Autumn

The air bites, not hard, but a nibble nonetheless. The season has turned and the faintest hints of the long cold mornings of winter are beginning to wake from their summer slumber. For the first few miles I ponder whether I really should have worn gloves.

Away to the East the sky is not quite black but full of a heavy navy hue,  imposing, looming. It pushes down hard on a thin line of cyan, as dawn lurks below the horizon. As I ride along a gravelly farm track I skirt a large field which falls away gently to the riverbank. It’s so early that water is only really distinguishable as a flat swathe across the otherwise equally dark but more erratic surfaces of fields and hedgerows.

Autumn is a time of transition, from the heat and light of summer to the cold and dark of winter, from the excitement of the racing season into a long steady phase of training and preparation. Fittingly this polar change is played out in a microcosm during each autumn ride. Rides start in the dark and end in the light (or vice-versa) and shift from cold to warm (or the other way)…

And so, with each minute that passes, the night recedes and I can pick out more of my surroundings. Having started my morning ride negotiating a wooded track in complete darkness, less than twenty minutes later the day is dawning strongly. Likewise the chill of cool air is soon displaced by the warm glow radiating out from inside me.

As I ride a short section across open farmland I can clearly see that, where just a couple of weeks ago the field was roughly ploughed with traces of the debris of harvest still scattered across the top, it is now flat with fine lines rippling the surface. Someone will probably be dining on the harvest of this year for some time, but the seeds have already been sown for the next year…

Back into the woods and as I dive down a sharp descent I find myself atop a section of path corrugated with tree roots and I’m struck by how much grip I find. Once the damp of winter set its they’ll be come highly treacherous, for now i’m still reaping the fruits of The Hottest Summer Since Records Began which has dried most of the earth into a fast hard surface.

A few late blooms of the racing season are still flowering, but personally I’m starting this autumn back at the very beginning of the journey of growth. After all, the slowest ’10’ of my life aside, it’s over 6 years since I last finished a race and I’m still wary of the disillusionment that led me to abandon my racing all that time ago. As a result I’ve taken this turning point in the year as an opportunity to forensically dissect the trails and bridlepaths, carefully tracing the dozens of paths that criss-cross the few square miles of local woods, steadily imprinting the options they  present in my mind, reducing the number of inevitable loops I leave with my GPS trace. It’s not easy when so much of the dense suburban woodland looks the same, or when the shifting of the seasons can lead to areas quickly becoming unrecognisable as the colours, surfaces and undergrowth change. But it does inject some exploration into what I’m doing, a welcome feature when so many years of cycling can sometimes lead to a feeling that precious little is new, and a perfect foil for that time of year when the old is fading away and the shoots of next year are at beginning of their journey…