Pete Scullion is on a mission to ride with his mountain bike heroes and see what makes them tick. This time he catches up with Junior Downhill World Champs legend turned neoenduro pro, Ruaridh Cunningham.

WORDS & PHOTOGRAPHY PETE SCULLION

As I stand in a frozen Innerleithen car park trying to wrap my arms tighter around my torso in a vain effort to warm myself up, I’m slapped by the irony of having Ruaridh Cunningham battle through Edinburgh rush hour traffic and an icy mountain road in early December to discuss the less glamorous aspects of being a professional mountain biker. At least the sun is out, right?

From the get-go up a frosty Glenbenna, Ruaridh (say ‘Roo-ree’) is in his element. There’s a tempo to the gentle spin up the fire road and between buildings where lumber harvesters are being serviced that has me forward on the saddle and going faster than I can sustain as my legs struggle to loosen up.

Even on the steep, slippy push up the trails in the woods here, I can’t keep pace and every time Ruaridh points the bike downhill, there’s an effortless urgency about his riding that I quite quickly stop trying to match. It’s no real surprise that downhill speed comes easily to the man from the Tweed Valley, but it’s far beyond what I was expecting.

Keeping moving in -3°C is key, and I’m not in any danger of cooling down keeping up with Ruaridh at any point during the day. We’re out to beat the sun’s low dash across the horizon before the forecast rain comes and ruins play.

The trails are slick from having never seen enough traffic or the sun’s attention, and I’m squirming about as the red dot that is the man in Trek Factory Racing colours gets further and further away through the thick pines that are synonymous with the Tweed Valley.

Anything to keep the bike clean…

Making history.

Few can forget arguably one of the finest moments in British mountain bike history that was Ruaridh’s Junior gold medalwinning run at the Fort William World Championships in 2007, but the journey through a full decade as a professional mountain bike racer that followed has certainly not been all sunshine and lollipops as I soon discover. In fact, a year or so prior to this meeting in a chilly car park in the Borders, there was a very real chance that we might never have seen the man himself racing a bike again.