The race starts le man style with a whole load of very improbable looking athletes making a dash across the Downs towards their bikes. I’m going to be following Tom, he won the last one of these but as a favour to me he agrees to go at my pace today. Still I don’t want to be a total slow-coach so I’m running as fast as I can. I used to be a mountain bike journalist and I have ridden with some of the best professional cyclists in the word. The problem is that these are not professional cyclists. These guys are cycle couriers, and cycle couriers are nuts.
God know what you would do if you needed a package sent today. Couriers form four cities are here, Cardiff, London, Bristol and Birmingham. But I guess that since it’s a bank holiday Monday no one cares.
We pick up the bikes, but rather than steam off into the distance most people just stand their scratching their heads. To each bike is pinned a note. It’s a clue to the first checkpoint. It say’s
“You swore you’d never shop there then as soon as it opened you did, now hills of gold amass where once wild animals hid.”
‘What the hell?’
‘I thought they’d be a lot less cryptic than this.’
‘Well we’ll just have to wait till someone figures it out and follow them!’
Four or five bikes high-tail it off past the water tower, before swinging around to the left like a flock of birds. People murmur they think they may just be going off at random, like they have no idea where to go, but want to make us think that they do by going off early.
‘The Zoo?’
‘No.’
‘Could it be Cabot Circus?’
‘There were no wild animals at Cabot Circus… No Golden Hills either.’
Then I get it. It’s the Tesco they built on the old playing fields at Golden Hill. There were a whole bunch of protests at the time, but eventually they came to nothing. The council gave permission, and then stubbornly stood by it. As if looking down at the people and saying, ‘who the hell are you to stand in the way of progress.’ I whisper ‘Tesco’ to Tom and we are away, the second group out of the blocks.
The fact that we go the same route as the first group means we get a whole raft of hangers-on clinging to our coattails. As we speed towards the first junction the lights turn yellow, we sneak through just in time and then thirty five bikes run the red light behind us. A cacophony of car horns erupts as traffic makes a start and then suddenly has to stop as it’s penned in by a Hitchcockian mob of couriers on fixies. We are gone before the real chaos beings and drifting at forty-five degrees around the Westbury road roundabout. A couple of other bikes have bunny hopped up onto the kerb so they can straight line it across and they almost hit us as we enter Redland hill and pedal frantically just to keep up with our own wheels.
We race down towards the roundabout at the bottom forming up into an unofficial peloton. Taking the brunt of the wind is Sandman. Even among the cycle-courier community Sandman has a reputation for insanity. He got the nickname in his last Joe Job before he became a courier. He was working at a bar in Birmingham and decided that it might be funny if he put Rohypnol into every drink he sold. 78 people passed out. The local news called it a ‘Chemical Attack’. While no one could prove it was him that did it, he still lost his job; three of the people that passed out were only Seventeen and the police shut the whole place down.
Joe jobs and Cycle couriers don’t mix, perhaps because this is one of the few careers in the world where it actually does help to be crazy. Sandman’ s girlfriend calls him Sandy. Nobody has any idea what he was doing with that much Rohypnol.
We steam towards the roundabout. Briefly flirting with the idea of going down Durham Park Road but thinking better of it. Just past the eco-house, I see Sandman come very close to slamming into the 586 bus on its way to Hotwells. There are no breaks on a fixie, but there is no flywheel either, the single gear is fixed directly to the back wheel so when he stops his pedals the back wheel stops spinning and skids out.
Almost immediately he cuts inside and is back on the power more horns from the bus, the hiss of its hydraulic breaks… Then in the window I see and angry looking child covered in his own orange juice, an even angrier looking mother.
We come onto the roundabout like crows chasing off an eagle and pedal hard to keep the speed as we shoot up Redland road and then onto Coldharbour Road. From here it’s just a long straight dash all the way up Golden Hill.
Even on quiet day this ColdHarbour is too narrow for the traffic . A blue rover with a covered plastic roof rack has come to a standstill in the middle of the road… he shouts and waves his fist at us. Sandman shouts something back about saving the planet. I don’t think even his heart was in it.
I wonder if that same blue rover is stopped like this because of the group ahead of us. If perhaps that irate driver thought that they were just one small group of crazies and now this, Coldharbour Road isn’t used to this, it’s not prepared for people with strange haircuts and garish clothes, Coldharbour Road is stone cold tree lined suburbia, we are it’s worst nightmare. We are Mad Max, we are the end of the world.
