by Guy Martin
There was still plenty of racing to be done. I went to the new Armoy race in Northern Ireland. Me, Danny and Bob Wharton, a mate of my dad’s, in his late-sixties, went in the van. Wharton doesn’t get his hands dirty. He doesn’t even make the tea. He just sits there giving us worldly advice. He’s quite high maintenance.
I finished second to Farquhar in the feature race, but I loved racing that track. Me and Ryan agreed that one particular corner at Armoy was the quickest corner in the whole of road racing. When you’re crossing the start–finish line on your first flying lap, you’re hitting sixth gear on the Superbike, so accelerating to well over 180 mph. And the straight is not even straight, it’s a bit of a left-hand bend, then you just ease the throttle ever so slightly, no brakes, and peel in. There are no walls, bushes or trees directly next to the track here, so you can have your tyres right in the gutter and be hanging over the verge. Usually, in road racing, you can’t use all the road, or your body, that’s leaning off the side of the bike, will hit something. So you position the bike slightly in from the gutter.
The bike is settled through a corner like this. On the exit, when you’re winding the throttle back on from 80 per cent to 100 per cent it gets the bike squirming a little bit. If you got the entry to this corner wrong, by tipping in too early or too late, you would have to roll the throttle shut and adjust your line, and then you’d lose your momentum for the run down into Armoy.
It’s corners like this that separate those who can run in the top five at a modern road race from those further down the order. It’s a man’s corner. Road racing isn’t about how late you can brake into a corner, like I tried in my first race at Kells back in 2002. You’re not going to make up time at corners that way. It’s about going through corners like this flat-out, inch perfect, and knowing, but not considering, that if anything went wrong it would be disastrous.
My racing calendar had gone through a big change when I joined the English-based teams, AIM Yamaha and SMR. With them, I didn’t go back to Ireland except for the big International meetings like the Ulster and the North West 200. Going to Armoy brought it home how much I loved racing at the smaller national meetings in Ireland. Because Armoy was a new race, the organisers paid my ferry and put me up in a B&B. I finished second and earned a few quid. I’ve still never won at Armoy. It’s Dunlop country – their backyard.
Former racer Rob McElnea has complained about the Irish fans being against him when he was racing local favourite Joey Dunlop, Michael’s uncle, back in the 1980s, but the Irish fans have always been spot-on with me. I think they remember I learnt my trade over there.
At the end of 2009, I had to make a decision. Shaun Muir is a top bloke, but I’d been there three years and in that final year nothing went to plan. We weren’t moving forwards with the job, in fact we were going backwards. I had faith in the team structure, running without a foreman, but the last-minute let-down didn’t help. It wasn’t a case of thinking the grass was greener. Despite three podium finishes, I felt I was further away from winning a TT than I had been in my first year with the team. It was time for a change.
CHAPTER 11
PUSHBIKES
‘“You sad buggers, have you got nothing better to do with your life?” It looked so grim. The solo riders just looked like death. I had to try it.’
I’M NOT A fan of gyms. I’m not against them, I just don’t fancy going to them. During a busy time with work and the TV job I had a week where, because of work, I hadn’t been out pushbiking or anything, and then I had to go Birmingham for the filming job. I was in the hotel and thought, ‘Bloody hell, I’m going to have to go in one of these here gyms.’ I went to the hotel’s gym and I couldn’t believe what was going on. There were people flailing their arms and legs about, and blokes blatantly watching themselves in the mirror, with stern looks on their faces, while they were doing stuff. I couldn’t take it in. It all seemed to be about what you looked like. All very vain. Look at me, here I am. But, each to their own.
A lot of motorcycle racers use personal trainers, but I think if you need a trainer to spur you on there’s something wrong. The drive should come from within, but if that’s what people need to get the best out of themselves, then fair play. Again, each to their own, but I set my own goals.
If I lived closer to a fellow racer on a bit of a similar wavelength, like Leon Haslam, I wouldn’t mind doing a bit of training with him. I think he’s a top bloke, but I don’t have time to take half a day to go training. My training is part of my everyday life.
