Merry Christmas.

What are the odds? It's been a great week. It began with a spin of epic proportions with the local cycling collective and wound up today with a lot of love on the side of the street in my home town. Funny because its been a year of Atlantic depths and Alpine highs, now rounded off nicely.
I'm a positive person. I try to see the good in everyone first. I try to put a smile on everyone's face because I've always known that the profundity of some people's despair can be impregnable and bottomless. Sometimes a handshake or random act of kindness or a quick quip at your expense can be all that is required to turn over a day.
So last Sunday my Christmas season began in the company of most of the local collective, the Kunst krew, the boys that are the art of cycling. They also happen to be a bunch of men that have propped me up on occasion this year and given a damn. Of course we went cycling! Cycling is my coke, my crack, my toke of choice and I'm never far from my next hit. We cycled on red-ale coloured roads, made sloppy by recent agricultural off-run, stopped by the sea for a couple of beers while seated around a smoking fire and went our separate ways with broad grins on our faces.
Then midweek I ran into John, my tattoo-artist of choice who had just been talking about me in a good way with a past pupil. Later I ran into a fellow teacher who'd only been talking about how I always try to remain positive. And I'd never thought about it. Family health problems, a broken elbow, unwanted stress from unwanted directions were the order of the last year. The stress of your ultimate fears sure can make you focus. I won three local races and a league in the last twelve months on anger, hunger and specific training despite all that. I showed up at the first league race knowing I was going to win. How did I know? Because whatever higher power that's had my back for half a century knew I deserved it. I had so much energy from all my life's dark matter, well, I could have illuminated hell with it. And often had. Putting anger and frustration into every pedal stroke is what won me that race. I'd figured the algorithm that converted a crap year and a world of worry, fear and lost sleep, into forward-moving energy. Hate energy. Dark Matter. I knew I was going to win on the grid. An hour's relief from the servitude of fear, worry and hurt, but a relief all the same.
Consider the inanimate buffoon that sat on the couch after breaking his elbow. It was, by a street, a turn around. Hats off to Richard for cajoling me. Ironic as it sounds, getting back training proved that pain is a wonderful anaesthetic. That and sharing my worries with a fabulous band of friends. Always a kind word just when it was needed.
And then on the street today. I ran into people. You know how Christmas is... people around that you haven't seen in a year. And I found that even though I've existed under a cartoon cloud all year, people wanted to talk. Or hail a greeting. Or share my crooked smile for a minute. You could call it Christmas cheer but really it was something in me that had changed.
Hemingway wrote that "The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places." I felt that today in South street. If only for a moment my sprained spirit and strained heart were stronger after a wicked year. So I'm not talking about a broken elbow, but you knew that, didn't you? I dunno how I smiled sometimes, dunno how I taught classes, dunno in fact how I functioned on so many levels.... a Dad, a husband, a friend, a son, a colleague. And sometimes I didn't. That's when I hugged my incredibly strong wife and went cycling. Into a block headwind. Ignoring soaked feet. Laughing at gravity on a hillside. That's where I healed; at the point of physical hurt. Now, I do understand that a cup of tea can do the same job for some of you.... I admire that. I'm jealous of that. But I'm Joe Rossiter and it's always been the longest way round to find the shortest way home for me. I've cycled for thirty years but this is the first time I understand why.
Hemingway also said that "Every day above the earth is a good day." And I see that now too. So I've been reading a good novel, drinking Yellow-Belly Citra Pale Ale, thinking about twinkling tree-lights outside churches.... I know that I'm a good person, that basically all of us are. Occasionally our DNA or our psyche or a trauma turn us away from the light. Maybe we all have a terror or two fizzing through our veins between the red and white blood cells?
Do we ever know? We can't know what keeps people awake at night, with nothing but a ceiling bearing down for company. But we can lift that burden one millimetre at a time by realising not all of us are what we appear to be. Maybe we should assume that life is tough for every single one of us and then no-one gets left behind or left out?

Billy matchbox tension

"Ah come on!"
"I'm sorry, its 5pm."
I lifted my watch and held it up to the camera, the digital face showing 4.57pm.
The security guard just bunched his shoulders and stared at me from far inside the closed office building. His voice came over the speaker.
"Five o'clock on my watch bud. Come back tomorrow."
"I can't! This says urgent! Its meant to be delivered no matter what! Can't you ring their office and ask if they're still there?"
"Nope. Not today."
My radio crackled. "Billy? 21 Billy? Delivered that last one yet?"
"21 to base," I replied, "security goon won't let me in. Can you ring the addressee? Monkey Wrench Motorsports. Fourth floor."
"Will do. Stand by."
I knew it would take a few minutes so I broke out my works box from the satchel on my back. The old timber box with skins and Amber Leaf and an old rolley machine. It had been everywhere with me. And now New York's East Side. I thought about the toothless old man of indeterminable age who sold it to me. I wish I was back in Thailand now, not inhaling cheap smoke on the side of an anonymous street in cold November. I knew it could be worse.
A minute later I exhaled into the face of an apologetic security guard.