The trees give way to a set of local shops as the road begins to slope down hill again. There are three people on the zebra crossing. Tom who now fronts the peleton shows no intention of stopping. . I am in the space just behind I ring the bell on my bike. Sandman laughs hard and all five of our bikes zip through a gap with barley inches to spare followed shortly by another fifteen or so.
Seconds later more traffic lights, this time green, thank god. For the first time we see the first breakaway pack ahead of us. See the three of them starting the climb that comes after this descent. Slowing down as Coldharbour becomes Kelloway avenue. There can be no doubt about it, they are going to the same place as us. Seeing the rival group spurs us on and we strain to catch up. There are no gears on a fixie so going up hill just means pedalling harder. People have them set up in different ways depending on what they think they can handle. The bike tom has leant me is set at quite a high ratio, which is great for going quickly down hill (due to the fixed back wheel we have to pedal even going downhill…) but not so good for climbing. I start to fall back from the rest of the group. I’m simply not used to this. My thighs pine for gearing like a dogs for their master. It seems crazy. Why should we suffer when we have the technology, why have we taken this step back in time? I watch Tom, Carl, Yorkie and Sandman get smaller and smaller. I get passed by three other bikes. The others are going to be angry with me, but not as angry as my thighs.
At crawl speed I cut off the road and onto the redbrick walkway that head to the front of tesco’s. There is blood on the floor and already there are tyre tracks going straight through it.
One of the first group went over a shopping trolley. Luckily it didn’t belong to anyone. It was just sitting in the middle of the walkway, he has gravel rash on his leg, he’s doesnt seem to care, he says he was ‘checking his six’ when he hit it and laughs.
The check point, has clearly come out of the back of someone’s car. It is a collapsible picnic table with a girl behind it. She must be 19 years old with long dark hair and a selection of facial piercings. Pretty typical for a Courier girlfriend, she probably sings in a punk band. She hands me a Blond wig and a can of beer.
I take the wig, but I’m allergic to beer so I refuse it. On top of that all I want right now is water. I can’t see Tom at all but Carl says he doesn’t drink so he has gone to do the forfeit, three circuits of the car park. I don’t feel like doing futile laps of the car park on already tired legs so I just take a black stamp on my hand in the shape of a small cat, it will add six minutes to my final time. Wearing the wig is non negotiable.
I have to loosen my helmet in order to get the wig underneath it. When I was working on What Mountainbike I wrote about a study that showed that on the road you are actually safer in wig than a bike helmet. Apparently people think blonds are prone to swerve around at random. If you have long blond hair they are much less likely to overtake and when they do will give you an average of almost 16 inches more room. I know of some drivers that would never overtake an attractive woman on a bicycle, simply because they wouldn’t want to spoil the view.
This kind of Driver psychology won’t save us today. A blond wig will not protect you head from a collision with a shopping trolley. Sandman Downs his Beer. Tom get’s back.
‘Why is everyone still here?’
‘5102’
‘What?’
‘That’s the clue, just four numbers 5,1,0,2, we think it might be a pin number or locker combination or something.’
‘I know where that is.’
It’s a miracle, but I do, my friend Andy did a radio show about those four numbers for BBC Bristol investigates. They are the longitude and latitude of Bristol, they are also the numbers written on the building that crosses stokes croft, just before the Bear Pit roundabout.
Just as the last group of riders are arriving at the check point we pull out of Golden Hill with our locks flowing behind us in the wind.
For 100 yards of so we go back the back the way we came, and then swoop off like top gun jets down Longmead Avenue. We ride top speed with the cold air in our lungs, the last day of summer, the first of autumn… Damn it feels good to be young and free today. On our right we pass the giant grey wall of Horfield Prison.
Cycle couriers don’t tend to ask what they are carrying. Often it’s documents; sometimes it’s DVD’s or Dat tapes. Once in a while someone will pay you over the odds to carry a mysterious brown parcel or two. The police can usually get a car to stop, they’d have a hard time getting one of these guy’s to pull over.
The down hill blur ends with five back wheel skids and a moment of panic I am sure I will not be able to stop on time and will just burst out on to Gloucester Road and die, but just in time I am able to skid the back out and do what I think is a quite impressive BMX style skid . Then Tom does one next to me and as he rotates, clips my front wheel with his back one and leaves me sprawled on the floor. Yorkie, whose nickname stems from the fact that he once lived in York, giggles. ‘Classic Takedown’ I get the feeling Tom might have done this on purpose.
