Andre snapped this picture of the Great Don McEdald in the wild, at the Mont.

If you have seen him since, please report his location and condition. His groupies are looking for him. 

IN THE PAIN CANOE

NOT IN THE PAIN CANOE

Christmas eve 2011, 3:30am. The streets of the 2602 lentil belt are still, a dew is gathering on the urban chicken coops and organic backyard veggie patches. Everyone is either in town and loose, trying to get jiggy with it or asleep.

In a one bedroom apartment a phone illuminates a room, begins playing a nauseatingly optimistic Gomez song and is jabbed repeatedly until it yields silence. A rotund man exhales and sighs a defeated sigh, born of his realisation that he has again been thrust from sleep into the disinterested universe, with no pre-constructed flat-packed purpose, no turn-key meaning and no new episodes of Black Books.

The Pain Canoe Sailing Club President puts his feet on the floor, rights the rest of his mass and makes the four paces from his lover’s bed to her coffee machine. He crosses his arms and leans against the bench with his head lolled to one side and waits for the machine to warm.

Today he commutes 143 nautical miles home.

I’d laid out my clothes the night before, full bore utilitarian cycling kit. Knicks and jersey, SPD shoes and gloves. My bike, a Salsa Fargo in funguy green, was already packed with a frame bag full of food, tools and tubes and a perforated dry bag on a rack containing one change of casual clothes and a book. Super minimal for what in my world was going to be an arduous ride all the way home to the annual family celebration of Hammocka.

I looked at the time. The time was illegitimate. The only people waking up that early are hunters, fishermen and young couples fumbling into 4am monochrome fornication. Their monochromatic dream addled bodies just artifacts of sheer reality in an ebbing sleeve of unconsciousness. My unconsciousness was dissolved chemically, I gathered the necessities and fled.

I met up with Ed at ANU, by the concrete balls. I was eight minutes late. We were both keen to ride miles. Ed was keen because he wanted to top his legs up with some quality base miles. I was keen because I wanted to make it to Wagga before Boxing Day (during the celebration of Hammocka Boxing Day is the day after the day of High Hammocking. On Boxing day we collect the bottles and put them back into the box so that they may be recycled). Ed was coming as far as Wee Jasper and returning solo to Canberra to make family festivities that afternoon. I outlined my planned route to him as we rode the bike path along Lake Burley Griffiin in the dark. Ed is a skinny faced fastman. A world class endurance mountain bicycle cyclist. A surfer of mud or blood, but never neither. As we spoke I was concerned about how I could only conceive the relative immensity of the ride one corner at a time. This would be the longest ride I had ever attempted in both time and distance.

Sunrise over Canberra

But the universe was not interested in these undertakings. Dawn cracked, same as always, and with the road to ourselves we made easy progress, surging up hills, oohing at the dawn. Ed spoke knowledgeably about issues of international importance and I maxed out my concentration just huffing and puffing the accommodatingly tepid air.

We rolled out into farmland and followed Mountain Creek Road through scrubby undulations and herds of cattle. Calves raised their heads and eyed us with teenage bravado but we slipped past their disinterested mothers, they were safe from city-slicker intruders on the other side of a six strand barbed wire fence.

I find that when I’ve successfully displaced  myself into the wilderness, or rural farmland as the case may be, it’s the pace of it, and the peace, that usually tumbles down into me like a box of hilts and balustrades, displacing the mindset of modern life. There’s a whole other jangly metronome timing the wind through the mountains and the reach of the boughs. This time though, I’d brought with me numbers and data and distances. You can’t be in a place when you know exactly where you are, and how far, just by glancing at your Garmin.

We turned off Mountain Creek Road and onto Wee Jasper Road near Lake Burrinjuck and stopped for breakfast near a bridge over a small creek. There was moss growing on the side of the bridge, the creek was flowing and the grasses were high and green. This is country NSW in December, and I haven’t seen it like this for a decade or more, when I was a kid.

Ed at the breakfast stop, peeled banana in hand.

I imagine an alfa gorilla has at his disposal a range of techniques, developed over time, to fend off challengers and maintain his enviable position as primary impregnator of his band. He would reserve more vicious attacks for deployment against his most credible rivals, while mere teenage agitators would be flicked away without effort or risk of injury.

So I count it as a compliment to my meagre but increasing skills as a bicycle rider that Ed, probably subconsciously, employed a percussive technique, I think, to ensure my continuing reverence. During our breakfast Ed nonchalantly flung a quite unexpected banana skin, which slapped against my chest and brought with it a message from Ed’s unconscious.

Now, some might say that Ed is the nicest guy you’ll ever meet, an educated guy with an eloquent manner and a deep respect for his fellow man. And this is true. But it is my suspicion that in that skinny faced fastman is a roaring furnace of scalding mojo, eighty viscous fathoms of nitrous oxide magma deep, and his primary virtue on the racetrack is to keep the outlet of this furnace at a mild aperture, only applying as much as necessary. When the time arises, however, his more credible challengers might expect a more humbling reward for their efforts than an accidental banana skin in the chest.

