It’s a long way on a motorcycle. The house seems even further away with a dead arse, stiff knees, tight hips, and especially when you discover that you’re not even being rewarded with the proposed fuel-efficiency savings.
I’m here for two weeks. I arrived at 8.45pm last night, after setting off from my Auntie Katie and Uncle Simon’s at 7am that morning. Thirteen and three-quarter hours of travel on the clock, and that doesn’t account for the +1 hour time difference.
Taking the bike as an alternative to the car was to satisfy a few criteria that I’d set out to test. As everything in my life must apparently be Fit For Purpose, of course I’d defined three clear parameters by which the purpose of taking the motorbike could be considered fulfilled.
First, it was to save money.
I’ve been coaching for 13 years, and in that time have built a fairly good stable of current and historical clients. I’ve only advertised my personal coaching - that which would fall under CGR Cooke and not my boxing roles at Union Jab or Newcastle University - once in the past eight years, that I can remember. It hasn’t really been needed. I give so much of myself to my clients, study so intensely, and become so enamoured with their success that they often become more inspired to be coached, follow their training, and believe in themselves because I believe in them. This means not just that my clients are very successful, but that they tend to spread the word to close friends. For that reason I’ve always had a small troop of clients almost entirely through word of mouth.
The downside, if you can call it that, is that this way of coaching does not scale particularly well when you also have two other coaching roles and run a CIC. Union Jab sees me act not only as a coach attending evening classes, 121 sessions and organisation bookings, but as the founder and director who has at various points also been the web designer, staff trainer, social media manager, PR person, marketer and funding manager. Each role is small, but they are diverse and many. Believe it or not, running a community interest company that exists to provide meaningful social involvement in sport - particularly for neurodivergent people - isn’t really the big money maker you may imagine it to be. Therefore, I’m not exactly rolling in cash.
I pursued my career in reverse order to most. The norm I’ve seen among wealthy people, including many very well-compensated clients I’ve coached, is to begin in a working position, climb the ladder through management, perhaps start a company, make lots of money, and then once the mortgage is smaller or the children are older or retirement is in sight, start focusing on themselves. They find purpose through volunteering or charity or board work, improve their health, travel, pick up hobbies, and finally buy back some of the free time they spent decades selling.
I did not do this. At 18 I started my first company - a blog and YouTube channel attempting to make nutrition science accessible to the general public - alongside running two environmental preservation projects at uni. The demand for this service was as you’d expect but I didn’t: low. So by 21 I’d already been bankrupt once and was instead running my second company, trying to promote access to boxing for people who don’t really want to get hit. After the pandemic I brought it back with a much bigger emphasis on social work, and arranged my work in such a way that I could run loads, do DIY, fix my own cars, rock climb, coach people I cared about, and generally have some control over my own time. I traded the income that most people get first in order to find the fulfilment, purpose, satisfaction and freedom they typically go looking for second - most often in retirement.
I did not want to wait until my ever-more broken body was entirely decrepit before I could enjoy the freedom granted by it, hence going about it backwards. This trade-off of high purpose but low money is fine when you’re not married and don’t have kids... But last month I got married. It’s time I went a bit more traditional.
Now, at last, we’re back to the house in France and the reason for taking the motorbike.
Put simply, the house is part of a fairly massive change to my way of earning and providing value to the world. I’ve reworked CGR Cooke around the Fit For Purpose method - a phrase I realised I use to explain my relationship with almost everything, but especially health and fitness - reduced some of my face-to-face work, brought more people into Union Jab, and spent a good amount of time and money trying to make what I do more accessible to people who haven’t already been referred by somebody I’ve coached. I think it is the right long-term move. In the short term, however, it means quite a lot is going out while not quite as much is coming back in.
Therefore, with all of this set up and outgoings on a boxing CIC director’s salary, I currently don’t have much dosh to splash on bringing the car and its respectively more expensive channel crossing, motorway tolls and - I assumed - fuel bill. The bike was cheaper on the ferry, much cheaper on the French toll roads, and surely a 650cc motorbike would use less fuel than a car.
At least, so I thought.
Second, it would be more experiential.
