The Cyclist Who Went Out in the Cold

by Tim Moore

  With barely a month left until we flew off to the Arctic together, I set about readying this blameless old campsite runabout for the brutal ride of its life. I removed the dynamo and hit up the gold shopper for its Duomatic rear wheel, bell and kickstand. (This other bike, as a point of interest, was what you might call an extreme folder – when I unscrewed the central bolt the thing fell into two entirely separate halves.) The ferociously pointy-toothed snow tyres had almost eaten their way out of the cardboard box they’d been delivered in, and fitting them required the motorcycle gauntlets I had last worn twenty-five years before, while encouraging a vast and furious cat into his travel basket. Shod in these rotary maces, my MIFA exuded an improbable whiff of aggression, the sort of thing Mad Max’s auntie might have ridden to the bingo.

  My devotion to authenticity had never been entirely slavish, and as departure loomed the backsliding gathered pace. Could I reasonably be expected to straddle a vinyl breezeblock for 10,000km? To curl my fingers around bar grips of harshly ridged Bakelite over the same eternity, while pushing round tiny, twin-spindled rubber pedals with enormous Arctic boots? Addressing these issues and a few others was bad news for the bikes I’d be leaving behind in the shed. I took the saddle off my 1914 Giro bike, and mounted it on the chassis plundered from my eldest daughter’s basket-fronted ladies’ model. My daily ride – a thief-repellent eBay clunker – donated handlebar grips and flat pedals, and my mothballed Tour de France bike bequeathed its panniers. With a sigh and a dip of the shoulders, I then trudged shamefully forth to the darkened outer limits of acceptable compromise.

  Even without a folding hinge, my MIFA’s single-spar open frame had shrieked its pliable vulnerability to all who saw it. Rather than the double-braced diamond established as the time-honoured bicycle standard, here was a two-sided triangle. With its twin carriers laden with luggage and a grown ninny in the saddle, there seemed little reasonable prospect of such a design covering the full and bumpy length of Europe without profound structural mishap. There wasn’t enough tubing, and what there was had been forged and assembled by Communists. Because try as I might, there was no forgetting my unhappy introduction to East German bicycles: the ten-speed GDR-built racer that was my sixteenth birthday present, a brand-new machine that died of old age before I could vote.

  At any rate, the frame clearly needed some sort of brace. After a fiesta of scattergun Googling I found that scaffolding handrails came in tubes of appropriate diameter, sold with clamps that together might make a bolt-on crossbar. Just in case this scheme wasn’t as excellent as it seemed, I did a search for ‘amateur frame-builder’ and emailed the first name that came up for a second opinion. ‘My instinct on the scaffold poles is that they aren’t a good idea, but I could be wrong,’ replied Stephen Hilton, before politely explaining in elaborate detail why he definitely wasn’t. Stephen’s easy way with the language of fillet brazing and mitres marked him out as an unusually capable amateur. His subsequent actions marked him out as an unusually wonderful man. Within a week, he had taken my frame away to his domestic workshop in Chorley, fitted a bespoke bolt-on top-tube and delivered it back to my door. ‘Just in time,’ he said as my eyes filled with tears of grateful wonder. ‘The front and back tubes were already way out of parallel.’ Despite my repeated efforts, this noble paragon of self-taught frame-builders would not accept a penny for all that brazing, mitring and crawling up and down the M6. It’s the least I can do to order you – yes, you – to buy one of his frames.

  Alas, it is almost time to bring this enthralling tale of salvage, plunder and mechanical give-and-take to a close. But one chapter remains before the Dr Frankenstein of expeditionary shopping bicycles brings his ungodly creation to life, and it begins with our spirited protagonist flicking the Vs at a Thompson bottom bracket.

  Soon after my MIFA arrived I noted that its between-the-pedals engine-room was home to that eponymous cottered horror, the same stupid, clonking mess that did its un-level best to destroy my 1914 Giro ride. Having bent down to insult this engineering travesty, I battered the hateful thing clean out of the frame with a club hammer. A cotterless replacement arrived in due course from Germany, and Peter from our pub-quiz team came round to help me coax it into place. Pooling our resources – his dextrous inventiveness, my crate full of century-old bike bits – we also fashioned a bracket to connect the arm of the rear-wheel coaster brake to the bike frame, and another to brace the wobbly rear luggage carrier.

