Two Strange Years.

So I got better. You may have noticed the blog rather died on a wail of despair. But I didn’t actually! I did in fact get better. I didn’t know what to make of the whole thing for a long time. My fingers and in fact many things about my life froze.

I initially fell sick in October 2020. 10 months of hopeless stasis later I rolled down the road for jab two. My first vaccine dose had done nothing for me so hope wasn’t high. The next morning I awoke and something had changed, I don’t know quite how I knew. I still felt groggy and tired as I had for most of a year. The tenor of it was different somehow, I KNEW something was different. It felt more like a hangover than the permanent weight of fatigue and by the early afternoon I was bouncing. Energy at last. Still, when I went to sleep that night, I dreaded putting my head on the pillow.

If you read accounts from people with Long Covid many will mention a pattern. This is a sense of progress, of feeling better in the evening followed by a return to square one by morning. I’ve seen this put down to the body’s release of histamine overnight. It’s a trying way to live. You feel at your best as you go to sleep, like your recouvery might finally be progressing. Then morning comes. One remembers what it’s like to get better from a bad cold or flu, you start to wake up feeling better. With Long Covid it simply never happens. All the while the mind forgets to temper expectation. The disappointment each groggy morning never softens. It took months for me to stop making plans for two weeks time when I would be better. In retrospect, it’s no surprise that when I did get better, I struggled to believe it.

In a disorientingly short amount of time, the pattern shattered. I went for some exploratory bike rides. I worked a full working week. Quite by surprise, my life had been returned to me. Like a bloody miracle. I assumed this was temporary respite, that I should enjoy it while it lasted. But it’s a year and a bit later, my body is still mine. I’m back, I’m me. I won’t have to live my life as a semi-recluse, recovering for three days from a walk to get coffee. I’m back doing endurance events on my bike, I’m faster than I was before in fact. Progression returned to my life. I did not know what to make of it.

I asked my therapist if this counted as a traumatic experience. Emphatic yes. I suppose in retrospect it must have been. Ten months looking at the ceiling. How on earth I was going to survive? Is this now forever? With a whiplash crack, it was as though it never was.

I know exactly when I figured it was behind me. When I could stop living for the moment. It was the first time I surpassed something I did pre-illness. The Mallorca 312 is a 312km bike around the mountainous north of the island. In 2019 pre-Long Covid I got around in 11 hours and 37 minutes. In 2022 I did it in 10h:43m. That’s a big boy gain, I smashed it and it wasn’t even a smooth run, I crashed halfway around and it didn’t stop me.

I was utterly elated.

Two days later I got sick, stuck that thing up my nose waited 15 minutes and the test almost screamed at me. POSITIVE! Full of lurgy! Sick as can be but this time I healed like you’re supposed to after a miserable week and change. After that, I had all the evidence I needed. Whatever it was about Covid my body couldn’t handle pre-vaccine in 2020 it had resolved by 2022. My body was normal again.

So move on.

The manic push to experience everything I could faded. I found I had to process the two strangest years of my life. One half I’d spent flat on my back the other pushing as hard as I could. To feel good and live as much life as possible because the inevitable relapse must be coming and it’d kick hard. A lot of small things went ignored. My talent for not thinking about the inconvenient, I had honed to a soaring level. Unpacking it has been an interesting experience to say the least and I’m far from done. But the body is healed. Mostly. The way I concentrate has fundamentally changed. I used to have mild allergies now I have really bad ones, for which I have a permanent prescription of turbo anti-histamines. The booster knocked me clean on my backside for two months. Horror show! I thought it was back, but I did heal again.

My mind remains disoriented by the meaningless chance of it all. Still, my legs work again, my heart beats, I am more rested in the morning than when I lay down to rest. Slowly the mind catches up with the body, just the same as when you first fall ill, it takes a while to accept the change.



I’m Chronic.

Let’s call Long-Covid what it is then shall we? It’s a chronic illness. A new one. A shocking thing to think about for the many of the people that have it. We are beginning to discover that a scary number of people have it and have had their lives changed by it. We must hope not forever but seemingly no one really knows. It’s a disaster, an appalling disaster and just like the more than one hundred thousand dead Britons and three million lost worldwide largely something that could have been prevented by an actually functioning society.

