Adam goes on a tour to help restore his heart and mind – and pull apart his bike.

WORDS ADAM BOGGON PHOTOGRAPHY CREDITED

Credit: Peter Munnoch

Subsequent to the sudden death of a childhood friend, and my girlfriend, leaving me over the phone during my graduate school finals in Boston, I fell into a major depression. I became as a pebble falling through a body of water. The only question: how deep is the ravine? Turned out it was pretty deep. For months I could barely speak, sleep, follow conversations, execute simple tasks, or feel anything beyond a sort of deadness. When initial treatments failed, I lost hope, but was started on lithium and, once that element reached the target level in my blood, I recovered within 48 hours. I was like a hoover switched on at the wall. My nervous breakdown was over, and I had a new reality to accommodate to: I have bipolar type II disorder.

Restored, I pronounced myself ready to begin my rotation in child and adolescent psychiatry but was advised to calm my jets and take a few weeks to reconnect with life before reloading myself into the NHS cannon. That’s what took me to Minch Moor near Innerleithen in the Scottish Borders. It was early November… clocks’d changed, first frost’d nipped the grass, and the water in the rivers was running cold. I was at the start of a week’s riding which would take in the Borders, Dunkeld, Laggan, Tarland and Glenlivet. Who wants gardening leave when you can have mountain-biking leave?

Disarticulated crank

Who needs D3O when you have suede?

Credit: Peter Munnoch

Although known principally for its downhill runs, Innerleithen’s crosscountry loop offers nineteen kilometres of perhaps the best singletrack in Scotland. I made the climb dozens of times during my first year as a doctor when I worked at the Borders General Hospital in Melrose. Midsummer evenings found me often among the pines, listening to Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, and Lawrence Freedman’s Strategy: A History on my iPod as I spun to the top of the sweeping descent. Then the trails of the Tweed Valley were as integral to my life as the wards, the squash court in the doctors’ residence, and the bar of Burt’s Hotel. They are in my memory, attributes of the same substance – threads of the same cloth.

Having barely sat on a mountain bike in fifteen months, owing first to a year as a library gremlin at Harvard then to a stint as a near-stuporous wreck in my childhood bedroom, I struggled to handle the technical parts of the climb. I called to my friend Joe Winstanley: “Was it always this difficult? I feel like an old man who’s just been discharged from a threeweek hospital stay.” Looking down, I saw the dark form of my Genesis Mantle. I bought it in 2010 for £600. It’s featherlight, on account of a double-butted heat-treated aluminium frame, and because most of the paint has been scraped off by hard yards across Scotland and West Africa.