He’s Not From This World

As some of my beleaguered twitter follows may have picked up on, I have recently started cycling to work. Out of a desire to shed a couple of pounds, cut my exorbitant monthly fuel bill and reduce my carbon footprint, for the last couple of weeks I have been peddling the 50 mile round trip to the office and back two days a week.

It’s quite hard work but I’m rewarded by a wholesomely-smug feeling for my effort, so for the moment, all is good. All except one disturbing fact that is; in the two short weeks I’ve been biking, I’ve already locked horns with my nemesis.

My first contact with Him was disconcerting, but it was quite close to Hessle where I work and I had already done more than 20 miles. So when He breezed past me without so much as a drop of perspiration about His face I mistakenly thought it was because He hadn’t travelled far, whereas I had been cycling for more than an hour.

But the next time I had no such excuse. Two days later cycling through Gilberdyke – a good 10 miles from the site of our initial meeting – my nemesis once again passed me as if engaged in nothing more strenuous than blowing out candles on a birthday cake.

I tried to keep up with Him for about half a mile, but it was no good. Even peddling at what seemed like a frantic rate, He pulled away and I backed off to my normal pace with a bruised ego and not an air of smugness about me.

Now, you might think this is all a bit of an over-reaction; that I’ve just started cycling regularly and that I should give myself a break. And maybe I would, but there are a couple of facts I have omitted to mention hitherto … He, my nemesis, the man who has occupied too many of my thoughts than is healthy recently, is around 70 years of age and rides a rusty old bike I can only imagine he’s owned since a teenager.

I’m thirty-bloody-four for God’s sake. It’s just embarrassing being publically bested by a man twice my age riding something you’d expect to find in a skip.

I’m hoping my nemesis is a former Olympic cyclist who has kept His form ever since, or in his younger days competed in the Tour de France. Judging by the size of His calves, which bulge like a horny frigate bird’s chest as he speeds off into the distance, this could indeed be the case. But I doubt it. What is more likely, if His appearance is any clue – and I don’t wish to sound derogatory – is that He simply can’t afford a car.

So what to do? Certainly I am determined to be able to keep up with Him in the not-too-distant-future. But then what happens; what etiquette governs the situation? Does he one day pass me with all his usual indifference and I, realising I can finally match his pace, lock on to his tail like a heat-seeking missile? If so, what then? Do I pass him back? This would surely betray the fact that we’ve been locked into a contest from the first time our paths crossed; one he won’t want to lose, and will inevitably set about teaching me a lesson. I might win, but what if I don’t? Would it be too much for my large but fragile ego to bear? Would shame dictate I had to find a new route altogether? Who knows?

One thing I do know is there’s little dignity in a man in his mid 30s overtly trying to beat a man in his 70s in a bike race.

But that doesn’t detract from the fact He is my nemesis, and in actual fact, not a pensioner at all but some kind of super-villain in disguise. And like all the greatest superhero/super-villain pairings – Superman and Lex Luthor, Batman and the Joker, Bertie Wooster and Roderick Spode – good must eventually triumph over evil, which means before long I will be speeding to work without fear of being embarrassed by a man twice my age who sports freakily-oversized calf muscles.

I can then progress to conquer a whole set of new challenges – out boxing an armless man for instance, a 100m dash against an amputee, crushing a grape; the world’s my lobster once my nemesis is destroyed.

Oh what it is to be a man in this day and age.

I’m sure my grandfather once fought in a war or something.