The turn onto Gloucester Road is the last turn off we have to make before the checkpoint, from here is its three miles of gentle downhill slope. I feel confident. I have raced this route before, hundreds of times, for years I was commuting up and down the Gloucester Road at least five times a week, when you do a route that often you get to know the other riders. I remember Cannondale Man. Trek boy and the elusive yet beautiful Blue Racer Girl. I remember their faces, their thighs, their strengths and weaknesses. I remember every bump and every turn of this road, almost as if it runs down the centre of my brain.
This is probably why I’m not paying enough attention when an ordinary cyclist, in a grey and red shell-suit jacket, a man who is not involved in a life and death race against the clock pulls out of Wesley Road without looking, and it’s all I can do to stay on the bike as I am forced to cut inside him, Carl follows me as Tom, Yorkie and Sandman, zip past on his right. How does he react to this, almost as soon as we pass, he is up out of his saddle and peddling hard to catch up. The last thing he wants is to have to explain to his friends that he just got overtaken by transvestites on fixies.
So now we are six, like Charlies Angels with Charlie five feet behind. We zip past Oddbins, Bishopston Hardware, Bristol North Swimming baths, and Somerfield. There is a brief incident with a scaffolding truck, but we come out unscathed. Then we are past Re-Psycho and the Hobgoblin Pub, where I am briefly distracted by an attractive redhead and nearly pay for it with my life and the back of large blue Taxi. Luckily by this point I am getting the hang of pedal breaking, but the course correction costs me some speed. Charlie yells, ‘come on!’ like Leyton Hewitt, as he overtakes zipping past my right handlebar.
The prom wine bar and Mr Pringles arcade/pool-hall disappear in our wake. All too soon we are at the junction where Gloucester road meets, Zetland road and the light is red. Apparently winning is more important that living to tell the tale. Oddly enough, Charlie, who isn’t even officially involved, doesn’t so much as flinch at the lights, he just tilts his GT and hugs the curb next to the Prince of Wales and hopes beyond hope that no one is going to turn into Cromwell street and cut off his route. He survives so I follow him through and as one long worm of riders we progress up the empty bus lane and then out under the arches of the railway bridge, and carry as much speed through the next junction as we can into the only section of uphill between us and the check point. I ride the thick white line that separates the bus lane from the road in the mistaken belief that I will somehow gain more traction on the smooth rubbery paint. I stay tight behind Charlie, slip streaming him all the way up. I know this road. Just outside Colston Girls School I make my move, the maximum chance of a nubile audience making his humiliation complete. Feeling extremely self-satisfied I rejoin the back of our peleton and act as if nothing has happened. We start to leave Charlie behind. Thankfully the lights near the old White Tree Garage are green and we are able to scoot though safely, onwards up what is now Cheltenham Road, past Fred Baker Cycles towards the Pipe and Slippers. The outside punters look puzzled. We are a flash of the surreal in their drunken afternoon, and then we are gone… Clear through another green light and into the Peoples Republic of Stokes Croft. Finally a place where there’s nothing unusual about a group of freaks on specialist bicycles.
Stokes croft is 200 yards of bad area in an otherwise nice street. Ketemin heads and borderline homeless mix with middle class radicals and lipstick crusties till it’s hard to tell the two apart. Now though there’s a group of people who want to use art to do the place up. A graffiti makeover. Perhaps inspired by the famous Banksey mural that lives here, with it’s Mild Mild West Slogan that berates the West for being politically inert. That yellow teddy is now speeding towards me on my left hand side, it’s petrol bomb held high, in echo of the riots that ravaged this street twice in the 1980s. Riots I watched from my bedroom window. The people’s republic are the people who turfed over Turbo Island. They paint murals on burnt out buildings and strive to build a community from the ashes of one that went up in smoke.
We are past, lickin’ chicken’, the city road junction, and the spiralling acid trip paintwork Clockwork and the Blue Mountain club. Then suddenly, just outside the Halfmoon Pub we cut onto the curb before we come to skidding halt under the 5102 building. Followed very shortly by Charlie, who turns out to be called Mirek.
‘You guy’s are fricken crazy man’ say’s Mirek ‘I love it.’ Mirek is Polish.
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