I have it. I’ve been sick for 6 months and counting. I turned 29 on the 2nd of October and was sick and off work by around the 10th. I have never really gotten better. On my birthday I got up at the crack of dawn to go cycling. I was a very fit indeed cyclist. It’s a point worth stressing for those that somehow still do not realise how dangerous COVID is but, in order to be fitter than I was at the time, you’d need to be obsessed. Yes, certainly, there were plenty of fitter and faster people than me, for those people though, words like “a hobby” don’t quite cut it. I was cycling between 350 and 450 kilometers a week. I loved it so much, it gave my life so much meaning and adventure, it was my meditation, what I did to socialise, what I’m doing for my career. I so dearly hope that’s not gone forever. I’d found my thing, I wasn’t particularly looking for another.


Because now I am nowhere. Half the days a week I’m not making it to the shops. I’ve had some better days. Days when the sun hits my face and I feel the pleasure of a good mood and can walk around my area feeling good, but I can feel all the while swelling in the back of my neck, a dull nausea, dizziness if I move a bit too fast and a faint headache. I can tell my body is sick and that these feelings will ramp up and up sometime soon. Imagine getting a cold or the flu and just waking up every morning not feeling better. A week passed, then another, then months and I just did not get better. Till eventually, I had to give up hope that I would actually get better and had to come to terms with a life seemingly irrevocably changed. The things I love to do gone and the prospect of having to change my perception of what I am capable of and what my life might look like in order not to totally despair. 

Of course, I still hope I get better. I would be devastated to fully accept that cycling as a big part of my life is over. This illness I have is too new and very little is known about it, so maybe there might be a cure. That sadly is part of the fear. I live in the U.K a country controlled these days mostly by corruption and ineptitude. Some of the good bits still function but they are on their knees due to the deliberate neglect of austerity. Who knows if this is the sort of country that will honestly try its best to solve something like this anymore. I hear a shocking number of NHS workers have Long Covid, which they contracted fighting for our lives. I sure hope a cure is coming.

I do believe I’m one of the lucky ones. I’ve got let’s say enough health to be mostly functional. My work has been tremendously supportive, I can go for a walk feel the pleasure of being outside at least a couple of times a week. My lungs are not turning themselves inside out, I have this headache but I don’t think I’m losing my memory in the way some describe, it’s more like a migraine than losing the ability to think. Comparative suffering is a stupid game, but, comparatively, I guess I’ve done okay amongst the Long Covid havers.

To spare my mental health I’ve begun planning for what I might do if I can’t live the life I was living. I am of course absolutely hopping mad that COVID was allowed to ravage this country like this. I got this bloody thing in October, right as cases were surging. Imagine how many would be alive or not crippled by this thing if our government gave a split damn. I took up cycling to avoid having to think too hard about the terrible things I’d learned about the world whilst studying politics. The world seems to now resolutely be the sort of place that forces you to look at it, whether you’d like to or not.

Suddenly, nothing.

About a month ago I woke up to train. Quite a high-intensity session. Got about 3 minutes into the first interval and had to stop. No big deal, wasn’t feeling it, the body didn’t want it, happens sometimes. I congratulated myself on my maturity for stopping, spinning out the legs and scheduling in a quiet week. For the rest of my day, I felt fine, two days later I felt awful.

Fatigue, nausea, weakness in my arms, bit dizzy almost. Feel a bit like I might be hungover. I say feel because a month later I feel exactly the same. I’ve gone from very fit and healthy to housebound overnight. Concentrating to write this is a struggle.

I’m not depressed. I don’t say that lightly, mental health is something I take seriously both for its own nature and to watch for it in myself. I’ve taken the deep dive into black days, these are not they, though they threaten to become them if they continue much longer. By dint of not leaving the house, I’m getting lonely.

It’s a feeling of enormous powerlessness. Every day I wake up hoping to feel that bit better, that feeling you get when a cold is over, not well but better. Every day mirrors next. I spring out of bed with as much positivity as I can muster and try to get the engine going. Get in the shower, nip out for a short walk, etc. I can barely make it to the shop and back, a month before this I cycled 600km in a week up over Dolomite Cols. My horizons have shrunk so fast I’ve got whiplash. It can’t go on.

