Book Review: The Wind at My Back — A Cycling Life, by Paul Maunder

Title: The Wind at My Back – A Cycling Life
Author: Paul Maunder
Publisher: Bloomsbury Sport
Year: 2018
Pages: 266
Order: Bloomsbury
What it is: A chamoir that mixes thoughts on cycling and writing
Strengths: It mixes elements of Jack Thurston’s Lost Lanes series with bits of Edward Thomas’ In Pursuit of Spring and Jon Day’s Cyclogeography
Weaknesses: It’s less than the sum of its parts

“You’re a writer, because you write, and you have no choice in the matter. But if no fucker reads it, what’s the point?”
~ Paul Maunder

Born in Oxford (“the city of dreaming spires, where I was born in the snowbound February of 1974, amid fuel shortages and the Three-Day Week”), Paul Maunder grew up in Watlington (“just another Oxford village with a quaint High Street, a homely butcher’s shop and a couple of half-decent pubs nestled among the cottages”) and nearby Henley-on-Thames (home of the regatta). Growing up, the worst thing to happen to him seems to have been a fear of what was under his bed. Not the monsters Pixar charmed us with but something else entirely:

“At five, I used to demand that I go to bed with the lights on and the door open. Before closing my eyes I would get out of my bed to check there were no bombs underneath. I was scared of assassination attempts. A sign of an over-active ego as much as an over-active imagination.”

As a child, Maunder rode the local lanes alone, with his father, and with a particularly middle-class group of CTC riders (“On some rides, my father calculated, because he values such things, there were more people with PhDs than not”). In time, he graduated to racing, in time he gradually became bored with racing (“cycling should always feel like an adventure, an exploration. Racing was fun, thrilling even. But I missed those long meandering CTC rides a few years before”), and in time he quit racing (“My racing career, which ended when I was 19, was modest. At the time I blamed a lack of natural talent. In recent years, having got to know a few elite racing cyclists, I’ve come to understand just how strong their competitive urge is. Without it an athlete will never drive himself to the top of his chosen sport. Impossible. I didn’t have that competitive spirit”).

At the appropriate age Maunder left home for university (politics at Norwich),…