Borrowing the will of the ball

For about two years now I've pretty much hated cycling. Even seeing people in lycra has annoyed me. I hated it so much I gave it up. For 197 days since last October.

Mentally for me, cycling had become an attritional and miserable activity involving being wet and cold and in the middle of nowhere, and bikes had become the kind of obstacles that you fall over repeatedly indoors when you're trying to get the hoover out of the cupboard, rather than things for outdoor use. A hobby that started out as a bit of fun and a chance to get some fresh air and see some new places had turned into the sort of thing that Peter Jackson could have made a new trilogy out of.

Arriving in Arnside in June 2012 under a misty, soggy, dark and rainy sky, after a 108 mile, 13 hour bike ride, and being unable to remove my own socks, knowing I had to do it all again the next day, then being up most of the night downing Powerade and doubting my own legs and then getting up and doing just that might have been my greatest ever achievement on a bike, but it was also the point when I realised most clearly that it had stopped being fun. I pulled more muscles trying to get those socks off that I ever did on the road.

But that wasn't the start of the misery. No, that came a long time before. At the start of 2011. With a whole year's worth of cycling for Ruth and I having been not only planned but written down in felt pen on a laminated wall planner (being so organised for once must have been a bad omen), Ruth was hit by a car in January and all those plans were ruined.

Except I didn't notice. Instead of adapting to the new information, I kept plodding along the pre-planned track, thinking that it was just a ripple in the stream that would correct itself.

The low point of my evidence denying lunacy was attempting a 200k Audax on a baking Easter Saturday, while Ruth was at home in the garden. I was being driven by forces I didn't even understand. After 30k of it, having pulled a few muscles going off too fast, and stunned by the bewilderingly long list of places I was supposed to cycle in and out of in the next 12 hours, in weather so hot I could have fried an egg on the pavement, I gave up and went home. But by then Ruth and I had become out of sync.

I persisted in arranging a cycling holiday for us in May 2011, when for Ruth even the sound of a car engine could induce panic and fear, and it became less a holiday and more a post traumatic stress filled, ash cloud and hurricane strength winds fleeing misery.  

With that, my main fortnight's holiday of the year was gone, and plodding along as I was in a job that was driving me round the bend, by the summer of 2011 I was completely unravelling mentally.

By August I reached a breaking point. I walked in to work one day and walked straight back out. At a time when Ruth needed me to be there to lean on, instead I was collapsing under the weight of my own anxieties.

2012 started with some unemployment and a trip to India. I'd become a dead man walking, and it was an attempt to bring me back to life. For someone like me, who hates unpredictability, it should probably have been kill or cure. In the end I'm not sure it was either.

Another accident in February 2012 put paid to Ruth's cycling recovery, and our chances of getting back into sync on the road. By that time I was heavily into training for the absolutely bonkers challenge, that was cycling Coast to Coast to Coast over 2 days with a bunch of other 40 something mid-life crises made flesh. The irony is, despite the unremovability of wet socks, and the appalling weather on that ride, and in all the training rides that led up to it, it may well have been my finest hour on a bike. It just didn't feel like it. It was nothing like the fun-filled, sun-filled lengthy pub lunch enjoying (and occasional trip in an ambulance) jamboree that had been 2010's C2C. No, it was grim.

After 2 years of being disconnected from her bikewise, I resolved at the start of 2013 to put the emphasis back onto cycling with Ruth but again January was a disaster. I was miserable all through a group weekend away, feeling mentally completely fatigued and all at sea, and within 4 months we'd somehow contrived to split up altogether.

As a cycling year 2013 was a failure. At first I couldn't get going on a death trap of a bike that had a special gold ring missing from the steering (cue Peter Jackson). Overweight and with no motivation or will to continue, I was half-hearted at best. Instead of completing things in a weary and bedraggled state a la 2012, I stopped completing them at all. I'd gained two stone since the high point of 2010 when I'd done nearly 5000 miles, and I was feeling sluggish in every way.

By May 2013 I was living alone in Darlington, and the few rides I did with friends that year, rides I would have coasted through previously, I either grovelled through, or gave up part way. Going uphill in particular had become a crawl-a-thon.

By the summer of 2013 I decided to start at the very beginning again. Instead of trying to be a macho man riding the big distances in the wind and the rain I decided to start small.

Instead of thinking about distance, I tried to just enjoy being on a bike again. And for a while it worked. With no car anymore, I really started to enjoy the 3 miles each way to work and back on the mountain bike (the other bike Ruth had bought me, the less death trappy one).

The roads were pretty potholey but with the suspension and the big tyres I didn't feel the bumps, and I was really enjoying being able to ride up the kerb. I also liked the fact that I didn't need to carry any spares, because the longest distance I'd have to walk in the event of a breakdown was a mile and a half.

And so I had a brief relapse into enjoying cycling again. I rode through South Park each morning with the morning dew still fresh on the bowling green, getting abuse off parrots and talking to dog owners and on those short sun-filled journeys, whatever it was that had ruined cycling for me was being repaired bit by bit but then in August some little shite stole that bike I loved and that was the end of that. My enthusiasm was lost all over again.

For a while I continued tackling the potholes on the road bike, but I felt the bumps a lot more, and getting up the kerbs wasn't anywhere near as much fun.