To that end, I’ve started forcing myself to move through the fatigue. I don’t know what else to do, stretching and going through what would normally be my recovery routine leaves me feeling better for a short time, then utterly exhausted.

I wonder where this has come from. I’m being put through a battery of tests by doctors, with more to come. I assume it’s not overtraining, it wouldn’t have been so sudden and total. I hope whatever it is can be cured, this cannot be the new normal.

It’s shown me how quite how much cycling has become the central beat to the rhythm of my life and opened a window into what I would do if I was suddenly without. I guess I’d survive and find something else but it would be a greyer existence.

I got into cycling at university when during the 2010’s the international politics degree I was doing in conjunction with the world’s inability to even turn and face the incoming climate crisis had left me despondent. All I was learning was that a career in politics would probably constitute soul-crushing loss after soul-crushing loss as the world spiralled towards disaster. Nothing I thought since then has been proven wrong, the direction of travel is awful. Cycling has been my escape and my life since that point on. I don’t think I can do without it.

I hope I won’t have to for much longer.

Long days.

I think part of the reason I’ve started this little writing project is to cope with a life unstructured. I’m sure that’s familiar to a lot of you. It speaks in some senses how much work provides a defining quality to many of our lives. My work is pretty social, it’s also pretty hard and tiring. It’s in an industry I want to be in, although not perhaps the sector I want to stay in forever. Like a lot of people sometimes I get into a flow with it find it rewarding, sometimes it’s frustrating and I come home demoralised. I suspect it’s a fairly typical experience.

What I wasn’t anticipating was quite how much I’d miss the rhythm it puts into my day. Whilst I’m sometimes guilty of wasting my time away from work, I’ve always appreciated my job for its lists of things to get done and goals to be achieved. At work my focus tends to come environmentally, there’s not much space to procrastinate and the feedback from working hard is too obvious to be ignored. It’s a busy shop after all, if you’re not on top of things life gets difficult fast, it might otherwise! It definitely will if you so careless as to let it though.

So initially my idea was the obvious one. If I loved crochet I’m sure I’d be swimming in scarves right now. The first irresponsible thought was: “I am going to ride further then you could possibly imagine, every, damn day.” That didn’t last too long, I’m not an idiot (citation needed), this isn’t the time. Nonetheless a great deal of cycling is well within my capabilities whilst remaining clearly on the side of respecting the spirit of the exercise exception in our lockdown. As my work requires me to be present I am fully furloughed this means, like a lot of people, each day stretches on further than you’d thought possible. I know how to make my own fun, it involves getting out as far into the wild as I can, don’t do that screams necessity.

The world is a sudden mixture of zero stakes personal minute to minute and anxiety inducing wider circumstances. Having only myself to decide how to fill inside time I’m turning to things like this to start to fill the twin holes of purpose and exercise lead mental focus. I’ve had several bouts with depression in my life. The most recent one started around 5 years ago and lasted somewhere between 2 and 3 years to fully, is the word escape? It might be, I’d probably end up saying I came to terms with it. Cycling was central, really it was the purpose it gave me, the drive to move and the time to think it afforded me. Common anti-depressant drugs called SSRIs don’t really do much for me. When my Doctors feel I need something, what I end up on tends to leave me in what feels like a waking coma. Better than the alternative but far from ideal. I end up sad when I’m stuck in place, I begin to panic and have violent stabs of anxiety if I think I can’t escape and might sink back into a depressed state. Depression is terrifying! Months of your life in dark hole.

Luckily, we’re advanced from where I was. I think I can do this! Keep moving, whilst staying mainly indoors, keep my brain convinced we’re moving forward. This sort of thing helps! I’ll be talking about some of the other things I’m doing as well as exploring mental health a bit more in these blogs going forward.

They’ll remain trains of thought for the time being though! Planning comes when my fingers are really moving.

Peace!
Z

The price is worth the reward.

A lot of cyclists look to the sport for some hardship. To understand this is to understand that the sport is in many ways a preserve of the at least somewhat privileged. Certainly it is in countries like this one where half the bikes you see ridden in areas like London are worth the best part of five grand. I’m sure some might want to push back on this, so for clarity I am not saying it’s uniform but certainly a strong enough trend to want to interrogate.

