Loops

#6

The loop was precisely 10.31 kilometres, starting and ending at the Weston Road cemetery. Greg had measured it to within a fastidious metre on a Garmin cycle computer that had cost him more than his first car. In the small hours of the morning for the last seven weeks he had freewheeled the two miles from his house to the nominal start line, using the cruising time to warm up and mentally envisage taking another second or two from his own record. He’d succeeded for 49 consecutive days.

The loop was his own creation. Forced into being by sleeplessness and circumstance on a night when his bed felt like a prison, the covers hot and uninviting. He had gone down the stairs, carelessly loud in the empty house, through the dusty playroom and the now barely used living room and into the garage where his gear was neatly stored.

He’d rode thoughtlessly away from the house; his legs churning in a mindless desire to feel nothing but the burning of lactic, his head down and his teeth gritted. Quiet cycle paths along which he’d once walked lazily to school, to friends’ houses, commuted to dead end teenage jobs on now took on an unfamiliar quality as the loop revealed itself. A complete thing unfolding from his rage and confusion. A full thing being brought into sharp relief from the darkness, like the profile of a mountain range illuminated by the rising sun. It was his.

The loop was made safe and possible by a quirk of idealistic town planning. Every major road in the town was mirrored by broad cycle tracks, doggedly following dual carriageways and ducking under roundabouts, connected by graffiti ridden underpasses, softly lit by sodium street lights. How Greg had come to utilise them, riding a time trial of his own making in the middle of the night, every night, was the result of many decisions layered over time, decisions that he had made and decisions made by others.

Cycling at 3 a.m. was strange and quiet and still. Its weirdness felt like a transgression and meant that he saw no one and no one saw him. It enabled Greg to ride fast. He would never have ridden so fast in the day because he was likely to endanger pedestrians and also because of the shame he would have felt at onlookers observing a forty-year-old man with roughly seven thousand pounds worth of elite-level cycling gear, pelting through the Hertfordshire suburbs at speeds usually associated with high-level French amateur races.

Greg hadn’t known that first night, preparing sheepishly for what at the time was a desperate and bizarre late night cycle ride, that he was committing himself to starting a routine that had no definitive end.

As he’d barrelled around his kitchen gathering equipment, the metal cleats of his cycling shoes clattering against the wooden floors, Greg had caught sight of himself in the mirrored surface of his oven. Head to toe in Rapha at three in the morning, alone in a house filled with infrequently played with toys. Instinctively he’d completed his outfit by wearing the huge mirrored Oakleys he always used on his Sunday morning rides. He’d at least remembered to take them off before wheeling his bike outside and riding off aimlessly into the dark.

The first part of the loop was his favourite, starting beyond an apparently historic house once owned by an author, Greg didn’t know or care what his name was, before running down into the cycle tracks proper. From there it was a straight line, marginally uphill, to the roundabout at the Oval before hooking right down towards Fairlands and the Town. On that stretch, sometime during the second week, he’d seen a far-off thunderstorm and as lightning crackled pink in the night away to the west of the town his mouth had made a perfect, childlike O of shock.

Over time he had shaved metres and seconds from the loop; honing the line he took around corners, cycling on the wrong side of the tracks where necessary, haring through junctions out of the saddle and straining. A few times he’d monitored the split times on the small LED screen clipped to his handlebars and had observed with horror that he was going to be slower than the day before. This prospect had so alarmed him on one occasion that he’d begun to cry. But each time that he’d been off pace he’d always been able to save himself with a gargantuan effort, finishing the loop and punching the “End Route” button with numb fingers, breathing ragged and spots of light popping in the corners of his vision.

But there was a limit. He knew that. He was reaching the edges of his ability, the brutal place where physiology met reality, regardless of equipment or desire. He found himself drifting in work meetings, already befuddled by insomnia and now deviled by the contemplation of his defeat by the loop. He’d snap to attention as someone enquired, “What do you think Greg?” – five associates and two managers around him, staring at his bleary eyes, noticing his biro tapping staccato against the rim of the table, a deck of pointless slides projected on the meeting room screen.

The loop was a secret, kept from everyone including the therapist he’d hired as a clear outward signifier of his intentions to grow and change. Not that that decision had thawed relations really. His therapist didn’t even know he couldn’t sleep. In sessions Greg presented a carefully calibrated version of what a man in his situation might be going through – empty house, monthly visitations, acrimonious mediation sessions, overwork. He thought of it like pitching to a client – you find the story that makes the most sense, that gets you closer to a resolution, and you tell it.

There was a gnawing sensation that asked whether it might just be easier to tell the truth. Each week since the loop had begun he’d been startled as the therapist stepped into the waiting room and breezily informed Greg she was ready. He was inevitably poring over the Google map of the route, trying to locate the points where he was lacking, could save time, and he would frantically close the window like he’d been looking at porn.

For the last week he’d barely tried to sleep and it was costing him. On the train he kept waking, jerkily and afraid, two minutes before his stop, the white noise he listened to to drown out the other commuters blaring in his ears. Then he’d get home and get changed and he’d pace, caged, waiting for the appointed hour to roll down his driveway and out onto the street as though it mattered. As though people were counting on it. Hands through his hair, hands on imaginary handlebars, visualising, swaying through the route, eyelids closed, fluttering, murmuring under his breath.

On the 50th night he’d sensed the end. The night air felt sluggish, his legs unresponsive. Swooping through the first stretch at the top end of Martins Way he was already behind the required timings. His breath pounded in his chest, his mind was a blank, inviting hum. Down through Bedwell, gears whirring, calves taught with agony, teeth grinding he flew, resisting for a moment, but already done for, midway through an inevitable valiant defeat. He considered stopping but rejected the idea in his head immediately. Fuck it, he thought. Fuck everything, fuck the loop, fuck me.

At the three quarter mark, cutting right, back through the industrial estate he watched the time on the cycle computer climb beyond any reasonable doubt and felt a heaviness lift from him as all meaning was divested from his actions and he was rendered what he truly was – a man alone, cycling in the night angry at those decisions he’d made, angry at those made by others.

By the time he was back on the lower stretch of Martins Way, in the final stages of connecting the dots of his loop, there was a smile on his lips. He didn’t even bother to end the route timing function on the Garmin as he rolled over the finish line. Forty minutes later, in his cycling bib and shorts, he was sound asleep, alone in his bed.