There was a bright spot of going to Scotland in September to ride round some Scottish Islands on the finally fully functional former death trap, but mostly that was about using the most efficient means of transport at getting round the islands, rather than wanting to ride. Even an 80 mile dash back to Ardrossan to get home in time for Graeme's Audax was ultimately a bit of a let down, when I didn't complete that ride either.

By October when the clocks had changed and I was going to and from work in the dark, on skinny tyres, and over potholes everywhere, I just thought 'Ah, fuck it, I'd rather walk'.

So for almost six months, from October till the end of March at which point I gave up my job to move to Leeds I walked to work every day. 3 miles each way. In the dark, and in the wind and the rain. Along roads lined with dog shit, under a railway bridge that had to be power washed every day to get the pigeon crap off. Because I didn't have a car, I walked lots of other miles too. Some days up to 10 or 12 miles. I know this because for a while I carried a pedometer.

I don't really do strategy, but if there was any vague strategy behind my actions it was that I was going to spend six months walking, and then if I ever did get back on a bike again, I'd have lost some weight, and I'd have some residual stamina in my legs to start with.

When I moved to Leeds last month, I thought the move would help revive the cycling. Having somewhere new and different to ride. At first it didn't. I bought the Sustrans map of West Yorkshire, but for a month I only ever looked at it from a chair, and never from the road.

I even took up running instead. There were various reasons for this, but some of it was undoubtedly bike avoidance.

Then one day, shortly before I passed 200 bike free days, I finally took the road bike outside again. The cycling was pretty much how I remembered it. Fatigue, mental confusion, inability to map read, going round in circles, mud, dog's climbing up my leg, potholes, dirt tracks, bin lorries scaring the crap out of me, so tired I lost all language skills by halfway. That sort of thing.

But despite all that, it gave me the push I needed to finally replace the stolen mountain bike. And then a morning of nearly removing my own fingerprints trying to attach an old style bike computer and magnet to the mountain bike convinced me to buy a Garmin, and so the ball was rolling again. But I was still felt somewhat lacking in real motivation.

For a long time in the last year or so, I've been fixated on the past. On the pivotal moments in life when I've chosen certain paths. And I've been very aware of the things I've lost. Sometimes those feelings have seemed overwhelming. The decision to move back to Leeds after nearly 25 years away brought back a lot of memories and it made me weigh up everything that has happened during that time away.

I know that there's a tendency, which I'm invariably guilty of, of sometimes looking back on large periods of life, and only picking out the salient events which demonstrate the areas where things have gone wrong. Woe is me and all that. It's probably that thing called awfulisation that my counsellor was on about that time. Well, for a long time that had been me and cycling (it was also me and Darlington, but that's another story). For those 197 bike free days I was only thinking about the bad stuff. Like a child with an otherwise happy childhood, who couldn't stop thinking about being force-fed Brussel Sprouts at mealtimes.

Anyway, as far as the recent past goes, and the cycling in particular, well somewhere in the misery that I got myself lost in, I managed to separate and alienate myself from the person who was most responsible for getting me into cycling in the first place, and who was the one who would pick up the pieces on the road when I crumbled, mentally or otherwise. The person who I was most evenly paced and in tune with, and who would take charge and go order me some food when I was imitating the action of a zombie in Killin or Berwick-on-Tweed. And in other places, when I couldn't remember my own name, or where I'd come from that day. That's not to suggest it was all plain sailing out there, all sweetness and light. Far from it, there were plenty of instances of near divorce at the roadside too.

As for things as they are now, well whatever the rights and wrongs of the past, you can only start where you are. I suppose, in the end, with life, as in cycling, eventually you have to stop feeling sorry for yourself, thinking about what's gone wrong, and just get on with things. For the sake of the present, and for the future. Otherwise 197 days can turn into the rest of your life.

Re: the cycling, some advice I'm probably misquoting came some time ago from my friends Graeme and Stephen, who have both said (sort of) that if you don't set any goals, you won't do anything.

If I know myself at all, I know that I lack the motivation for going it alone. I just don't have the will to do big stuff by myself. It's why I never decorate. Historically I've always been better in a team, or a partnership. It's why I was good at rugby and football but crap at squash and tennis. When it was only me I just didn't care.

There's a scene in the film Awakenings with Robin Williams, based on the real life experiences of Oliver Sacks, where otherwise seemingly comatose patients will stick their arm out to catch a passing tennis ball, and he describes this as 'borrowing the will of the ball'. Sometimes I lack the means of giving myself the push I need to do things, and so I also need to borrow some willpower from outside myself.

Anyway, since I want to do some stuff, but haven't got the heart for going it alone, I decided that the only way to properly kickstart my enthusiasm for cycling again, was to join some organised events.

Because I lack the get up and go to get up and go by myself, a possible way round it is to find some other people who are going, and get up and go with them instead, even if I don't know who they are. So that's what I'm going to do.

Today I've signed up to do a Coast to Coast ride at the end of June and an End to End (Land's End to John o' Groats) ride in September. Both trips will work out somewhat more expensive than if I were to do them alone and unsupported. But that's kind of the point. To do them alone and unsupported means in all likelihood not to do them at all. Because for me they are big things. Not just physically but mentally and emotionally. And to do them I know I'll need the benefit of mutual encouragement / shared experience / no man is an island and all that.

Now if it would just stop raining for 5 minutes, I could go out and do some training..