Urban myth 9. Sitting at the bank

The bank in Baggot street became our central meeting point. If it rained we stood under the overhang of it's edifice. If it was dry we sat on the low wall out front. If it was dry and sunny it was the Costa del Dublin 2. By 2002 when I did my last Summer it had all changed. Or at least society had. The economy was thriving. Messengers were not. The pay was alright I guess, but the companies were charging customers an arm and a leg because the money was there. Couriers wages never rose exponentially but the size of courier company owner's houses and cars did.
The city was changing too... not quite Gotham but no longer Pleasantville. Traffic doubled as did messengers getting doored. Broken collar bones and shoulders seemed like an epidemic. If cycling the city had been a steady game of Space Invaders it was now on level 100 and there were way to many invaders to avoid. Drivers changed from fairly predictable hamsters on the city fly-wheel to coffee/ blood-pressure/ mortgaged stress balls willing to take you on in fisticuffs on the middle of the road. Cocaine was sniffed off cisterns all over the city to the point of normality, the whiff of joints as you passed cars in rush-hour slowness was common-place. Then the same people popped you with a door or wing mirror because they couldn't see you.
Jobs came in waves instead of a steady drip. You would sign-out by midday because you had done one job and go home only to hear of an epic afternoon. Or you'd lazily radio in from a warm bed in Rathmines only to be buried with 5 drops before you'd poured milk on your muesli. Receptionists became waitresses in Hollywood, i.e. they were only receptionists until something in HR or a bigger administration came along. So they stopped flirting/ making eye contact /caring /smiling /being receptionists. They'd question you if a delivery was late but not give a damn if you had to sit waiting on one of them to fumble a job into an envelope.
A lower class of motorbike couriers brought the standard down. One guy lost an envelope from his satchel on the way to the airport and swore he'd delivered it, including forging a signature, only for the envelope to be found on the verge and delivered. Instant dismissal. A pair of guys I used to work with had their own base robbed on wages day and couldn't be implicated as they'd not physically done it themselves and were miles away.
It was time to get out. I was mentally tired and not giving my all. The rain and cold were wiping the smile off my face. I didn't finish on bad terms...I just couldn't process everything anymore. But it was beautiful and horrible in equal measure. On one level I'll never have a better time. What an unbelievable way to spend my youthful energy! But I gave a lot. A hell of a lot. I miss the idea of being a bike messenger but not the reality. I needed a time scale with a finite number of months or years. I feel the love affair died out and took my soul with it for a while. So I shut the book and put it in my bag for safe keeping for fifteen years. Thanks for helping me open it! Sign here please.

Old age

Saturday was the last straw. Or maybe it was Sunday. I dunno, I get easily confused these days. No, actually it was fifth year English last week. Some of those pupils are as feral as a bearded-lady from a circus but most of them are smart. At least most of the time I don't smell burning when I ask them to think.... You see, at the moment we are charging through WB Yeats, and as sometimes happens' we arrived at 'The Wild Swans at Coole'. Not a bad poem but it can be tough for a teenage pupil to relate to an auld fella harping on about getting slower and feeling ancient. What has getting old got to do with the visceral energy of youth?
I guess those type of poems are written by saddened men remembering that energy and feeling, pretty sick that it ain't there any longer.
Imagine cycling up to Graignamanagh to chase up a girlfriend after cycling 200km that day already and then cycling home in the moonlight later? ENERGY!!!!!
Imagine working 12-hour days driving machinery or hanging out of a scaffold on a building site loading blocks before dawn in January and not being tired. ENERGY!
Imagine nothing phasing you as you leave your country and don't know how it's gonna work out or how long you'll be gone for! ENERGY!
Shakespeare wrote about time running out, Robert Frost wrote about his Autumn too. Yeats had a lot to regret. His unrequited love is famous. The most famous crash and burn of the literary set. He stares at the swans and wishes he was paired-off too instead of being the odd-one-out.
And worse still he ended up marrying what was really his third choice rather than being alone as he went grey.
On Saturday I found myself buying ECCO shoes: comfy, orthopedic, ECCO shoes.... As a young lad I saw older teachers in ECCOs and thought to myself "That'll never be me! I'll never look like a grand-aunt shuffling around behind a zimmer-frame!" How wrong was I?!! I have stress fractures in my feet,[probably from trying to catch and pass a thirteen-year-old a few years ago at a Saint Stephen's day turkey burner race]... but the fact remains that I am now one of those old guys. I'm not Yeats or Will Shakespeare or Bob Frost but I'm feeling their pain.
Yesterday morning I fell off my bike on a piece of ice so small I've had more in a G+T. But my instant reaction was to get up, get going again and not to acknowledge the pain or embarrassment, not to admit to feeling it, not yet giving in to the obvious.

