That's My Boy

I woke up at 4:45am this morning. I’m not tired, I went to bed too early, so now I’m awake in a sleeping house. It’s Sunday, so I’m holding myself back from working, although that’s my normal go-to when this happens because my mind is always buzzing when I wake up and the morning contains my highest-functioning hours of the day. I don’t do any of the bro-science delaying coffee or looking for sunlight, I enjoy using my brain when it’s firing on all cylinders because I know that, as the day goes on, it will slow down and become less useful to me.

I did meditate every morning for a solid year in an attempt to calm it down, and maybe I’ll go back to that at some point in my life, but for now I quite like making use of my morning predisposition.

So here I am, sitting in my office wondering what to do that is worthy of a Sunday morning, and I thought, “Substack!” Why not write about the joy of riding with my 14-year-old son, Archibald? That’s surplus thinking I’ve never actually sat down and chronicled.

I’ve played a long game with Archie. I don’t think I’ve ever forced it, although the osmosis of being surrounded by bikes, going to races, meeting professional cyclists and seeing Daddy living and breathing bikes and bike racing has meant there’s been no avoiding it. Of our three kids, it’s only Archie who has shown any interest. Harvey and Maxine couldn’t care less, and they’ve had exactly the same experiences and options. That might change, but I highly doubt it.

This is good in a way, because it makes me even more grateful that Archie is showing an interest, as my laisser-faire attitude could easily have meant he wasn’t interested either. I’ve been determined not to force anything, to allow the kids to find their own things, which means giving them the opportunity to sample as much as possible - something I’m very grateful we’re able to do. Some things will stick, others won’t, yet the journey of trial and error and self-discovery is what will hopefully give them the opportunity to find something they are genuinely passionate about.

I think the origin of this is my own discovery of cycling. Nobody in my family did it, yet I was given the opportunity to let my rampant curiosity tangent off randomly in different directions. It was all self-motivated. Ned pointed out recently that I’m one of the few autodidacts he knows; I hated school and did all my learning on my own terms, disappearing down rabbit hole after rabbit hole, often following whatever fell onto my radar and piqued my interest.

Bikes were one of those rabbit holes, although it didn’t happen immediately. I got into BMX in the 1980s when it was booming, then my BMX got stolen, so that fell by the wayside and I took up other things. Later we moved house and I decided I wanted to play tennis, but I needed a bike to ride the 3km to the tennis courts. I ended up not taking up tennis. Bikes were a more interesting rabbit hole.

It was 1990, when mountain biking was having its moment, John Tomac et al. So I cut lawns, washed cars and did a paper round to save up for a mountain bike. It took me six months, if I remember correctly. It was probably the most financially responsible period of my entire life. I had a chart glued to my bedroom ceiling above my bed, with a graph of my earnings, a timeline and my projected goal.

Long story short, it all began there, when I was 13.