By Bill Strickland
The road now falls sharply under tree cover. There is no need to pedal; the bike accelerates rapidly past the point where pedaling would be effective. You move into a tuck, making your body as small as you can into the wind, spreading your weight as low and evenly as possible over the bike. In the autumn, your eyes would be scanning the road for wet leaves that can form a skein of slime as treacherous as ice. But the winter's rains have washed the surface of detritus. Still you watch for potholes and stones.
I didn't write that. Matt Seaton did. I met him last summer, just for a few minutes, in an outdoor cafe atop Alpe d'Huez last summer. I knew that if I started talking about how much I liked his book, “The Escape Artist”, I would sound either like a literary critic or a lunatic. I kept it simple: "I loved your book," I said. "Please write more."
As with riding, I spend way too much time writing about riding (and, again, trying to explain why would make me sound madly magniloquent). When I find someone out there who can write the way riding feels, which somehow or other became one of my ambitions, I get a rush, and a giddiness, and a lightness I also get from cycling.
You are in free-fall, Seaton writes in “The Escape Artist.” You are aware of nothing but the line you need to take. A few minutes before, the sound of your labouring lungs was your constant companion. Now, in the background there is just the roar of the wind and pulsing of blood in your ears.
The road makes a hard bend to the right and then straightens to point directly downhill to the valley floor. If the surface is dry and you are running on good tyres, if the way is clear of traffic and you can use the width of the road, if you have all your courage and wits about you, you can make it round that curve without touching the brakes. You hit forty-five, fifty, right at the apex. You cannot see the exit and it is crucial to pick the right line. If you start running out of road, the camber will be against you, shrugging you off the blacktop. Once committed to a line, it is too late to use the brakes. To crash at this speed is unthinkable.
And then, in a split second, you are round and free. You are still upright, and the road stretches out in front of you again. You cannot believe your luck, you are alive and intact. You feel the chill of the air as the wind slices through layers of clothing, greedily sucking away the body's heat from damp undergarments and the scorching tears on your cheeks. But the cold does not hurt. You have taken flight.
If you read Sitting In regularly, it's probably because you care at least as much about how riding feels, about what it means - whatever that means - as you do about new gear or the latest news from Europe or our bullet-pointed advice for staying lean (which works, by the way). Go chase down “The Escape Artist.” "The great escapes are etched on my memory," Matt writes, and parts of his book will become etched in yours, break your heart a little, come burbling up out of who-knows-where as you're out on some beloved ribbon of road. The hardest hill he ever climbed in his life haunts me, on and on.
You can scrounge up a copy of The Escape Artist through Amazon, of course, but I prefer to go to Booksense and find an independent store that stocks it or will order it. Matt deserves to have his book read by all of us, and you deserve to read it.