Ed apologised graciously for discarding his banana skin in my direction, and we set off onto a climb that I reckon a roadie could use as some justification for their normally mundane flavour of bicycle cycling. In keeping with the popular internet meme ‘pictures or it didn’t happen’ I have included two below:

Which means I could claim to have done the climb twice. When roadies do a climb, get to the top, and then turn around and do it again they say they have done ‘reps’. It’s short for repetition, which reveals the utterly boring nature of road bicycle cycling. Naturally, beyond this rapha-esque scene lay a few clicks of fairly mundane farmland before we approached Wee Jasper.

You have to note that it’s an easy lot to wake up in an unfamiliar bed, disoriented and entwined in the limbs of three young liberals of varying or uncertain gender, and to look around, take stock, weigh the pros and cons and realise that the only part of the scene lighting any bulb of familiarity is the smarm they’re emitting, even while sleeping. That’s a simple problem to solve. Put your sunglasses on and brainstorm.

Conversely, regaining your full and complete consciousness halfway down the coiling descent into Wee Jasper at 45 knots is not, upon examination, a problem. It’s a symptom. It’s a symptom indicating that your wit and faculties have emerged from their dormancy, reoriented themselves outwardly and are now wholly engaged in saving your sedentary arse from itself. Months of living the life mechanical, free of The Fear and therefore far from any jot of purpose leaves you running on auto-pilot while your consciousness watches shadows of the outside world on the back of your skull.

India’s biggest export behind back office services is probably the clear mind, ‘true’ enlightenment; the shedding of the ego and the eschewing of the senses.‘Close your eyes, orientate yourself inwards and concentrate on the emptiness between your thoughts’. You can get prepackaged inner peace on DVD. The real thing is the ebb and vacuum after inner turmoil conducted straight to you by senses charged by real and imminent danger. Like the hammering silence after the bushfire, or the unknown self found eighteen hours into a twenty four hour solo (or at least that’s what I heard).

So by the Bridge over the Goodradigbee River at Wee Jasper the fog of a secure existence had lifted, I’d cracked it, and I licked the midges from my teeth while I waited for Ed to finish the descent. The thin strip of dirt on the outside of each of my tyres (‘chicken strips’) indicated that I had been close to leaning my off-road touring bicycle cycle onto the sidewall. From the sidewall it’s all downhill and ambulance. I grew impatient during the three to nine second wait for Ed at the bottom of the descent. He was held back by his meagre mass, unable to bonnet surf the commodore of gravity. Remember kids – sitting in the vortex of your own beer gut will gain you speed when descending, and the ladies.

At Wee Jay we filled our bottles and I felt as though the first stage of the ride was done, and in good time. We sat on a rock, Ed said he’d like to continue to Tumut, but had to make it home. He asked how I felt, and I said I was confident. Ed said I was looking pretty slow on the climbs and that I had a shit of a day ahead. That’s when he stole my mojo.

Part two of this voyage in the pain canoe might be published in the coming months.

The Pain Canoe Sailing Club President

The Mont mass participation mountain bicycle event is over, and while we’re slipping into something more comfortable peruse for yourself some images from Singlespeed Heights and surrounds:

“So Captain Morgan became our unofficial mascot for the trip and bottle quickly disappeared between the three of us in that tiny campground. For those that don’t know me, I really don’t drink very much so the Captain made quite an impression on me. In true pirate fashion, we slept on our boats.”

Have a shufty at a five day fat Bike Odessy up the central coast of Australia (including spectacular waterspout photos) : http://www.theunknownrider.com/2012/02/14/fat-bike-odyssey-day-1/ .

Doi doi – doi doi – doi doiiiiii

And with that the lights began blinking (blink, blinky, blink – blink) and tapes began whirring (whirrrrrrrrrring) at Rollick Publishing Pty Ltd. Neither too soon or tardy, the reignition of the Rollick is in time for the Mont twenty-four hour Mass Participation Mountain Bicycle Cycling Event, which is occurring this weekend. Rollick will be embedded with a team of singlespeed champions, steely in their resolve and their nether regions, faltering not for root or rock and certainly not for hill or dale. Our keen eyed race reporter will be in the field, observing, intervening and hydrating. He will be sent in with the simplest of assignments: find and confront the nub of the most anticipated mass participation mountain cycling event of the year. What is it the portly fiends of dirt and sweat are chasing as they jostle for position two thousand four hundred and ninety nine? What puts the urgent rasp in their voices as they yell ‘track!’ and slip one spot closer to the Dickson High School Mixed Team of 6?

Keep your RSS feed tuned to this channel for the low down.

Captain Editor