Hannah calls on some of her friends and colleagues to see what, if anything, they managed to learn and achieve over the long months of successive (or continuous) lockdowns.

WORDS HANNAH & FRIENDS

PHOTOGRAPHY MOSTLY SELFIES

Hopefully by the time this issue lands on your doorstep, greater freedoms are on the horizon and you’re so busy out riding your bike into the next county and hugging your friends that you’ve barely got time to read this.

Before we (hopefully) leave lockdowns and loungewear behind us, we thought we should look at the lessons we’ve learnt. Apart from confirming the fact that washing your hands, wearing a mask, and staying off crowded public transport is great for avoiding germs and nits, what else is there to show for lockdown? Were you one of those people who mastered a new instrument or language?

Maybe cultivated a sourdough starter or garden? Well done. Personally, I’m not sure I’ve achieved much beyond survival and honing the ability to make a meal from some unpromising ingredients. But what of bikes, and bike related things? Again, I’m not sure that I am heading out of lockdown with anything bolstered except my waistline. Let us turn to my colleagues and companions in search of lessons learnt.

Amanda

Prior to being in lockdown, I only ever rode mountain bikes. They’re a relatively new addition to my life, and you’d be hard pushed to get me spending my weekends on anything but a bike ride with friends that almost always finishes at a pub after a couple of hours of stop-start riding, faffing, and socialising.

So, remove the social element and I soon lost the motivation to get myself out of the door. I also found myself unsure of how to scale a ride, given that the excuse for a breather each time a friend had a mechanical or needed a Haribo had been removed. It turned out that I wasn’t capable of much distance without the breaks.

Somewhere between the first and second lockdown, I was coerced into riding a road bike. This naturally progressed into riding a gravel bike, and I soon discovered just how many miles I have in my legs. I found a new motivation to get me out of the door and, in the process, I learnt a lot about general fitness. Having always stomped my way up climbs, burning off all my energy in one messy scramble, I now know that cadence is my friend. I have found that the only thing stopping me from achieving a huge ride is simply the preconception that I can’t do it. A careful balance of rest days, strategic snacking (a banana about 5km before a big climb is my current trick) and self-belief has taken me from feeling proud of a 20km ride, to deciding that 160km off-road is probably doable. This isn’t to say that I’m only riding bikes for fitness now, but it’s been enough of a solo challenge to give me focus and a reason to set out on a ride while the world is malfunctioning.