Have a look through this link on cycling statistics for some harder evidence backing my assertion.
https://www.cyclinguk.org/statistics

So, if you accept, at least in an area like the South East, that your keen cyclists probably have a few bob you will accept, on a sliding scale, that their current lives probably verge towards the comfortable. Which is why I want to talk about the pursuit of suffering.

Road cyclists in particular seem to idolise suffering. I think they can be split into two rough groups with plenty of cross over. Those that suffer because they want to get faster to win at racing and those that suffer so that they might go out and suffer even harder and longer on monumental rides and adventures. I myself lean more towards the second group with interested toe dipping into the first. I’ve written about it here but one of the best things I’ve done on my bike was the Mallorca 312. During which my stomach tried to eject itself through my spine in the midst of an 11-hour timed Gran Fondo. Loved it! Going back this year if, inshallah, the crisis ends before October. The racers however suffer for something that might be far more understandable to the non-cyclist. It’s glory! If you win something you experience glory and there’s no two ways about it. The racers and the for sufferings sake riders do have something in common though, and with road cyclists I think it’s a certain communion with nature made possible only by the easy way your bike can propel you far out into the world. There’s a quote, that links the communion of suffering and nature so perfectly I’m going to post it here and it’s from the kind of rider I’m talking about above. A perhaps somewhat cossetted man whose discovered what it means to be rewarded for giving everything to the ride:

“Because after the finish all the suffering turns to memories of pleasure, and the greater the suffering, the greater the pleasure. That is Nature’s payback to riders for the homage they pay her by suffering.

Velvet pillows, safari parks, sunglasses: people have become wolly mice. They still have bodies that can walk for five days and four nights though a desert of snow, without food, but they accept praise for having taken a one hour bicycle ride. ‘Good for you.’ Instead of expressing their gratitude to the rain by getting wet, people walk around with umbrellas. Nature is an old lady with few suitors these days, and those who wish to make use of her charms she rewards passionately.

That’s why there are riders.” – Tim Krabbe in The Rider.

There is a backlash experienced after this is all over. Sometimes I do think the kind of cycling I and my peers engage in is like a particularly wholesome drug. After a ride where I’ve really pushed the next day I sometimes feel remarkably similar to if I’d been drinking, recovery steps taken and all.  Nonetheless, I’m planning my next ride, I’m healing and working on my body so it’s ready and I can enjoy it. Because it will be worth it! Nature will make it so, the wind whipping past your ears, the view over that crest, I’m happy to suffer to see it, and to know that I went and saw it.

Peace!
Z

Quick rumination on cycletiquette and not sitting on my wheel!

Short one today because the ride was long and hot. I’ve earned my vegging on the sofa today by sacrificing oodles of sweat and a fast beating heart. Anyway the topic is a moan likely to cause a forest of tiny violins to appear around my head and moaning is only amusing if it ends fairly fast.

Firstly, cycling is better and worst for its etiquette. When followed generally it functions as a useful icebreaker when you meet someone on the road. “Can I sit on your wheel?” Is all it takes. Easy to ask and if someone does usually your happy to oblige and you get to feel all helpful to your suffering fellow rider. If they don’t it’s somewhat unnerving. Around Regents park where North London’s cycling tragics like to train it’s fairly scary. Speeds tend to be very high, but ability not necessarily so. Out in the wild it’s generally an individual and things are slower. Unless of course it’s the middle of a bloody global pandemic and all health advice suggests you shouldn’t! An absolute spanner followed me up Layahms Hill and then Skid Hill for the best part of 10 minutes, then near the top sprints off like I’m his sodding lead out man. Wearing full World Champions kit. Here cycling etiquette conveniently lands in my favour. It’s one of my favourite little things about cycling that differentiates it from other sports and probably leaves marketing types in paroxysms of fury: Team Kit is for the team, if you’re wearing the Rainbow bands, please be the World Champion, do not wear the Yellow Jersey. I didn’t turn round and shout SOD OFF MADS PEDERSON, maybe should have done.

Anyway, the ride was a glorious ride out into Kent on the usually autumnal falling leaves route. Sun turns everything into the best ride ever but my goodness was it ever a beautiful day to be in the countryside. Also, as a North Londoner, these locked-down days provide a hopefully fleeting opportunity to get down south were the riding is just better. Landscapes are almost always more aesthetically pleasing if you add gradient. A bit of up and down is good for the soul, and the views in Kent prove it.

