Ten things you must do (or have) to be a champ.

BREAKFAST ALONE; Get your ass out of bed before your partner/kids/parakeet. This gives you 'you' time. Now you can chew your porridge and chew over whatever sport-porn magazine you have on the kitchen table. It may just be a moment of morning glory as you dribble the spit of jealousy onto the page containing the latest, impossibly sexy,carbon trickery, or perhaps the pair of runners that weigh less than your 30g serving of oats. But it puts you into that Runner/ Cyclist/ Triathlete frame of mind for the whole day.


ESCAPE; I've never minded hitting the road in the dark of pre-dawn. If it means getting my training done before my family notice I've gone, then its win-win. You come back with a baggy of endorphins that will energise more than any chalky-white line off a pub's toilet cistern and its fairly free in comparison. Back by 10am you can juggle the lot, give your partner free time or attention by the ladleful and keep everyone guessing as to why you are permanently smiling. Heading out, in fact, often heading home before some clubs have left on their group rides often gives you an amazing feeling of having got one over on everyone too! Try it!

PREP; In the 3.5 minutes it takes to heat my three-bears worth of porridge and watch the thermostat on the coffee machine ratchet up I will have filled my two bottles, one with electrolytes and one with protein, laid out my apparel [sounds better than tired 'aul gear] in order of putting on, starting with chamois cream and HRM strap. And everything is right side out so as not to resemble an octopus in the grey light of dawn. Bike is in the hall, tyres pumped the previous evening, oil bottle outside the front door in a flower pot so as not to stain the hall mat. Oh, and there's a scoop of protein powder waiting in the shaker for my return.

CHARGING UP; Not like the good old days, a lick of speed in your bottle like for a Grand Prix chaudiere race in Northern France. Charging today is a double shot of oily espresso. It releases chlorogenic acid that sets your endurance day up to be more easily endured. And of course there's the other charging, plugging in your Garmin or whatever GPS you use. Ever spent an eternity watching one bar of battery life wondering when it will shut down? Most likely in the middle of your super energetic and in-need-of-accuracy interval. And charge the phone. It might just be for Strava but the one time you forget to charge it will be the crash/ hospital/ carnage of a lifetime ride. A charged phone at just the right moment doesn't have a price.

DOWNTIME; Set a weekend or holiday where you do nothing. Be human again. Don't mention sport. Shower everyone around you with love and proof that you can be more than one-dimensional.

TARGET; You have to have at least one. Its so easy to fall off the wagon when you don't have a D-day or two pencilled in on your calendar. You might occasionally kill the cookie jar, empty the dessert trolley or guzzle a province worth of Tempranillo but you will stumble back to your default setting of 'in training' if you know there is a day of reckoning. Excuses have a hollow sound when you have targeted something and told everyone about it. Without the D-day marked off there's no reason not to go full diabetic with the diet or full orbit with the alcohol.

BELIEVE; Hard to believe it but your local pub is often frequented by chubby gobshites talking behind your back, in between bouts of listening to their arteries hardening. Alcohol and low-level lighting help to bring fool's thoughts even lower than you can imagine. But you are NOT in that pub. You believe in yourself and what you are doing...training, racing, resting, planning...and aren't you the lucky one? Sometimes you may not feel it, maybe you are tired or injured, but you are always lucky. Fit, awake, alive because you believe in what you are doing. And you don't have the banger headaches, broadening gut and slowing bowel movements of the gossiping beer-swiller either!

SLEEP; Ah Morpheus. Get your rest. Compression socks, no coffee after 5pm, Read a good book but get resting. Human Growth Hormone is great stuff! Ask Sylvester Stallone! But seriously, HGH is a naturally occurring hormone that supports recovery and repair and its released when you nap/ sleep. Free drugs? Get them into you! The other free drug available to you is serotonin. Mood elevators can be bought on any street corner or from the pale dude in the pub jax or gained naturally by getting your R.E.M. sleep. It's a short segment of your night's sleep but its the one that keeps you sane, alert, smiling and motivated. Oh, and you need your beauty sleep for God's sake!