I was with Hector Neill, the owner of the Tyco TAS Suzuki team, one time when we were being interviewed for Irish TV. I was asked how I trained, and I said I didn’t really do any, but Hector disagreed. ‘Well, you could say that,’ he said, ‘or you could say you train 14 hours a day, six days a week.’ And I could say that.
While I’m at work I’m exercising all day. It’s not like being a car mechanic, I’m constantly jacking stuff up and lifting 70 kg truck wheels, truck drum brakes, back axles, truck cylinder heads – it’s all heavy stuff. It’s such varied stuff too, lifting, twisting, jacking, hammering – it’s oily, greasy cross-training.
One of the hardest job is changing Scania mid-lift pins on a three-axle truck. This is on the six-by-two trucks. That means it’s got six wheels, and two of them drive. The middle two steer, and also lift off the ground when the load is light or the truck isn’t pulling a trailer. Anyway, these pins hold the axle to the truck. To replace them you have to burn a cut in the bush and knock it out with a ballpeen hammer and a punch. It takes a hell of a lot of doing. Then you’ve got to knock another one in while it’s still hot.
I have the biggest ball-peen hammer Snap-On make, a BP 40 B+40 0z. I bought my first one when I was 16, but I wasn’t man enough for it. I was always blacking my fingernails with it. I’m all right with it now. I used to strangle it, hold it too close to the head. A person confident with their hammer holds it right at the end.
It’ll take 100 flat-out knocks to drive the bushes and pins in. You have to do it while you’re stood in the pit, so you’re doing it all above your head. To do them all it takes 40 minutes, non-stop. You know you’ve finished. You’re sweating. Every truck needs it doing every year or two. So I probably do one a fortnight. Jobs like this, and jacking cabs up, is all upper body work. The truck stuff is more anaerobic, and the bike is all aerobic.
When I joined the TAS Suzuki team I went to Queen’s University, Belfast to have my fitness levels checked. They confirmed what I knew, that I’m fit enough to race motorcycles. While I was there I got more advice on training, both for road racing and mountain bike racing.
I’m regularly up at 5.30 and on my bike for 6am. The end of Radio 4’s Farming Today is my flag dropping, then I set off pedalling to work. The shortest way is 12 miles, but I normally only do that one in winter. I’ve left home and it’s been so cold my Camelbak has frozen before the top of Caistor Hill, a mile away from the front door of where I was living at the time. The coldest I remember it going down to was minus-11. I take the easy route on a day like that.
Most days I’ll take a 20-mile route, with 1,000 feet of climbing, there and back. I love cycling down Immingham Docks on the way home. It doesn’t matter what time you go, it’s like the M25. All the coal tankers, the oil tankers, the cranes … I get a bit of buzz cycling that way.
When I was training for an Austrian mountain bike endurance race in 2011, I’d go 30 miles, call in for a brew at a mate’s house and get home for 11, then get up at 5.30 again. I’m not training for the sake of it. I was being technical about it, trying to increase my VO2 levels, to improve the anaerobic threshold. Basically, the harder your heart can beat before you go into the anaerobic state is a measure of how fit you are. Mine was pretty high, which is good, because you wouldn’t believe how hard your heart beats during a motorcycle race. My heartbeat is reaching well over 180 bpm at times. I can’t understand why, because I’m not out of breath.
To keep fuelled
up during all this cycling I eat a lot of pasta and chicken. I’m not much of a Jamie Oliver and I’m not even really bothered what it tastes like. If I have time I’ll chuck in some Dolmio sauce, but normally it’s just plain chicken and pasta. Sometimes I’ll throw some mince in. I’m getting more exotic with the spices and veg. Lasagne is my signature dish. And my mate Tim Coles is a beef farmer and sorts me out with some good cuts of steak too. For breakfast, it’s cod liver oil and a massive bowl of porridge every morning.
I’ve put a bit of weight on since 2011 and I’m happy I have. I’m about 11 stone four pounds and better for it. When I broke my back, in 2010, I was 10 stone seven pounds, and during some road races I was like a flea on a dog’s ball-sack. When I signed for TAS I knew I had to be heavier. I was OK on a 600, but I wasn’t man enough for a 1000. I’d lost a bit of upper body strength. I was too lean, with a physique more like a cyclist than a motorbike racer.