  The great unknown was the Duomatic hub, which to judge from the state of the 1970s bike it came off hadn’t seen much action in decades. An online search unearthed an exploded diagram – more precisely a shattering detonation of microscopic ironmongery – which persuaded us to leave it be. To atone we slathered most of the bike in engine oil, then tightened everything up really, really hard, wishing we’d done these things the other way round.

  ‘Any better?’ asked Peter, when I returned from a five-minute test ride.

  ‘Night and day,’ I said, hauling my leg over Stephen Hilton’s crossbar. This sounded preferable to full disclosure: with my departure three days off, that was the first time I’d ridden the thing.

  3. THE WINTER WAR

  ‘Please, anything. Bread? I am on a bicycle. There are no shops. Please.’

  Two days in, and already pleading for my life. This lakeside hut renter was proving a reluctant Samaritan on the phone; I had just interrupted her assertion that the eighty-five-euro overnight tariff did not entitle guests to bedding, towels or sustenance of any sort. The hut was still more than 20km away, the daylight frail and frigid, and the next place to buy food was the town she was speaking from, a further 60km up the road. All I could be grateful for was that even here – way out in the frozen, lonely sticks – Finland’s deep association with mobile telephony had endowed me a three-bar signal.

  A pained sigh crackled from the speaker, at length followed by words. ‘Some people stay also with you. I talk and maybe they give you food.’

  Tim Moore

  @mrtimmoore

  Lovely day except for the minus 14ness. And the 11 hours to do 88km.

  To the cyclist, snow is like sand. If you’ve ever ridden a bike on the beach, you will have an idea of the consequent impact on speed and ease of progress. Every kilometre was an attrition of gasps and slithers, one more battle in this hopeless campaign to conquer a hostile infinity. I gazed through that fleece-framed slit across iced lakes and forests, my snood-muffled huffing the only sound in a cryogenic realm of white silence. I saw my first reindeer, a mournful taupe column shuffling through the snow with antlers downcast, on their lonely trek to a farmer’s casserole. Once every hour or so a car barrelled waywardly past, piloted by a blank-faced man in a docker’s hat with a fag between his lips. To preserve my bond with humanity I duly saluted each and every one, though with my many-gloved hands wedged fast in my pogies (as I’m afraid those oven-mitt handlebar covers are known), all I could manage by way of greeting was a wink. Until we hit minus 13, and my eyelashes started freezing together.

  Before setting off, I had researched the risks and rewards of riding a bicycle in extremely cold weather, as described by a plucky brotherhood of online ‘ice bike’ enthusiasts. The upsides seemed both vague and few, no more than a handful of rhetorical questions that begged for unkind answers: ‘Need a place to reflect and unwind?’ ‘Want to push yourself right to the limit?’ ‘How does your own private road through an Arctic wilderness sound?’ Not really; no; absolutely bloody terrifying.

  The downsides, though, presented an endless litany of danger and distress. In the brutal days ahead I dwelt regularly on the scariest. Most centred on the human brain and body’s suicidally whimsical reactions to extreme cold. When Captain Oates succumbed to frostbite on that sorry runners-up trudge back from the South Pole, he slept with his feet outside the tent: the agony as they thawed inside was literally unbearable. Take a bow, circulation and nervous systems – some lovely interplay there. (What a tragedy to reflect that i
f Oates had only been able to pull a pair of plastic carrier bags on under his socks, he could have starved to death with everyone else thirteen days later.)

  Then there’s the moronic package of death-welcomers we call hypothermia. In response to intense but sub-lethal cold, our brain essentially gets drunk – both quickly and extremely – and starts making giggly prank calls to every gullible body part. The hands that were frozen a moment ago suddenly feel pleasantly warm. Your eyes decide the map makes more sense upside-down, and a report comes in from your ears that a rescue helicopter is touching down just behind that hill. Before you know it your legs are striding enthusiastically off the path and up through a dense and snowbound forest, and making good speed with those clumsy boots discarded. Soon your fingers are so burningly hot that you offer your gloves to the centaur at your side, who gobbles them whole and vomits up the paisley Travelodge that will somehow evade the hikers who chance upon your clenched remains four years later.