PERSEVERENCE; Ghosts coming out of the mist, or the "neon haze with Confederate dead" to quote James Lee Burke. Yep, you see them; the crappiest weather...Baltic temps, Biblical rain, Floridian wind, yet they are out...exercising, gaunt, doubled and smiling. Living here on a Craggy Island you'd often feel as if you were in the Hobbit. Except our little spot feels like its weather being thrown at us, by the bucket load.
Of course, you also have to persevere against the ignorance of those that don't understand your dedication in the face of so many obstacles. As an island with such a widespread diaspora, its incredible how some people can be so insular and parochial in their mindset. But ignorance is just another obstacle for you to overcome, because you CAN.

CELEBRATE; Achieved your goal? Reward yourself! Super happy just getting there? Reward yourself! Beaten the odds on your generation/ family/ background/ age/ weight of expectation? Celebrate! It might be a bar of chocolate or even falling asleep at the bar...but do it. Your soul will thank you for it!

Cut and trust.

There's always a bigger picture. We've all learned that over time. A tough time is often just a blip but it can feel like an eternity in the right/wrong circumstances. Of course I never take my own advice, and the initial time after breaking my elbow felt like an eternity. Anaesthetic is a wonderful thing, just not when it makes ya feel like a Patagonia-jacket wearing, skeletal junkie drifting in and out of scenarios. I'm not sure how many Friends episodes I watched [or rather, 'sat through' as I wasn't particularly compus mentis for a week] but I know it wasn't fun. I was so edgy I couldn't watch Fast and Loud for God's sake!. I know now that a week isn't a long time really. Gradually cycling hove into view again. I must like cycling considering I've ridden through 2 courses of antibiotics, re-configured the cockpit of my bike to resemble a fighting bull throwing a matador overhead, elbowed my way around the roads and gone out the door at 7am to fit my 'training' in instead of curling into the arms of Morpheus and sleeping off my aspirations.
Today, 7 weeks after my fall, the sun is shining and Coach has me doing sprints in the afternoon. Cannot wait.

As regards never taking my own advice, its silly really how we notice what others are or are not doing, try to correct them but aren't capable of taking correction ourselves. I'm aware of my own shortcomings but not taking advice is top of the pile. Sometimes you just want to be brave and do your own thing. Other times, something neanderthal cuts in and drives you. Often there's no explanation. Stopping listening to my own advice, in fact my own alarm bells ringing like a four-storey fire, has led to stupid places and people. Trust as a theme has been beating me up recently. People I accepted despite the alarm bells or people I ignored in haste and now regret. But sure that's life, ain't it? As I've got old I seem to have developed a Perspex detector that was non-existent in my twenties. I can now see through people, detect layers, different needs or angles that went straight over my head years ago. Or maybe I'm just a cycnical mofo that deserves to lose people and refuses to see his own faults.
But I know that life goes on. I'd put my hand in the fire now for probably a handful (!)of people in total.
Its ying and yang really. I've let people down and vice versa. Hemingway said you spend the first two years of your life learning to speak and the next fifty learning to keep your mouth shut. Words do damage.
So in cycling terms I'm on a crusade, well, a little crusade. Okay, tiny. Without the 1000 knights, countless hangers-on and the march to the holy-land, my 'crusade' seems ridiculous. But the plan is simple. I'm going to forgive all the people in cycling that I know of that have crossed me with negativity, be it their arrogance, stupidity or egotism. The ones with one side of a story. The ones that looked down on me. The ones that twisted the knife. I'm even going to let slide the 'only members or prospective members here Joe' guy from seven years ago, and the people who stood there and said nothing at the time. Carte blanche I think its called. You see there's many an eejit out there, many a pseudo alpha-male in cycling, but I've been one as well sometimes so I can't expect people to be good if I can't myself. I'm going to try and trust people again. Hemingway also wrote 'the best way to know if you can trust somebody is to trust them...'
Everything this year is a new start. I'm so happy to be back in the Purple and gold, I'm delighted to be out on my bike and training hard and planning ahead. Its best to start anew on all fronts. I intend to continue being happy and spreading that joy in our sport without asking for anything in return. I know, looking at the seven-inch scar on my elbow, that I'm lucky. Time to give something back for all the good luck I've experienced and all the good people I've met that never pointed out my shortcomings because they knew they had some themselves.