terrify yourself on flat ice and see how you long for the hiterhto unappreciated comfort of a painful, yet mercifully ice-free, climb.

One final black swan, then. Given that climbing hurts, it seems reasonable to induce that the more one climbs, the more one hurts? Not so – and here’s the blackest bird of all: at the steepermost summit all laws of rationality are again inverted. Where on previous experience the maximum pain is expected, the minimum is found. In its place, against all logic and prediction: the maximum delight.

[1] Sepp Jochler in The White Spider, Heinrich Harrer’s account of the first ascents of the Eigernordwand

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Cold? Not even close.

Posted on November 11, 2011 by Joseph Coulson

About this time of year when riding across town through horizontal freeze-rain in the dark for the fourth time in a week, I catch myself starting to whinge.

“I’m co-old.” “My body only just got over last winter.”

In The Tau is Silent, Raymond Smullyan describes a thought experiment in which the reader is invited to imagine themselves being unpleasantly bumped while lying relaxedly in a boat, drifting on a lake. You don’t get annoyed with acts of nature — Smullyan says — in the way you do with acts of man.

Nothing of the sort. I hate winter weather like an actual enemy.

“Why must this coldness be visited on me?” “A plague on your house, sleet.”

 

A photograph taken by Captain Scott. (From The Lost Photographs of Captain Scott)

A photograph taken by Captain Scott. (From The Lost Photographs of Captain Scott)

A hundred years ago today, Captain Scott’s journal entry began

A very horrid march A [sic] strong headwind during the first part — 5 miles (geo.) — then a snowstorm

which was a balmy jaunt compared to much of the rest of an expedition during which temperatures got so low that chattering caused one member of the party’s teeth to shatter, and which ended — although there can be no need to re-say it — with hypothermia, starvation, and death.

As the anniversaries approach; first of reaching the pole and then of the final, tragic march, the questions surrounding Scott’s final expedition will be re-asked.

But something of which there can’t be any doubt is this. A moment’s reflection on some of the simple, freezing suffering that went down, beyond the 66th parallel, all those years ago, and on the courage with which it was unarguably met, is all you need to put a bit of drizzle — and many of the apparent hardships about which it is all to easy to find oneself whinging — pretty quickly into perspective.

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In praise of the sporting faithful

Posted on November 6, 2011 by Joseph Coulson
Cyclists in Richmond Park, London

Cyclists in Richmond Park, London. Sunday 6th November, 2011. Photo by the author.

Anyone who’s ever trained for an endurance event — a marathon, for example — soon finds themselves in a covenant with Sunday mornings.

For most, the long run or ride is the cornerstone of any training programme, and Sunday morning is the obvious time to do it.

Perhaps it starts as a chore, but quickly it becomes an immovable and vital part of the week.

Because let’s just think for a moment what you get back from that covenant. Exercise and fun, of course. But much more than that: a few hours to reflect — among friends or clubmates, or in solitude — and a moment of silence in the outdoors, at a time when the world is at rest.

That’s why — when asked for his religion in the recent UK census — a training buddy of mine was only half joking when he wrote ‘cycling’.

But this Sunday morning I was at Richmond Park to do some test shooting for a project on endurance. Its 2,300 acres are a shrine for athletes, with miles of woody trails and a perimeter road that seems to be custom-made for TTing.

I’d admonished myself for having driven there, but — charged with a bootful of kit, and having made a solemn promise to go for a run later in the day — I made an exception.

It didn’t disappoint. The Park was — as always on a Sunday morning — an exalted sight. Hundreds of athletes, from the pro cyclist to the weekend jogger. A cathedral of human movement!

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Night ride is beacon of sustainability

Posted on October 16, 2011 by Joseph Coulson

First posted on Racing Green, 16th October 2011

Sleeping cyclists on the beach at the end of the Dunwich Dynamo 2011

Sleeping cyclists at the end of the Dunwich Dynamo 2011

If like Racing Green you are interested in sustainability in sport, look no further than the Dunwich Dynamo for a great example of a big bike event with little or no impact on the environment.

Many cyclosportives see riders arrive and depart by car, often covering tens or even hundreds of miles in the process. Some are all but inaccessible by public transport.

But the Dunwich Dynamo is a masterclass in how different things could be. Featuring machines ranging from penny farthings to aging baker’s bikes it undoubtedly falls into the category of fun mass ride rather than performance-orientated sportive, but the lessons it provides are transferable.

Riders roll out from London Fields at about 9pm and from then on it’s totally unsupported: no sponsors, no broom wagon, just 120 moonlit miles to the Suffolk coast.

But its real triumph only becomes apparent at dawn as the bleary-eyed riders arrive at Dunwich Beach. You might expect many to meet obliging car-owning friends for a cosy lift back to London. Not so. In fact, while a hardcore minority simply turn round and pedal back to London, almost everyone else opts for one of the coach-plus-lorry convoys organised by Southwark Cyclists and the London School of Cycling.

The “Dun Run” leaves no trace on the beautiful route by which it gets to the sea and — thanks to this admirable bit of planning — it leaves nothing on the way back either.

RacingGreen is a network of amateur athletes who want to encourage events, clubs and participants seek the benefits of improved sustainability.

 

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The process — not the prize — is the prize

Posted on October 2, 2011 by Joseph Coulson

Last week I found myself pitching a programme idea to a panel of BBC luminaries in a lofty part of W12. Think Dragon’s Den. Don’t think Monkey Tennis.

It was part of an internal pitching competition which saw everyone invited to enter ideas for the chance to win a small amount of money with which to shoot a taster tape and develop their idea further.

