Product Description

The story of one man's passion for amateur cycling, and his retreat from that obsession as real life barged roughly in. For a time there were four bikes in Matt Seaton's life, a training bike, a track bike, a mountain bike and a racing bike. His evenings were spent "doing the miles" on the roads between South London and the North Downs. Weekends were taken up with Club meetings, road races and time trials - rides that took him to cold village halls at dawn and out onto the empty bypasses of southern England. Cycling had become a passion that bordered on possession. When he was in the saddle, real life remained at a comfortable distance. But this flight from responsibility could not last. Life came flooding in with his marriage to Ruth Picardie, the birth of their twins and Ruth's brutal illness. Today the bikes that remain are gathering dust on top of the road grime from their last rides, museum pieces of a life distantly remembered. "The Escape Artist" is a celebration of amateur sport, a social history of the bicycle, an honest account of adult responsibilities and a quiet hymn to the beauty of cycling for its own ends.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #579581 in Books
• Published on: 2002-04-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 240 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
In reviewing Matt Seaton's The Escape Artist, the irresistible temptation is to adopt the shorthand of a marketing pitch and call it the Fever Pitch of cycling. Seaton's book, like Nick Hornby's, is about male obsession and the ways it changes (or doesn't) in the face of growing responsibility and maturity. In Fever Pitch the obsession was Arsenal FC; in The Escape Artist) the obsession is cycle-racing, the sport of strange, lycra-clad lads with shaved legs and eyes permanently fixed on the back wheel of the bike ahead. Seaton is particularly good at evoking the rituals of the sport (the loving maintenance of both body and bike, the relentless monitoring of calories, pulse beats and heart rates) and at recreating the adrenaline thrills it provides. His descriptions of his own races--with the cyclists bunched together for mile after mile, each one testing and assessing the pace and stamina of the others, until the sudden, dramatic opportunity to "escape" the pack offers itself--go a long way towards explaining the otherwise inexplicable hold the sport has on its devotees. His accounts of his own developing responsibilities, and of the tragedy of his wife's illness and premature death, which force him to reassess the priorities in his life, seem more tentative. It is as if the experiences, unsurprisingly, are still too raw and painful to be approached in any less oblique and indirect way. Yet it is these passages that give the book an individuality that makes it much more than just another story of male obsession. The Escape Artist is a brief book, easily read, but it is a moving one and it manages to say much in a short space about subjects more important than cycle-racing.--Nick Rennison

Review
A confession of an obsession with cycle racing, this book is a rich source of information providing not only technical details of the machines themselves but also an evocation of the insular world of bikies with their rituals, codes of honour and camaraderie allied to competitiveness. In attempting to explore the psychology of people who find a challenge in punishing themselves, Matt Seaton explains the relevance of associated activities, such as turbo-training, measuring pulse rates and even leg-shaving, and he spices the book with ancecdotes concerning fellow cyclists similarly obsessed with 'doing the miles' and 'feeling the burn'. Particularly memorable is the story of riders in the Tour de France stuffing slices of raw steak into the back of their shorts to use as a cushion before setting out in the morning then handing the meat, suitably marinaded in sweat, to a local restaurant in the evening. Whilst extolling the sense of sheer exhilaration in escaping from the mundane into a world of fresh air, speed and, sometimes, danger, Seaton is no mere cycle-racing evangelist. He balances his memoirs with an honest account of the extent to which his passion impinged upon his personal life, especially his marriage to the late journalist Ruth Picardie, dominated by early starts, time spent away from home and fears that their infertility problems are caused by the well-known effect of tight shorts. Seaton has avoided the trappings of obsession - boringness and self-delusion - to produce a highly enjoyable memoir which will appeal to fellow cycling enthusiasts and autobiography fans alike. (Kirkus UK)

Toby Clements, Daily Telegraph
His guilt, his shame, his incoherence and his helplessness as his wife dies are as poignant an elegy as anything I have ever read.

Customer Reviews

A captivating tale
The book captures the essence of the cycling experience, with wonderful descrptions of the relationships between riders. More than this, is asks some important questions about the relevance of this very consuming sport when "real life" knocks on the door and asks for a response.

I found myself unable to put the book down during the descriptions of Matt's improving results, and of his wife Ruth's
tolerance of his cycling, as they went through their trials.

The story of the pressure to give up a male obsession in order to satisfy the demands of a relationship with children were familiar territory, but left unexplored due to the tragic changes in the family's circumstances. I was left feeling quite sad and very moved by the account Matt gives.

One can't help but wonder if the cyling bug has really been extinguished in him; the passionate descriptions lead me to belive that he will find it hard to leaves cycling out of his life forever.

One for cylists and the people who tolerate them.

A must read book for any cyclist
The Escape Artist is by far the best book I’ve ever read about cycling and it tells of Matt Seaton’s life as a cyclist racing for the well known South London club VC De Londres. He used to train on the same roads that I used and it was heart warming reading in my front room in Cornwall about familiar names from my past such as Keston, Westerham, Badgers Mount and Knockholt. Places that I’ve ridden through hundreds of times on training rides. Mr Seaton was a road racer while I chose to do the less taxing discipline of Time Trialling, but I could easily identify with the obsessive nature of what being a racing cyclist is.
The book ends on a sad note with the death of his wife (the journalist Ruth Picardie) and the realisation that theirs more to life than cycling.
But after reading the 'The Escape Artist' Mr Seaton has given me an appetite to start pounding the roads again and I'll dust down my old Look Carbon Fibre racer as soon as the chiropractor's finished with me.

the escape artist
Matt Seaton's book,has for me been a real trip down memory lane,i too used to road race and i felt for him all the way through the book,i know what its like to win and loose,i also know how saddend i was to have to give up the bike.A damn good book,makes you proud to be a cyclist.