Friends and fallen comrades

Let me set the scene. Sunshine, sitting on a wall under a shade tree, chatting to three people. Shane, who is new to the game of cycling but not unwise to it, Gerry, whom I've known for more than quarter of a century and who always puts a smile on my face, and Martin, surfer, cyclist, entrepreneur, Mr can-do. Its the Eddie Tobin race in Bunclody, gateway to the beauty of Mt Leinster. But this race turns it's back on the mountain and goes north into the rolling hills instead. I'm sitting on that wall joshing with these people that mean a lot to me. It feels as good as the shaft of sunlight on my legs through the lush tree branches above. Its the usual intelligent banter of people I respect as opposed to banal pleasantries . Two of those guys are in categories above me, Martin having just ridden the Ras for God's sake! But we are equal in loving what we do for sport. This whole thing means a hell of a lot to me today. Eddie Tobin, of the race's title, was someone I knew. I've written before of his part in Wexford's re-emergence in the cycling world. Today meant a little more because I knew it's my last Eddie. I love the course, love the crew, loved the man. So, I'm sitting talking to some bloody nice people and then I'm on the grid and I'm in the race. And I'd been thinking all week what was the best thing to do? I mean, my friend Eoin coined the phrase 'What would Joe do?' in answer to the best way to win a race five or six years ago. Whatever I did at the time was bound to lose me the race, so if you did the opposite, you'd likely succeed. Yet today I knew I wasn't going to do what I'd been doing these last seasons...namely sitting and waiting. I learned to race, for good or for bad, in league races all over the county where you made the race and scrubbers got nothing. After a warm-up of a first lap I knew I had to get the blood going, fill the heart and give it socks, old school. Pauly joined me and we got going for a couple of kilometres, ultimately to no avail. But don't we do countless intervals? 30/30s in blocks of eights or hill repeats until we need to call Petvet? No point in not going again! And yet in two more forays on the second lap nobody wanted to join me. I know I have a marmite personality, but still, a race is a race! So I parked my aspirations for the next twenty kms and tried to recover while being alert. Last year I got tailed off with a couple of kms left because I was unfit. This time I'd done more hours, done the weights, buckled myself doing epic efforts, dispensing with any excuses. I've lost my sprint. I now need to power down long and hard on a hill to achieve anything. 400 metres to go I laid it all out. And I felt ok. But it wasn't enough and I was swamped. And yet I smiled like the village idiot going over the line. I hadn't so much had a tailwind into that finishing straight as the gentle breath of a hundred people I've known and loved and been influenced by in my wonderful, awful sport. I grinned like the fool because I lost but I gained. I enjoyed myself more today than I have in years. I did what I wanted to do and losing meant nothing. Of course the flip-side is that I seldom have a day like that and the tedium of monastic, snot-producing intervals and graft is slowly killing me. But the glimmer...just the glimmer....A glimmer that has me alert and writing at night, youngest kid asleep on the sofa behind me, bats flying around the yard, mind trying to get it all out onto the screen in front of me. But I always miss something at home, something significant that hurts a little each time. I guess what makes it a little better is that from the sign-on to the marshalling to the lead-cars to the place, all the familiar, friendly aspects of Wexford cycling were present and accounted for today, making being away a whole lot easier. My turn next year to be a part of that than pack-fodder.