I’m more into cycling now than I ever have been. Some weeks I’m cycling 250 miles, just to work and back, and I race bicycles too.
My first downhill race was an urban downhill in Scarborough, the week after the Gold Cup in 2008. The organisers of these races would find a town built on a hill and riders would race over the man-made obstacles, like flights of stairs. I went with Kate and Mark Davis, who a few years later would make the TV show The Boat That Guy Built with me. I don’t know where I finished in the standings, but I remember I crashed a load of times. I enjoyed it, though.
It led to a magazine called Mountain Bike Rider entering me in a national downhill race in Ae Forest, near Stranraer, Scotland. It was daunting, and I didn’t do very well, but I learnt a lot and enjoyed just going to do something by myself, and sleeping in the back of my van.
I had been up to Fort William previously with Mark, riding the downhill course, but not racing. Maybe I should explain what downhill is.
Mountain bike competition, back when the popularity of that style of bike exploded, used to be cross-country. The races go through hilly and mountainous countryside that involves climbing and descending a long route, sometimes over 100 miles in a day. Cross-country involves loads of pedalling. It’s the mountain bike sport included in the Olympics. Downhill is totally different. Basically, you’ve got a bicycle that looks like a motocrosser without an engine. It has loads of front and rear suspension travel, a massive alloy frame and huge knobbly tyres. You jump on a ski lift to the top of a mountain, not usually when there’s snow, but there are exceptions, and then you ride down the mountain on a specially made course. There’s not a lot of pedalling involved, but it’s bloody hard. You wouldn’t think riding a bike downhill would be so physically demanding, but the course makes it tough. From the ski lift, you can look down on sections of Fort William’s course and the thought goes through your mind, ‘You cannot ride a bicycle down there!’ There are huge six-foot-plus drops onto rocks and boulders at all sorts of angles. But, as I’m still learning on a downhill mountain bike, speed is your friend. You hit them hard enough and you clear the gap. But it takes commitment. And it doesn’t always work …
There’s a world series of downhill racing, the UCI World Cup, and Fort William would be one of the most challenging courses.
An organisation called No Fuss organised a six-hour downhill mountain bike race at Fort Bill. Instead of doing one run, as fast as you possibly could, you had to do as many runs as possible in six-hours. I finished something like fifteenth in 2008, though I wrecked myself, because I was always crashing. I was so tired, my arms so pumped up, I couldn’t pull the brakes, so to lose speed I’d crash on purpose. It didn’t occur to me to stop and have a rest.
Downhill offered another challenge, another buzz to fit into the weekends when I wasn’t racing a motorbike.
I promised myself that if I had a good TT in 2009 I’d take some time off work and compete in the Megavalanche downhill race at Alpe d’Huez in France. But I thought I had a poor TT, I was on a bit of a downer, so I went back to work on Monday. Then again we weren’t too busy at the truck yard, and I couldn’t shake the idea of going to the Megavalanche, so I got on the works computer, found out that an easyJet flight wasn’t too much, and it wouldn’t cost a lot more to take my pushbike, so I arranged with Dad to disappear for a few days.
I took my bike to bits and stuck it in a box, flew from East Midlands to Geneva and went to pick up my hire car. The trouble was, I didn’t have a credit card. I’d never had one, agreeing with my mum that if you can’t afford, you can’t have it. Even though I’d paid for the hire car they still needed a credit card to use as a guarantee. They didn’t want my passport or cash, just a credit card number. I was close to turning around and going home, but a Frenchman next to me, who could see I was having a bit of bother, put it on his credit card. What a legend! I’ve no idea what would have happened to his credit rating if I’d driven off the side of a mountain.
The Megavalanche is infamous in the mountain bike world. It is a cross between a downhill and a cross-country race. You start at the top of the alp, on the glacier, and you come down however you can. Some people try to ride it, others hold their bikes and just slide down on their arses. Once you’re off the snow you’re on a single track, and it swaps between cross-country, then a downhill section, then some uphill cross-country, then more downhill. When you see aerial photos of the start it looks mental, people just tumbling down the mountain. It’s hardcore.
I got to Alpe d’Huez and did the two days of practice, then on Friday I crashed and broke my big toe. I was racing the Southern 100 the next week, so I changed my mind about doing the Megavalanche race, but it was still a great experience.
