Patience Is A Virtue, I Guess…
The dust has long since settled after the Tour de France. The prizes have been awarded, podiums dismantled, and the “Best Of” DVDs are already into production. In my case however, the Tour is still casting a long shadow over my work. What seemed to be a routine infection is proving to be a struggle to overcome. To cut a long story short, my body seems to have become amazingly inefficient at dealing with, and delivering, fuel to my working muscles. A well trained endurance athlete normally has an incredibly efficient body, one that can burn fat at remarkably intense workloads. Of late my body would appear to be going in the opposite direction. No matter how many easily assimilated calories I provide my body with, both before and during training, an inevitable black hole awaits me during my ride: a slow, draining process, in which I bleed energy and find myself creeping along, much like a ship in the doldrums with no sails. For the mechanically minded among you, it is as though my engine is working OK, but something in my fuel injection system is awry.
When usually blessed with perfect health, it is easy to believe that modern medicine is a straight forward case of diagnosis and treatment, preferably with strong and effective drugs. The reality, it would seem, is that it isn’t always so easy, or quick, to work out what is happening. That seems to be especially true of such a seemingly minor fault in the body, but one that has such far reaching consequences for an endurance athlete. I have been trudging faithfully from one doctor to another, undergoing several blood tests, each time coming up a blank. It is an infuriating situation to find oneself in. I, like most riders, know my body inside out, and to know that it is not reacting as it should, but to have no solution at hand is, to say the least, frustrating.
Since I was sixteen, and started racing, there has been one sure way to solve most problems I have been faced with: Train more, train better, try harder than before. It has been the way for me to buy a house, get job security, move on. It has been the big equalizer, the solution to everything. Work your ass off, do a good job, and everything will be OK. But now, maybe for the first time ever, my body won’t allow me to do that. The handbrake is on. If you were to ask my close family, they would probably say that this is making me quite hard to live with. I prowl around, restless, with no way to get the tension off my chest, because I have spent the last ten years dealing with stuff by going out on my push bike and riding myself into a heap.
With the help of my family and some precious close friends, I have been trying to remain positive. I have been training twice per day, in an attempt to keep my “engine” in shape, whilst giving my body time to refuel slowly in between sessions. The doctor of the team, the unique and charismatic Jose Ibaguren Taus, has been vital, patiently thinking through possible solutions. But the truth is that it is a constant struggle to stay bright and breezy while you watch a season that started so well slowly crumble in your hands. And with that comes the added sting, the fact that with just a few weeks of turmoil, a career that felt like solid rock can become sinking sand. No performances mean no new job offers. I often think that cyclists are like boxers, or golfers: confidence is everything. You feed on positive experiences, and when you manage to maintain that delicate balance things come easily, you feel invincible. But when that cycle (!) is broken, doubt quickly sneaks its head through the door. Memories of recent performances, in my case this spring’s Giro, fade quickly, and you begin to doubt that you could ever reach those heights again. Was that really me, climbing with the best in the world over the Gavia and Zoncolan? Is this stubborn and uncooperative body the same one that took me safely through so many three week races in the last ten years?
What is needed now is patience and trust. I should give my body time to heal, and have trust in both the doctors ability and my own talent. Time, however, is not on my side. The clock is ticking and I need to get back to a decent level, to start producing in the factory that is Pro Cycling. Anyone who knows me will tell you that patience is not one of my strong points. But, like any other training drill, I am working hard on my patience. I am trying to back off a little and let my body find its way to balance once more. Lets hope that some karma is around the corner, and next time I write for you I can entertain you with some light hearted story about the heady life of pro cycling’s most charming Englishman. Or Finn. Whatever…