I take my motorbike as much as I can. I’d wanted one for as far as my poor memory serves me, and I just feel like a ‘biker’ to my core. I love it in the same way I love running or cycling, as I don’t just watch the world go past but feel part of it. To paraphrase Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, when you’re on a bike you’re not witnessing the world go past through the picture-screen of a car windscreen; you are in it. The road is right there moving beneath you, and you could so much as stick your foot out and touch it.
There’s something just so much more involved with riding a bike. It feels more as if it’s a part of you because so much more of you is required to participate in its movement. I steer a car around a corner through a rack and pinion via the wheel in my hand, a series of mechanical steps in which even the force to direct the wheels is dictated by a power-steering unit. I engage with a wheel that is multiple steps disconnected from the final act that determines my course, and therefore our interaction feels disconnected too, as we sit still in a seat that is itself contained in a larger unit travelling through space at a completely different pace. But on a bike, I steer myself around a corner by simply looking where I want to go, my body naturally adjusting the distribution of my weight, a slight push on the handlebar, and some kind of magic that telepathically communicates to the bike where I’d like us to head.
I particularly thought my bike would be best suited to this type of pilgrimage, or Chautauqua, though in the years I’ve owned it I’ve never actually done a big trip of this kind. It is a V-Strom DL650 - an ADV bike of a class marketed as ready for long adventures over any terrain across multiple countries, though the running ‘joke’ is their almost exclusive ownership by well-paid dentists and doctors who will prepare the bike for a nuclear apocalypse despite rarely venturing beyond a coffee-shop car park, sipping on a cappachoochoo sat neatly in their fully waterproof riding uniform. Fortunately, the Suzuki badge on mine supplants the BMW one on those that give this reputation to the whole ADV class, and my Wee Strom is actually quite the capable machine. It’s been all over the North East with me, covered in mud and road salt, up to Scotland for bothy and riding trips, and at nearly 75,000 miles on the clock it has proven its worth.
I love my Strom in a way that’s only possible between the type of man I am and a machine - a classical-minded person, in the eyes of Pirsig. Autistic, in the eyes of a psychologist.
As I ride my bike so much and love nearly every second of it when I do, I wanted to test how I’d fare on my pilgrimage; a journey of many miles with lots of time to think on the experience as it happens, and perhaps enhance your relationship with God or nature or whatever higher power you choose to put a name to as you journey. I’ve felt myself become more spiritually distant over recent years as work and commitments to my community have crept further and further into my life, and if I’m going to keep banging on about health being made up of Five Pillars - physical, mental, social, emotional and spiritual - then it is probably quite important that I notice when I’m failing one of my own standards and therefore, importantly, not become a hypocrite.
By experiencing this route as a person travelling the roads, and not a person in a car that’s travelling the roads, I had hoped to enhance my connection to the environment and reconnect with a part of myself that’s gone a little missing. A moving meditation, perhaps, with enough time and road to think without the normal collection of screens, jobs, messages and people requiring something from me.
Thirdly and finally, I said I would.
If you say you’re going to do something, you do it; and if you start something, you finish it. I was going to call this an unobjectionable truth, though taken literally it obviously isn’t. Sometimes you start something stupid. Sometimes circumstances change. Sometimes the sensible thing is to stop pouring time, money or energy into a thing simply because a past version of you announced that it mattered. There is a difference, though, between intelligently changing course and abandoning something because you have reached the bit that isn’t fun anymore.
It’s a false reward to tell the world what you want to do, because you get a little rush of reward from everyone saying how impressive that would be, as if you can sponge a bit of the satisfaction in advance. Of course, you haven’t actually done anything, so the satisfaction isn’t as great; so you find plenty of people constantly talking about what they’re ‘going to do’ in order to constantly farm a supply of inferred gratification without ever committing to doing any of it. This is a means to experience at least some of the pleasure of being ambitious and productive without the pain involved in pursuing and attaining it. Yet with no pain there’s little gain, and you never truly experience the vast satisfaction made available from actually completing a task worth doing.
It’s for this reason I uphold the same standard with clients. If we agree to a programme in order to complete a marathon, then barring an actual reason that changes the purpose, you will complete a marathon. The means by which we get there must of course be flexible, and timelines change, but if we have indelibly clarified the personal rewards and satisfactions available from completing 26.2 miles, then it won’t do to farm the ‘well dones’ through training and then flip to a new goal of, say, weight lifting when all that’s left is the hard part of actually running it.