Very short one today! Definitely more of a stream of consciousness than anything else. Have something longer and more planned cooking at the back of my skull for tomorrow.

Peace!
Z

Getting back in the habit.

I’ve set myself the task of writing for half an hour a day. To get back into the habit, to feel I’ve produced something every day and to reintroduce routine in the days of Covid-19. I wrote some blogs last year I’m moderately proud of but fell badly out of the habit when I herniated a disc during a sudden street side lie down last year. Annoyingly this crash happened whilst riding very slowly to a criterium. The irony that it’s taken me a year to get back to fitness from a crash that occurred before the dangerous racing thing was perhaps too much and I lost motivation to write. I’m trying not to be too negative about it now and getting my fingers back in the habit of typing will be part of that.

It’s not as though the year was a total write off after that. I began the building of the core strength and back stability I should have started before I was forced to and, after a tedious layoff, did get back on my bike. Six weeks of nasty training on a turbo and I was, just about, fit enough to go on the Alpine holiday that had been planned at the beginning of the year. There I found serenity is a mountain pass and resolved to absolutely fill the next year with cycling holidays crammed to the gills with gradient, hairpins and glacier adjacent roads.

There are worse things to have lost, missing holidays are an enormously trite thing to be writing about in the current context so, none of that here. Also not appearing in these blogs, will be much commentary on the crisis. “I’m not an epidemiologist but” will not be appearing on this blog. I do however have a history with and degree in politics so possibly some of that down the line when we’re in the flow of things. Mainly I will be writing about cycling in lockdown. Some of my friends disagree with this, they say at this time we cannot possibly risk crashing and therefore cycling is too much of a leap. I disagree, I think the government stipulation that one ride/run a day is there because otherwise there will be mental health disintegration on national scale. My rides are scrupulously social distanced, I see people out riding with their buds and that is obviously lamentable behaviour, I do not think it’s the norm however.

On the positive side, speaking only as a cyclist, we’re experiencing directly the sudden massive drop in industrial activity. Less cars, less soot, more birds, undergrowth sightings and empty roads. The experience when riding in London is haunting. In our own environments the brain wants to see busyness, Oxford Street with no one there trips something in the uncanny valley of my brain. Outside the green belt, where my wheels generally take me, nature is getting its first chance in decades to breath out. Suddenly not too far from London you can own miles of empty lane. The hope has to be that when this crisis is over we realise that we can keep a lot of this. Not maybe the emptiness, but the quiet and the clean air. Lots of walkers don’t sound like the thunderous road of combustion engines.

Right! That’s enough for a first attempt, I’m also just going to be throwing these up onto the blog with minimal editing at first. Again refinement will come when I know I’m in the habit. Ditto longer projects, expect a fair amount of meandering. I’d love you to come along though and let me know what you think.

Peace!
Z

I Three Twelved.

The Mallorca 312 was certainly the ride of my life so far. The 312 fits the bill. It is as promised. The first half is the classic epic, big climb into steep climb. Sweeping descents down closed roads, slightly sketchy on those first descents surrounded by thousands of riders, thrilling after the bunch has thinned out a bit. The middle section as you leave the mountains is euphoric. It’s half way and your flying! Taking the form of wide sweeping roads, wide enough that huge groups can really start to roll, the sheer momentum you gain in a large pack like that is astonishing, as you pass the middle of the ride and see that the kilometres are disappearing at pace the finish doesn’t seem far away. The hard part is behind you! You’re onto the flats and you’re going to make it. Oh certainly only half the ride is done but at this speed it’ll be no time. It turns out to be an illusion, the pack explodes in cross winds and through feed-stops and the last third is Type 2 Fun as full body sensory immersion experience. Why am I here choosing to do this? How can it be possible to hurt this much? You transition into the stubbornness stage and start relying on the bloody-mindedness of someone who signs up to do this for fun. Finishing is a relief so powerful it pulls shouts of joy from the riders crossing the line.