The next year, 2010, after I broke my back at the TT, the motorcycle racing governing body wouldn’t allow me to race a motorbike for a while, so I went back to Fort William for the six-hour downhill endurance. To compete, of course. I wouldn’t go all that way to watch other buggers doing it. It almost goes without saying that I properly spannered myself, again, just six weeks after breaking my back.
Before that, I had my first 24-hour mountain bike cross-country race back in 2009. I did this first one in a team of four, with some of the lads I’d ride with in Lincolnshire on Tuesday and Thursday nights. We did all right. Then I did it in a team of four with the lads from Hope Engineering, a mountain bike parts company based in Barnoldswick, Lancashire who I’d become friends with.
Next I did it as a team of two. I was a guest at a motorcycle show in Aberdeen and met a couple of blokes up there and we got talking about pushbikes. They were two brothers, Francis and Forbes Dungait, who I met because they were mates with Alan, one of the Isle of Man TT scrutineers. Francis will have been about 60, and Forbes was in his mid to late fifties. Francis told me his brother was into bikes and had done the Strathpuffer. Anyone who is into mountain bikes knows the Strathpuffer is as tough as it gets. Forbes had been on the podium in the two-man class, so I knew he wasn’t a messer. He said he was planning to do the next one, but his team-mate had pulled out. Did I fancy it?
After that one meeting Forbes and I had a phone call to arrange where to meet and that was it. The next time we met was at Ullapool. It’s so far north only the hardcore actually manage the drive there.
I’d been training like hell, because I didn’t want to let Forbes down. We would complete a 50-minute lap each, but by two in the morning, I’d finished my lap and had to do another because Forbes wasn’t up to it, so I’d double up a couple of times. I wasn’t bothered about the result; my whole focus was on not letting Forbes down. In the end we finished third out of 100 or so teams of two and we beat most of the four-man teams too.
I’d seen that there are some who ride the full 24 hours solo, not as part of a team. I’d look at them and think, ‘You sad buggers, have you got nothing better to do with your life?’ It looked so grim. The solo riders just looked like death. I had to try it.
In 2012 I rode the Relentless 24, again with Forbes, and we came second, though we should have won it.
I had a bad cold. Blood was peeing out of my face. I must’ve ruptured something blowing my nose so hard.
Then I had the notion of doing the Strathpuffer solo – the ultimate challenge – and finished fourth out of about 80 solo boys and beating loads of the two-, three- and four-person teams.
Every six hours I’d stop for four or five minutes, maximum, to have some warm porridge and sugar. Every lap I’d have an energy drink and energy gels. You’re burning so many calories, cycling for 24 hours, that you’re eating all the time, and by the end of it you’re sick to the back teeth of eating, but you’ve got to eat, because if you start to feel hungry it’s already too late.
I was second at three in the morning and my bike broke, so I had to push back and get my spare, losing time.
I enter these events because I like pushing myself, seeing what I can do. I actually like the pain. I’m not doing it for pats on the back, but I get a lot of personal satisfaction from the races. By physically pushing myself I can get a buzz similar to what I’ve always got from racing motorcycles on the roads. It’s not quite the same, but it’s getting there. And the more I do it, the more I get into it. The harder the challenge, the more I’m interested. That’s how I got around to entering a 24-hour cross-country mountain bike race and riding it solo. It’s my thing now.
I raced another 24-hour solo, at Fort William in October 2013. I came third, and was on the podium with the world champion. That race taught me that, even when your body is screaming, ‘Stop, you bastard!’ it will still produce power. I’m now having to recalibrate my mind to what it’s possible to do. I had said that if I ever got on the podium in a solo 24-hour mountain bike race, that would be that box ticked, but now I’m so close to winning one, I don’t want to stop.
The biggest crash I never had was on a fixed-wheel bicycle. Fixies are quite trendy in a lot of cities, but they’re originally track and training bikes. Fixed wheel means the back sprocket has no freewheel, so if the bike is moving the pedals are moving, you can never stop pedalling. The bikes they race in velodromes, like Chris Hoy in the Olympics, are fixed wheel. They don’t have gears, just one chainwheel and one rear sprocket, as simple as it gets.