  To fight off this insidious malaise, I had learned that one must first conquer the enemy within: sweat. If perspiration accumulates inside multiple layers and does not (bleargh) ‘wick away’, in very cold conditions it is likely to freeze. This is much to the detriment of your all-important core temperature, and when it happens, you already have one bare foot in the grave. Since the frozen-sleeves anorak incident I had been on paranoid alert against sweat and its causes, a vigil that began even before I set out in the morning. Fully clad in all my many layers, at room temperature I would begin to froth up like a salted slug within two minutes. The answer was to breakfast in thermal vest and long johns – sorry, landladies – before pulling on the rest in a sort of controlled frenzy, then waddling swishily out into the Arctic like a big fat love doll.

  That was the easy bit. Once the body hit normal operating temperature out on the road, any vaguely concerted effort would slam down every lever in my sweat factory. I’d survived a frosted-elbow scare while labouring up a gentle hillside before lunch, but the challenge now ahead was an open invite to heavy perspiration – concerted effort, and lots of it, was unavoidable if I fancied reaching that hut by nightfall. And that was before I factored in the circular conundrum presented by another capricious failing of psycho-physiology: if there’s one thing guaranteed to make you sweat like a pig, it’s the knowledge that doing so might kill you.

  It was way past six now, and the sun’s long goodbye was gilding the alabaster wilderness in a manner that would have doubtless looked wonderful through a heated windscreen. I lowered my glassy gaze to the Garmin screen, and watched the temperature flash down to minus14.2°C. A pitiful sniff froze my nostril hairs with a space-dust crinkle. Somewhere inside their six-layer cocoon of rubber, merino wool and polythene my toes died, a farewell klaxon-scream of agony fading into wooden numbness. Far more terrible, though, was the message that soon emerged from within my pogies: the thrice-gloved fingers that had been clawed rigid round the bars all afternoon now felt fluidly, lazily aglow, drawling for release from their four-walled thermal prison. Frozen shitlords! Here they came, the opiate delusions of hypothermia, luring me off to a peaceful, stupid death. The very thought squeezed my sweat glands like ripe citrus; both armpits prickled and a rivulet wriggled its way down the back of my neck. No! I arched my back to blot this bastard harbinger against an inner layer, and in doing so made a discovery that sent a steamy shriek of terror across the Arctic wastes. My anorak – the whole thing, sleeves, torso, collar and all – had frozen solid from the inside, an exoskeleton of iced sweat that I could have taken off and stood up in the snow beside me. Then befriended and gone off with hand in stiffened cuff, over the snowy hills to find that helicopter.

  Withdrawal, confusion, sleepiness, irrationality … My mind riffled desperately through the stages of hypothermic consciousness that preceded ‘apparent death’ in an online chart I’d found, hoping to recall which one bore the dread footnote: ‘by this stage you may already be too far gone to recognise the problem’. It didn’t help that sleepy, irrational confusion had been my default state for forty-eight hours. Then came the suspicion that the very act of hosting this inner monologue proved I was already too far gone to recognise the problem. How much further? With a dying groan I looked down at the Garmin and met a blank screen – the battery had gone. Hysteria welled in my guts. Did I have 5k left? Ten? The celestial dimmer-switch was on the twist from dusk to dark, and I hadn’t seen a car for at least two hours. When the road now curved uphill I succumbed to full-blown panic, pedalling so hard that my studded rear wheel begin to fishtail wildly through the snow and its underlay of polished ice. Sweat fairly sluiced down me, defrosting my eyelashes and stinging the mad red orbs behind them. Calm the fuck down! With a supreme effort I steadied my breathing, slithered to a halt and got off to push. This was better. Slow and steady, easy does it, we’re not at home to Mr Apparent Death. Bit slippy in these boots, mind, but … sweeesh … just one foot in front of … sweeeeeeesh … the other, and I’ll soon be sweeeeeeeeeesh-thwosh-FLOMP.

  I sat and watched the stricken MIFA slide gently back down the hill, exhaled remnants of body heat wisping out through my crusted fleece-hole. ‘The first rule of Arctic Bike Club is: you do not join Arctic Bike Club.’ My epitaph dwindled to a croak. ‘Rules end.’ Then I turned my head and there, winking through the trees and the frosted gloaming, was a cluster of lights.