So, how did my 312 go? Both fantastically and yet not so well that I don’t want another go. I will dispense with the relatively trivial disappointments here so as to get them out the way. Both are to do with me and not the event. The first is about 12 days out I crashed. On my commute to work, so slowly none of my kit even tore. Yet, after brushing myself off, checking the bike and continuing my ride to work I noticed my back was seizing up, by the time I got to work I was in immense pain. So instead of a being able to complete the end of my training programme I spent a lot of time in a physio’s room, on a foam roller, strapped to some ice and various other tricks to try and get my back remobilized. I just about succeeded, though I don’t think it helped on the day! Secondly, during the ride I made a tactical decision that did not pay off. I did not heed a faint call of nature at the third stop to save time. Between there and the last stop, (I had intended to three stop) things got tough and the call intensified. I have IBS and my stomach started cramping up. It was stupidly painful and it meant I couldn’t get power out of my legs, however, the situation was resolved at stop 4 and I sped to the finish. If I am honest something like this was bound to occur during my first crack at an event of this distance. Which is why I want another shot. The funny thing is despite being obviously very drained at the end, I do feel like I had some more to give! The time I spent dealing with my stomach prevented me from spending every penny of energy. Next time I will work smarter so I do get that chance. So! What went well?

Firstly, the three months preceding the crash. I put myself through a mixture of indoor interval sessions and increasingly long distance riding. I wanted to learn how to pace myself, how to reign myself in and how to raise myself to go again through fatigue. Key to this was the long slow ride, by limiting myself to a maximum heart rate on certain training rides I was able both to stress and improve different body systems to the ones I’d usually have trained on a smashy 100k loop. Also, mentally you learn how to be on your bike for 10 hours, how to stay both entertained and serene. This meant that on the day of the 312, particularly as my stomach crisis took hold I knew I would finish. I could resolve crises if they came but I would finish. You start to learn that your body and mind can be conquered, that feelings of negativity can be pushed through and left behind. After my crash feeling slightly panicked that I might now not make it, my physio calmed me down after my crash with these words: “your training is already done, nothing you do now would have made that much difference anyway” and I knew I had actually already made the difference. It meant that at my worst point in the race I knew after I had got to the last stop I would be fit to continue. I was and frankly I flew to the end.

The Mallorca 312 is route is just stunning. Closed road riding, in gorgeous scenery, almost designed to have bikes ridden on it. You cannot beat it. The mountains punish and reward you with ramps and sweeping descents, the views hold your heart and the locals belt out encouragement. I learnt a trick following a Spanish rider, in a small town and crowd was giving the golf clap. The rider in front of me shouted “VAMOS” and the crowd went nuts! I tried it with every crowd following that town and always got an awesome response. Hell of a boost! The weather was perfect and despite my crash and late problems I went pretty well, I did the thing at 28.8km/h average speed. I finished in the top 400 out of about 8000 participants and my finish line beer was about the best thing I’ve ever tasted. I cannot recommend it more. It will hang over your life in the months and weeks preceding it. It’s like a cycling Sword of Damocles, you dread not being able to finish as your training rides get longer and harder to complete. If you do though, it’s hard to think of an event that will reward you more.

Finally, being on holiday for a while longer afterwards was such a blessing. There is sometimes an emptiness associated with completing a big goal, I am so grateful that I was in Mallorca with my friends and 5 days of cycling some of Europe’s most prized roads ahead of me. We were straight in to eating, recovering, then riding in the cycling Mecca, there’s not much better reward for a cycling nut.

Chase The Winter Sun

I have a lamp in my room that simulates the sun. Apparently it shines with 10,000 lux. I don’t know what that means. It certainly is a big round number! Which must be why Lumie (the manufacturer) attached the figure to it’s marketing blah. I know that before I bought the light in early November I was starting to get somewhat desperate for it. I’d heard about light therapy, I know several people with Seasonal Affective Disorder and I knew that I tended to get sad in the winter. Switching it on in my room for the first time was emotional. Like I was a starving plant suddenly watered on the verge of going parched. Since that first time the light it makes has been pleasant to have, but no more than that. Thanks to the Lumie I haven’t gotten so desperate that being bathed in its artificial blue light could be such a relief again. Artificial is the word though, it’s not the real thing.

