The author, shortly after being particularly wrong

It’s okay to be wrong. Really.

Sometimes you have to admit you have made a mistake. Let me qualify that. Sometimes you’re forced into an admission of wrongness because the evidence is plain for all to see. Particularly your riding buddies, recently graduated from the University of I Told You So.

Six months ago, the mountain biking religion taking shape in my barn, missing only a crib and a donkey, generated belief with an XC full suss, a hardcore singlespeed and a retro trail bike. I was happy to evangelise to the non-believers on the pureness of a single cog or the beauty of hard-packed singletrack being caressed by a whippy steel frame. Mine was a broad church, with even the demon pivots being welcomed as icons of a new faith. We crusaded across this corner that is forever England and to foreign climes, plucking an arrow from the quiver most appropriate for the obstacles in front of us. We believed in everything the marketing guys told us and pursued our obsession in line with their sales forecasts. One bike for everything was an aberration: life without riding, living without playing, riding without buying.

It could never last. My MTB religion was clearly something where monogamy is nothing more than a badly spelt tree as titanium ousted aluminium in an ebay bitch fight. I had ended up with three right old slappers, second or third hand, ritually abused with only the occasional shiny trinket festooned upon their battered frames to assuage my shame. I tried to keep the faith but the shifting sands left me on my arse metaphorically and physically. I sold the full suss because, to paraphrase the 80s pretentious bollocks, I wanted the technical world to stop so I could get off. I replaced it with something that purported to be nirvana between the efficiency of a hardtail and the comfort of two suspended ends. If this wasn’t enough for the spiritual to be replaced by the secular, a second frame was sacrificed on the Altar of Titanium and my broad church shrank to a fundamentalism where pivots were the heretics and marketing men were being burned on the metaphoric stake. So not all bad then.

It’s like falling out of love. You don’t admit it for a while, you make do with the little things that piss you off. You put on a brave face and refuse to accept that all these words together spell denial. Your ability to reason is eroded as those with more brains and less angst disappear off down the hills on bikes they’ve owned for more than a month. They may be faster, you argue, but they have no soul, no feeling, no understanding of what is real. You mutter that ‘fast’ is merely a metaphor for ‘cheating’ and refuse to accept that your faith is rooted in a utopian world. Sometimes halcyon days rush past the present and perfect trail conditions renew your faith. But it’s not often. And it’s not enough.

There is a time when you have to admit you’re wrong. For me, it was a dreary April afternoon with the rain drilling the window like a thousand angry woodpeckers and a belly full of lunchtime lager. The club trip to the Peaks loomed and the Ti hardtail, the holy spirit of my MTB church, was left unloved and unridden since a trial by rocks had broken my faith. Whiling away the hopeless day with some gentle net surfing I found, amongst the debris of flamed victims on the virtual battlefield of a website forum, a warrior from a gentler time. Unmolested by marketing solutions looking for a problem, built with a nod to Brunel and sporting campaign scars from engagements further than a car park, the way of the righteous was clear to me. Don’t get me wrong, the sun didn’t arc as a laser from the heavens nor was I seized by religious fervour driving me on. To be honest, the rain inexorably turned the road into a river and the only voices in my head were clamouring for another beer, but something stirred. Maybe that was the other website I had open at the time.

I like to think I’m a man of action. Gripped by the need to get from a to z without passing through the intermediate steps of c-cost, d-dimensions, s-size and w-worth, I was banging out emails like a man with a story to tell. That story became cash for frames which is less exciting than wine from water but in today’s world of humdrum economics was the best I could manage. My excitement at the arrival of this stealthy black frame sprung with real coils was only marginally offset by the rape and pillage of my “this is my last frame” Ti hardtail. A balmy Friday night turned into a barmy Friday night as the beer-fuelled resurrection of my MTB faith occurred before my very eyes. Or to drop the idioms, I sat on my deck, getting pissed, watching someone else build it. Again, there was a noticeable lack of signs or portents as it took shape although the anointed one (as I like to think of myself during those megalomaniac phases) was heard to announce “f*ck me, that’s a beast”.

I have the urge to bore you further now with tales of my conversion to the Church of Full Suspension. But I’ve decided to spare you. Think of it as the biggest bare-faced U-turn since Winston decided he rather liked the Tories or Blair decided he liked being Prime Minister. I decried those who accused me of having more faces than Vanessa Feltz has arse cheeks by simply refusing to accept my previous pronouncements unless they had been written down and witnessed by someone in authority. In fact, my riding buddies cautiously welcomed me back into the fold comforting me that I’d finally found the road to salvation and really the Devil wasn’t behind me.

Six months on from my abandonment of the promised land of super fast downhills and cosseted arses, I’m back. And guess what? I have one trail hardtail, one singlespeed and one full suss. We keep re-inventing ourselves because the option is to opt for obscurity or niches. It’s hardly been the road to Damascus but while there has been mental and physical pain on the journey, I’ve learnt something.

Sometimes, it’s okay to be wrong.