WORDS & PHOTOGRAPHY CHIPPS
‘Puckpuckpuckpuckpuck…’
All I’d been able to hear for the last hour had been the octopus-like sucking noise coming from Nigel Page’s supersoft enduro racing knobblies on the featureless Lakeland tarmac. The mountains ahead, finally glimpsed in the distance, didn’t seem to be getting any bigger either. With every micro-downhill, I started to freewheel away from him. And now, though Nigel is legendarily cheerful, I began to think that his famously sunny disposition was beginning to slip in the face of this endless sticky-tyred water torture.