don’t let the apparently gentle slopes of the Pentlands fool you: they are steep and rugged in places, and contain a labyrinth of hidden glens, meandering and often quite gnarly paths, and trickling burns (Scottish for small rivers).
It’s a paradise for mountain biking, and I loved it. Unfortunately, it’s also pretty incompatible with my career in track cycling, because of the risk of injury. On a mountain bike, if you don’t crash on a fairly regular basis then you have to ask yourself if you’re trying hard enough … so it’s difficult to do now, though it is something I intend taking up again when I retire from track cycling. But I won’t be racing. Definitely not racing.
When I was getting into mountain biking, in my early to mid teens, a series of cross-country races were staged in the Pentlands. They were gruelling tests of endurance and strength on courses that often got churned up; you’d finish looking as though you’d been down a coal mine. They were tough races, and they pushed me to levels I didn’t know I could reach. The contrast to BMX races, those 30-second blasts, could hardly have been greater.
I think I realized, pretty early on in my mountain bike career, that I’d never be brilliant at this sport. But I did win one race. And it was an uphill race, bizarrely enough. It was at Innerleithen, about 30 miles south of Edinburgh: a mass-start event that went straight up a hill like a ramp and seemed to get steeper and steeper. Clearly organized by sadists.
Not surprisingly, the front group was rapidly whittled down. This was the kind of race where the action is at the back rather than the front, with people hanging on for dear life, until they can hang on no more. The mental battle is a big part of it – when your legs are screaming, your lungs burning, your brain telling you to stop, and you have to dig deeper and deeper. With such efforts, the physical limits lie somewhere beyond the mental limits.
Eventually there were only five of us left, at which point one guy attacked, jumping clear as though going for the finish. Nobody was mad enough to try to match his pace, preferring instead to watch him gradually slowing down in the distance and then ‘blowing up’ altogether. The words they use in cycling to denote that moment when you hit the wall – ‘blow up’ and ‘die’ being the most common – say it all, really. There is no return, especially on a hill. When this guy ran out of gas on the hill he became almost stationary – we had to avoid him as we went past, as if he was a bollard in the road.
Then I attacked. I attacked! And nobody came with me. As ever, the effort started to really hurt after about 15 seconds, but I managed to keep a bit in reserve and avoid the fate of the earlier attacker. I won on my own, which, looking back now, seems hard to believe. Let me write that again: I won a hill climb. This, appropriately enough, represented the summit of my achievements as a mountain biker. I’d rather not dwell on other races, typically longer races, following which – as my dad likes to tell everyone – he would be waiting in the car park, thinking I must have suffered some mechanical or other disaster, only to see me finally haul my exhausted body to the finish, well after everyone else had packed up and gone home.
At around the same time, there was another sport that was beginning to exercise me, in every sense of the word. Rowing. I still enjoyed rugby, but the increasing number of injuries I was suffering persuaded me eventually to give it up, and rowing was the sport that replaced it at school – cycling, unfortunately, not being part of the curriculum.
One of my best mates at school, Grant Florence, had started rowing, but there weren’t many guys who did it. For some reason it was seen at my school as a girls’ sport; male crews weren’t really encouraged. Obviously, for us male rowers, this wasn’t an entirely undesirable situation. But that isn’t why I was attracted to it, honest.
Seriously, it isn’t. If it had simply been a ruse to spend time splashing about on the water with the girls, then I wouldn’t have lasted very long, because this was a brutal sport. It was rowing rather than cycling, in fact, that opened my eyes to how hard it is possible to work at something. There was also a bit of family history in rowing. My uncle, John Poole, who’s married to my dad’s elder sister Joan, rowed in the ‘B’ crew for Oxford in the Oxford–Cambridge Boat Race in the 1950s. At 6ft 8in he’s a good build for it.
Where we trained, the Union Canal, is a seriously thin strip of water. In places it is not much wider – or less narrow – than the boat. A fractional misjudgement can cause the oar to hit the towpath, perhaps taking a runner’s legs from under him, or swiping an unsuspecting cyclist from their bike. Not that this has ever happened, to the best of my knowledge, but you feel it might. The Union Canal runs through the centre of Edinburgh and is a popular spot most days with crews of rowers.
In terms of location the canal was ideal for us, the boathouse being just a stone’s throw from the school. There were other advantages, too. Apart from when it iced over, the canal wasn’t much affected by the weather. Whereas the big rivers might arguably have offered more in the way of ‘proper’ rowing, and more room to manoeuvre, they were too choppy to row on when it was wild and windy, as it often can be in Scotland. Plus, on those big tidal rivers there were only certain times when you could row, and I heard, without feeling any envy, stories of other crews having to be out on the river as early as 6 a.m. At least we could row at any time.
We were out on the canal in all conditions. And I loved the whole scene, the social aspect, the camaraderie and the sense of being part of a committed team. You’d go down to the boat club before training and hang around, chatting to the boat manager, who happened to be Grant, the friend who got me into rowing in the first place. That was another thing: you were given responsibilities and jobs; I became club treasurer. George, who was in overall charge of the boathouse, tried to suss you out, I think, and if you passed the test you were trusted with the keys, given jobs to do, that kind of thing. Boat club treasurer was ‘a thankless task’, as was noted in a school report card at the time by one of my teachers, who added: ‘So I thank him now – on paper!’
The teachers were less impressed by one incident, for which I must hold my hands up. We were driving back to Edinburgh after a day’s training at Strathclyde Park when I found myself in possession of a super-soaker pump-action water machine-gun; a real beast of a weapon, which could fire jets of water up to about 30 feet. It was a hot summer’s day, we were hanging out of the windows of our minibus, and as we approached Edinburgh, and slowed down for a roundabout, we began to draw alongside a sports car with its roof down. It was irresistible.
My weapon was loaded and I gave it both barrels: not just a squirt of water, but a proper skoosh. OK, it was immature and it can’t have been pleasant for the driver, but all I can offer in my defence is that there is something in the Scottish psyche that disapproves of ostentatious displays of wealth, or flashiness. Soft-top cars fall into that category.
Monday morning came, however, and there was a letter waiting for me in registration. The head teacher was away, but I was to go and see his deputy, Mr Cowan. I knew it was about the water pistol incident. I had had a phone call the previous evening from George, the rowing man, who’d heard that the driver had complained to the school – well, we weren’t exactly hard to identify, given that the minibus was emblazoned with our school’s name. ‘I’m so disappointed,’ George had said. ‘I don’t know who it was.’
‘It was me, George,’ I said.
‘I’m so disappointed, Chris. I don’t know why you did it – you’ll have to face the music.’
So on Monday morning I faced the music. ‘I’ve had this letter,’ said Mr Cowan. ‘It seems that someone has used a water pistol on a member of the public. This is clearly a serious offence,’ and as he said this, I thought I could detect a little smile. Still, he sentenced me to half an hour of picking up litter. On balance, I think it was worth it.
The