I have an alarm clock that simulates the sunrise and sunset. I got it earlier this year. I’ve previously fixed my sleeping habits and the sun was already on the way back by the time I made the purchase. However, it certainly works. I am woken up naturally by the light around 5 minutes before the alarm starts, this is easy to recommend. Still, not the real thing. Nothing like feeling the warmth on your skin. I do like to have both lights on sometimes, the sunrise light tempers the harsh blue the SAD light.

I imagine the point has gotten through, I do not thrive in winter. I miss the sun. I’m half sure that maybe I photosynthesise. So the winter turns me into a sad plant. This winter, however, wasn’t nearly as bad as it might have been. Partly because I purchased various lux filled aides and artificial sunrises and partly because I started getting up to see the real thing.

Regents Park is perhaps an unlikely cycling Mecca. It’s flat, the scenery is fab when you can see into the park, but you mostly can’t. The surface is fine for English roads but no more than that and although there isn’t too much traffic there’s still plenty. Nonetheless, it is in the centre of North London, there is less traffic, the road is wide almost everywhere and the glimpses into the park are gorgeous, especially at sunrise. It is a home for urban cyclists we’d be sad to do without. Also, once you build up speed you really can get to rolling. The top laps of the park are 50kmh plus, large groups whip through in chain gangs doing mid 40’s. There is an app that tracks “not how fast but how many” laps you have done, complete with graphs. It can also be a very social way to cycle. Laps are a blast and there’s nothing quite as nice as sunrise laps. Some days in the winter, they truly are a privilege.

As the day shortens to nearly nothing in the winter months, just when you want them least, clouds blanket the sky. The slow to rise and low hanging sun spends 4 months of the year also obscured. Except, occasionally, rarely, when we are lucky. I learnt to watch for them, I had to become a connoisseur of various weather websites and they are so very rare. When they came however they brought, at last the real thing.

Though not at first of course. Not that easy. First force yourself onto your bike in the darkness. It’s 6.15AM or something ridiculous. In the deep winter there is barley a hint of Sun’s rise. Wear your warmest, layer up well, protect your ears, cover your mouth. Hit the park, it’s pitch black in places and lit under old fashioned yellow street lamps in others. The soundtrack is perfect, silence and thin tyres pounding tarmac. It’s the worlds quietest roar, it’s fast people on bikes. Their lights swarm like fireflies as they stream round the lap. Meet whoever your meeting and get going, you can’t wait around while it’s this cold and the changing view awaits. As the sun starts gently to colour the landscape, the lap around the park is slowly coloured in. On crisp winter days they view inside can take the breath away, golden glowing frosty grass with rising mist. The sun is coming, head round past the mosque, round the corner, the sun is round the hedge, THERE IT IS! Low in the sky, hanging over the fastest, widest part of the lap, orange and smaller in the winter. Not quite strong enough to warm the skin, but the sight of it is what you need, warming your soul, the real thing.

Clear winter days are rare and treasured. The secret I’m discovering this Spring are all the other ways to work your legs in the winter. This year, I’ve headed out into the mulch under clouds and sweated through my eyeballs on stationary training bikes. The days are stretching out at last, longer and longer and I’m ready. More ready than I was last year by a longshot. Last year the spring arrived and riding my bike felt light pushing through cobwebs, I had to start small. This year, it’s already time for adventures and time to go further. So, buy a winter bike or a turbo trainer, push through the winter, seize what sun there is to be had and when the warmth returns, the real summer Sun, you’ll be ready to seize it’s welcome.

Happy on my Home Roads: How cycling arrived just in time to help save my mental health.

Trigger Warning: Anxiety and Depression.

This, I suspect, will be the first of a few blogs tackling cycling and my mental health. As a first effort it certainly rambles. I don’t think I have yet reached full clarity on how cycling and my own mental health interact yet alone anyone else’s. However as this is about the start of my journey you might forgive if it reads like the start of my thinking on it.

I have now done the vast majority of my cycling on the roads around London.  As you can see from this handy heat-map:

https://www.strava.com/athletes/11956804/heatmaps/10c27d71#11/51.42458/-0.21763

It blazes brightest in Hertfordshire, of course on my commute, then spreads out through Essex, the Chilterns, Windsor, Kent and Surrey. Occasionally I’ve sallied with Islington Cycling Club on a grand adventure to Brighton, Cambridge or deep toward Norfolk. Click that link and it centres on London. That said, despite being born and raised in London and doing the vast majority of my riding here, these are not my home roads.