  So unfolded the longest, hardest days of my entire life. The mornings began with a bleary, fearful peek through many layers of bedroom glass, scanning the sullen sky, the thermometer nailed to the window frame outside, and beneath it the wobbly, last-gasp slalom my wheels had traced through the snow the night before. Twelve hours later I would stumble into a hotel reception, or a log cabin, or a reindeer farm, or a decommissioned bank, and stand there, shuddering and melting, while my refrigerated, under-nourished brain struggled to process thoughts into speech.

  Winter duly fought on to the last man, and even as I crawled ever southwards that little red column of alcohol held its ground in the thermometer’s horrid depths. By mid-morning my feet would be gripped by a perverse torment that seared their soles like a red-hot ice-axe. The price of a single afternoon on full-defrost in the blazing Arctic sun was a burned and blistered balaclava face-slot, a fast-track to the full Fiennes. It would be weeks before I saw grass, tarmac or water that wasn’t coming out of a tap.

  The morning after my brush with exposure, the temperature hit minus 22°C, so extravagantly bracing that a haze of ice hung in the air, and every inhalation punched the back of my throat like a death-eater’s fist. ‘But our cold here is a sort of dry cold,’ said one of the woolly-jumpered snowmobiling chums whose weekend holiday hut I had almost died outside.

  Nice try, I thought, fumbling a spoonful of their reindeer soup between my chattering teeth. Your cold here is a sort of fucking cold.

  It was bitter; it was lonesome. After that grocery near my Näätämö motel, I endured a barren 170km – two full and terrible days – before the next commercial establishment of any sort asserted itself from the tundra. Overbearing desolation is what northern Finland does best, and I would routinely have entire afternoons to myself, watching the illimitable, primordial scenery fail to evolve and wondering if the regional authorities had introduced human hibernation.

  Even the major national route I crept along for two days was a ghost road. So far-flung were the towns that my eyes would dampen as I approached that black-on-yellow skyline sign, and imminent reacquaintance with those wonderful places I dimly recalled, where people lived and did stuff. Ah, a petrol station, a bobble-hatted family in the café inside squirting condiments all over a shoebox of chips, a man filling up his snowmobile with 95 unleaded. The sound of silence at last punctured by chainsaws and barking; a roster of smells beyond pine resin or wood smoke. It would be some time before I noticed that these towns weren’t terribly appealing, their iced streets broad but empty, drably lined with low-rise regional headquarters and other slush-bordered studies in post-war
concrete. Even when I did notice, I didn’t care.

  Tim Moore

  @mrtimmoore

  ‘Finland - land of contrasts.’

  Between these rare urban oases yawned bleak refrigerations of forest and frozen water. I would gaze at the depthless horizons of spruce-girdled white lakes and think, then say, then bellow: FINLAND, LAND OF CONTRASTS. The woods started creeping me out, so dark and primitive, the big-bad-wolf backdrop for a million scary stories since the dawn of time. ‘Few are the forests like Finland’s, with four-point-four hectares per Finn!’ Trilling out self-composed jingles seemed a good way of keeping my spirits up. Instead, they always sounded like someone’s final utterance in a slasher film.

  Crawling onwards I succumbed to an unlikely trio of tribulations: exhaustion, terror and boredom. The snowed-in wastelands had first emitted the stark and awful majesty of a fairy-tale curse, but their stern beauty palled. And so my gaze inevitably dropped down to the Garmin screen, with its dispiriting record of glacial stasis.

  Polar shopper cycling is a cruel mistress, with a taste for drawn-out Tantric sadism. Each day seemed to last a week, a Sisyphean torment of slithering sloth. How I struggled to recalibrate my entire concept of acceptable progress. On the flat, 14kmh was a balls-out, breakneck blast; the tiniest incline dragged me down to low single digits and empathy with Captain Scott’s men, hauling their own sledges up ice-shelves after their ponies froze to death. The Garmin’s odometer clicked up kilometre-tenths with such dismal reluctance that I repeatedly thought it had stopped recording. Some of these 100-metre chapters went on for ever, but I stared them out to the bitter end, like Gollum watching Ceefax. I can still remember 267.3. And 324.9, that was another. Maybe you had to be there. Just be very glad you weren’t.