The story I put to the panel was — briefly — one of human endurance; of how ultra athletes — many of them amateur — are now performing acts of stamina so extreme that they raise questions about our fundamental limits, and what it might mean for everyone.

I kicked off with a clip I shot at the end of a recent 24-hour track race — featuring 2nd place finisher Simon Handley reflecting wide-eyed and sleep-deprived on the 223 km he’d just knocked out going round and round a 400m running track — and took it from there.

The leaderboard of a 24-hour track race approximately 1 hour before the end showing the number of miles completed by each competitor.

The leaderboard of the 24-hour 'Self-transcendence' track race approximately 1 hour before the finish. The numbers beside the names are miles completed. Tooting Bec Athletics Track, 18th September 2011.

The panel hit me with some thoughtful and stiff questions. So stiff, in fact, that I was pretty sure the game was up.

What’s interesting though, is this: I didn’t really mind. This wasn’t because I didn’t want to win — I did — or because I didn’t believe in my idea — I do — but because really I’d already got the prize. Meaningful competitions give more than just a prize to a few; they give the opportunity to embark on a steep and useful learning curve to everyone.

I can’t help but see a parallel here with the 24-hour race. Few of those involved in it cared at all about the trophies. What was important was that everyone taking part was doing something that would take them to a place they hadn’t been before, physically and psychologically. That was the prize.

As it turned out, I did actually end up being one of those fortunate enough to get the nod from the panel. I’m very excited about taking the idea forward, and of course I intend to share the process here.

Special kudos to Simon who was good enough to speak to me, 550 laps the worse for wear. The respect this deserves — as well as the limitations of my parallel with the pitching competition — will be clear when you consider that he had to interrupt the interview in order attend to the upwardly-projecting gastric consequences of 24 hours of running.

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Brixton’s best for running, swimming and cycling

Posted on August 13, 2011 by Joseph Coulson

First posted on Brixton Blog, 5th August 2011

Brockwell Park in summer with trainers in foreground

Brockwell Park – a playground for runners. Photo by the author

Brixton is home to some top exercise opportunities. SW2-resident and have-a-go triathlete Joe Coulson brings us his pick of the bunch.

Forget the Côte d’Azur: whether you are a dedicated multi-sporter or a gentle Sunday stroller, Brixton has everything the athletic heart could desire.

Where else could you take a dip in one of the city’s best lidos, launch a mammoth ride into the Surrey Hills, or knock out a few laps of South London’s prettiest park, all in the course of a weekend?

The options are indeed endless. My list can only scratch the surface so do add your favorites below.

  • Brockwell parkrun.  Parkrun believes that everyone should be able to run a free, timed 5K every week, anywhere in the world. Like all parkruns, the Brockwell Park edition is entirely volunteer-led and open to all. Saturdays, 9am.
  • Swimming at the Brixton Rec. There’s something special about a pool on the second floor of a building. Combine that with the gigantic windows and you’ve got an experience that feels as if it owes as much to flying as it does to swimming. And when you’ve finished, why not nip into one of Brixton Station Road’s cafes for the de rigueur flat white? The exoergic properties of caffeine are – after all – well-documented.
  • Laps of Dulwich Park. The perimeter path of Dulwich Park measures exactly one mile so if you want to tune your pace or easily keep track of distance, this is the place to do it. Coots and moorhens add an ornithological dimension to any run here, and it’s one of the only places in the world where you can still see the River Effra above ground. The 2-mile jog from Brixton makes a great warm-up.
  • Brockwell Lido. A classic haunt for triathletes, the pool is open from April to October, climate-permitting. The Windrush Triathlon Club provide coached sessions throughout the season.
  • Cycling in Surrey and Kent. If you want to get your teeth into some big bike miles, Brixton is the perfect place from which to roll out. Plot a course via Crystal Palace and you’ll soon be out of the city. Box Hill and the surrounding area offer unlimited permutations route-wise; a loop via Westerham is another great alternative. Crystal Palace Triathletes organise Sunday club runs for a variety of paces and distances.
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The unlikely pressure of the beach game

Posted on August 1, 2011 by Joseph Coulson

 

People playing boules on a beach

Beach boules - a study in the neuroscience of pressure. Photo by the author

I’ve been reading about how the brain behaves under pressure – why it is that on some occasions the necessity to perform brings out the best in people while at others it crushes their abilities and reduces them to the status of beginner.

The answer is obvious and simple but conceals a tantalising difficulty. Under normal circumstances our capacity to reason consciously is our great ally, but when the heat is turned up it becomes the enemy. Complex learned actions are derailed by thinking about them, but thinking about them is precisely what we are inclined to do when the outcome really matters. In a very real sense the way to succeed is to stop trying.

So when Roger Federer faces a championship point in a Grand Slam he’s got to feel as relaxed as he does when he’s on the practice court. When pressure is at a maximum, tension must be at a minimum. Thinking is fatal.

It was in this direction that my thoughts turned this weekend as a friend and I played a few rounds of what we were referring to as ‘pat-ball’ — that game with two wooden paddles and a small, not-very-bouncy ball — on the beach. Twenty or thirty consecutive volleys were no problem but what — I wondered — would happen if we did a little practical experiment and turned up the pressure?

“Let’s do a hundred.”

Reminding myself of the relevant theory I give myself a quick pep-talk first. Nerves are just a signal to perform. Drop the shoulders. Relax. Let’s play pat-ball.

We reach 77. Research — it appears — also indicates that however relaxed you are, you can’t stop your partner from playing like a goof.

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