Zoom out further and you’ll see them. North then west. In the heart of Wales.

I haven’t been back to my cycling home since I left university. My cycling happy place surrounds the town of Aberystwyth in a web. The roads of Ceredigion and Powys are a barley discovered cycling paradise in one of the world’s most beautiful and overlooked places. When I started cycling I did not want for Alps. Quite apart from the fact I would not have made it up them. I had instead a collection of passes, mountain lakes, majestic views and intense sweeping descents I now long to go back to. The landscape is Alpine in miniature, the occasionally intense rainfall and vast Victorian dam system in the area makes it feel at times Scandinavian. Turn round the mountain and suddenly you might see what could easily be described as a fjord. The roads used to service the dam system are smooth, well-kept and nearly deserted. I took such joy in discovering this unbelievable landscape on my doorstep. My course was four years and I only picked up road cycling for the last year. Suddenly I had my own personal adventure machine and a landscape that filled me with wonder on my doorstep. Thank goodness I did however, it was still to be the hardest year of my life.

It’s strange to think that I admitted to myself my depression after what had been an absolutely splendid day out on the bike. My university had a very small triathlon club of which the most active wing seemed to be the cycling third. We had gone on an awesome ride to Nant y Moch, a vast mountain top reservoir I never tired of visiting.  The weather had been brisk but perfect, the company was great and I felt like I was really getting into the swing of road cycling. The next day I got up and the crashing emptiness, the pressuring sadness, the utter bleakness of life in my head was back. It manifested as a desire to find all the blankets, clothes and warm things I owned, build them around me, block the door and attempt to anesthetise myself with sleep.

I don’t think I have developed my writing well enough yet to describe what it is to be depressed. Those who know, know. Those who don’t can merely empathise not understand. If I had to scratch it out in a sentence, your mind turns on itself and uses everything about your personality and history to attack your train of thought and state of mind. Emotional auto-immune disease.   Mental violence and defeat.

I do not dare think I speak for everyone. I do think if you have something that drags you outside you have a good foundation for the struggle overcoming yourself will be. Cycling for me took me further and made me feel more independent, self-reliant and stronger than I’d felt ever in my life. The juxtaposition between the life I had led and the path it had paved towards crisis against the life I was discovering and its possible path to contentment was shocking and ironic to me. It arrived just in the nick of time. The joy I was finding in adventure; the beauty I was surrounded by was the glimmer of hope I needed to begin to rebuild.

Why then does it work for me? Cycling and wanting to be good at it requires an enormous amount of time and commitment. However, it also gives very easily. Especially if you are in the right location. As you start small you can immediately go further and see more than you might running. Cycling is low impact and so long as you don’t crash you are unlikely to get injured on the right bike if you build your mileage correctly. Because of this, you can improve fast. However, the scope to improve is so vast that this improvement gives you a constant sense of increasing achievement. During the first couple of years each significant distance you hunt down (50K! 80K! 100 Kilometres! One Hundred Damn Miles! CHASE THE SUN, CYCLE ACROSS A COUNTRY) is on the horizon as something to be ticked off gradually.

There is something else, people with addictive personalities often end up depressed. The sort of person who gets hooked can get hooked on an awful lot of things that hurt them. Luckily for me cycling is deeply moreish, yet your fix must be sweated for and earnt. It is a rewarding and pure positive habit that can teach you the discipline needed to get the most out of it. This discipline works beautifully outside of cycling. In-fact it can be something of a habit breaker to have a hobby like cycling. If you learn to successfully strive and achieve great things even in something that simply gives you pleasure, you might well learn to better strive in areas less instantly gratifying. This works for road cycling in a place like Aberystwyth because of the latent appeal of longer rides and the discoveries on the other side. It would not have worked for me in London. So much of what drew me out of my room, out of my shell and into the world when I wanted nothing to do with most of it came from the landscape. It must be because it’s so remote that it’s not thought of more reverently amongst British Cyclists. There’s only one tiny train to Aberystwyth, it takes ages and there are no motorways headed in that direction either. We should all be going though, the roads there will take your breath away.



Find pictures of my first year road cycling here on my Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/Bu8ahpkF8hS/
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bu_63Mnl0Fg/