I’d said on my first visit to the house, and on every visit since, that I’d love to ride these beautiful French roads on my motorbike. On every long run or ride on my pedal bike - a very similar if not even more involved experience of the environment than its motorised brother - I’d thought how much I would love to do these routes at greater speed and lesser effort. This was the first time making the trip alone, in the height of summer at that, and there was no possible justification for now not to be the trip to do on two wheels. Even if I’d known in advance how I’d find the journey, or had been warned of the uncomfortable strain of hearing a 650cc engine at 80mph for long periods of time, I’d still said I was going to do it.
So I did it.
With the parameters set and the journey complete, we can now determine if the bike was in fact Fit For Purpose.
First: no.
Though cheaper on the ferry and much cheaper on the toll roads, I found that at motorway speeds and laden with big panniers and a top box, it was actually less fuel efficient than my car. So much so that the fuel cost and regular stops outweighed much of the cost and available time savings of the motorway tolls. This would be forgivable provided it was at least equitably a more fun and enhanced experience than it was expensive, which brings us to parameter number two.
Also no.
At 70mph/110kph+, a 650cc ADV bike going in a straight line is not a fun experience. Even with the pegs lowered and my constant shifting, my battered body cannot hold up particularly happily to sitting on a shouting, hot and entirely consistent bike for hour after hour. The Wee Strom is lovely; listening to it scream the same note at motorway speed while the wind tries to remove your head is less lovely.
I resolved this by coming off the motorway and taking my normal meandering route, which takes about 60-90 minutes longer. This was certainly more engaging and enjoyable and therefore made the perception of time go by much faster even if the clock ticked longer, but over eight and a half hours on what are still very well-maintained and relatively straight roads eventually eroded away at the enjoyment. I also had to resort to sticking headphones inside my helmet, as the engine and wind noise made listening to an audiobook through my helmet speakers impossible and turned the audible aspects of any music into only the tinny top notes - the presence of such distraction therefore taking away from the moving meditation I had sought.
There was no profound roadside spiritual awakening. No great revelation arrived somewhere south of Rouen. Mostly there was wind, fuel, traffic, numbness, a lot of thoughts, and an increasingly urgent need to straighten my knees.
However, in its final criterion, it did fulfil its purpose.
It got me to the house in France, and I now have two weeks to enjoy these roads with my friend the Wee Strom because I made the uncomfortable journey. Because I did what I said I would, and because I finished what I started, I have my pal available to cart me around the region as I split my time here between physical and mental work.
This, annoyingly, creates a problem for my own experiment. By the two apparently sensible measures I set in advance, the bike failed. It was not cheaper and, over the full journey, it was not more enjoyable. It also didn’t quite give me the rolling spiritual Chautauqua I’d imagined. If Fit For Purpose means choosing the thing that most efficiently achieves a measurable outcome, then the car wins and taking the bike was stupid.
But that is not really what purpose means.
Efficiency only matters in relation to what you are trying to be efficient for. If the sole purpose was to transport me and my luggage to France in the cheapest, easiest and most comfortable way possible, then I chose badly. But that wasn’t the sole purpose. I wanted to know what it was like to make this journey on my bike. I wanted to put the machine I love onto the roads I have spent years imagining riding. I wanted the long stretch of road and time alone, even if it turned out to contain rather less God and rather more dead arse than anticipated. And, most simply, I had said I would do it.
Perhaps this is where my original parameters were too neat. Some things are Fit For Purpose precisely because they are not the easiest way of doing them. A pilgrimage that is optimised until there is no inconvenience left in it is probably just transport. A marathon made painless is not a marathon. A life arranged purely around efficiency would presumably be wonderfully productive and absolutely dreadful.
So after thirteen and three-quarter hours, several fuel stops, stiff hips, angry knees, a thirstier-than-expected V-twin and absolutely no reward in the form of divine revelation, I have accidentally proved something slightly different from what I set out to prove. The bike was not fit for the purpose I thought I had defined; it was fit for the purpose I actually cared about.
My Wee Strom is sitting outside the house in France. I said I wanted to bring it here, so I brought it here. I’ve got work to do on the house, plenty to think about, and two weeks of those roads waiting for me whenever I put the tools or laptop down.
Maybe the bike was never meant to beat the car at being a car.
Best get to it.
