Changing Times

For a while now I have been considering my future in the sport and more importantly what I will be doing come September when I return to the UK. In recent weeks my form has dipped, probably not helped by a week on the beers in Berlin with my Australian team mate, and my motivation to train hard has followed. Whilst my future is as clear as the blurry image through the bottom of a Berlin beer glass, one thing is abundantly clear to me, as of September 2010 I will no longer be a bike racer, no longer need to drag my weary body out of bed at an ungodly hour in winter to do an unhealthy amount of training, no longer constantly suffer from sore legs and more importantly no longer have to watch what I eat and drink, mind you I never did much of the latter anyway.

Don’t for a minute think that this is a snap decision brought about by a little dip in form as it is not, the stark reality is I haven’t been ‘on it’ for a while and an incident the other week couldn’t have made it any clearer to me that I no longer ‘have it’ whatever ‘it’ is.

Standing on the start line of a local semi-nocturne with 99 other lycra wearing bike junkies, the rain began to fall in biblical proportions. Having been dry for some time the roads were in a dry and dusty state before the rain decided to make an unwanted appearance, as any racer knows this is a recipe for disaster. In this situation the rain and dust combine to form a slippery paste which lies on the road surface and leaves the amount of grip you have about as easy to predict as the winning lottery numbers.

Instead of the motivational thoughts, that should have been running through my head, all I was thinking was how little friction there would be between tyre and tarmac. Nevertheless I clipped my unwilling body into my pedals, noticed that I would be ruining another pair of nice white socks, and headed down the road with the rest of the pack. Everything was going okay for the first 2 or 3 laps of the circuit, much to my amazement, and everyone was taking the corners relatively sensibly with the usual French approach of cornering, which is based on trying to take corners in the wet at exactly the same speed as you would take them in the dry, seeming to be long forgotten.

My amazement was to be short lived when on an inconspicuous roundabout Daniel Barry, ironically not French but a New Zealander with Leucieme Espoir Quimper, decided that sliding along the tarmac, directly in front of yours truly, was in fact the fastest line to take. This in itself may not seem like such an unusual incident and if I am honest in recent years I would have been pleased to see such a rider, being one of the strongest in the race, on the ground (sorry Dan if you are reading this) however the difference in reaction between myself and Daniel couldn’t have been further apart, whilst Daniel jumped back up on to his bike like a ‘Jack in the Box’, I preceded to bottle every corner and eventually decided to call it a day after a few more laps.

Daniel went on to take 3^rd place…I went to the pub.