Urban myth 8. Breadline

College isn't much fun when you are broke. A broke bike messenger is abysmal. The first summer's ignorance cost me dearly. Like a London cabby, there's a certain knowledge you have to have. I had all the physical energy of a greyhound pup but I didn't know my way around the inner city at all. So what I made up in speed I lost by getting lost.
Tom the dispatcher bless him, he must have cursed the newbie to hell. I knew flatland... Ranelagh/ Rathmines/ Donnybrook, like the back of my hand but put me town side of the canal and I was as green as the scum floating on the canal itself! Every second job I'd have to look in me street index. One minute I was Sean Kelly busting down Georges street but if I got multiple drops over the radio I'd instantly turn into the Dutch tourist standing on the side of the road turning the map for orientation.
My first job off the green was famous because I'd headed the opposite direction to where I should have. The guys said nothing and rightly so. I passed them a minute later in shame but going the right way.

 
You see, trying to be a courier was going to be tough initially. But before pay day you could be buying 6 bread rolls in Dunnes to fill your belly. Dinner would be pasta by the shovel with some shitty fake Ragu from the market. Still not as bad as Koka noodles and luncheon sausage by the tonne as I had in college and the subsequent worms that took up rent free residence in my bowels for a year.
That first summer I got a short haircut (affectionately called a Belsen by the barber) because the weather was hot and I promptly lost a stone because I was on the go and vaguely eating. Tuna and sweet corn sandwiches at lunch was my version of a Ritz afternoon tea. A can of warm Jolt kola to wash it down was better than Dom Perignon. And of course you had to have beers of a Friday evening to exhale. Which promptly put you into a precarious financial position the following week!
My family were shocked when I went home for the weekend mid-summer. So was I as I don't think I'd stood still long enough to look in the mirror for months. They thought I was doing drugs but ironically we were all pissed in the pub when that conversation came about....
I was living the dream in my head with no intention of quitting until I at least finished college. It's just that my body didn't get to do the same. It wasn't until I joined the tofu crew in Cyclone a year later that I learned how to look out for myself. Maybe knowing what its like to look on a shop floor for coppers to make up the price of a budget sliced pan has had a hand in forming who I am now?

Urban Myth 7. Monster energy

I went to college at night to lis

Urban Myth 6. Black Tuesday

I sailed down the North Strand like a super yacht with the spinnaker up. A lovely northerly and a spit of rain. Hello November! There wasn't much going on on the radio. A latte and a chat later, things sparkled into life. I slipped a plastic, bank coin-bag down over the wee rubber aerial to protect my radio from the rain and we were off like freaks in a discombobulated Grand National.

 Into the teeth of a storm. 

Bad weather drives workers indoors to actually work. No skyvin' out for a fag/ coffee/ sandwich/ chat. When your umbrella has been blown inside out, your shoes are shippin' water and it's unpleasant... you become productive.
That's lovely in a centrally-heated office with the percolator on and Mr Muffin delivering to your desk at 10.30 but its going to be a bad day for the bike messenger.
Like God turning on the weather it had all changed by 10am. A wheelie bin came at me across Leeson Street. My satchel was flapping in every gust like a landed salmon on a riverbank. Rain was finding every tiny angle to meander into my jacket. My shins were numb from the rain-water and wind. I only had mitts, so a quick return to base had me rifling rubber gloves from the kitchenette and an old pair of woolly socks from a pile of discarded odds and ends in a corner. The socks went over the gloves and made me look like Fagan. I didn't care. Nobody did. Some Messengers went home and switched off their radios. My signature sheets were fast becoming a clump. My mouth was numb, I couldn't ask for basic things without sounding like a stroke-victim. I kept going because I figured the consequences of stopping even for a minute would be damaging. By God it was busy. I probably did close to sixty jobs what with people forced indoors and not all our boys willing to work. My fingers were sore, then numb-sore. My whole being was cold despite gallons of snatched coffees and enough Snickers to silence Mr T. Around three I took off my socks and shoes and semi-heated them under a hand-dryer in a toilet under O'Connell street. An hour later I had to pee in a stairwell for a lack of any other place to go. Six o'clock saw me spent. Finally back to the base, I didn't have the strength to face the gloom outside. But when I did the rain had stopped, the wind had died and when I looked up to the amber street-lit sky, a jet was flying low over the buildings towards the airport.

And I knew I would soon have to do the same.

Urban myth 5. Scalextric

The odd day you'd get it right. The wind would be at your back all the way from Ringsend to James's street. If you had a controller with robot-like spatial awareness they'd know more than your area, they'd know what door you were passing. A good day then would be the wind, the extra jobs along the way, surfing a bus to get to Trinity College. An exceptional day saw you racing another messenger across, along and through three lanes and laughing when you lost. Most days involved an altercation with a taxi-driver. Only a rare day saw you scratch their ride with the bike-lock key you wore on an elastic band around your wrist. Or better still, pulling the held-on-with-a-magnet radio-aerial off the back of their boot as they sped away.
You'd shimmy the pedestrian crossings on Dame street like a chess master, ache your way up to Christchurch and then have the beauty of a meander along Thomas Street passing the auld wans flogging industrial quantities of loo-roll and washing-powder to ghosts that lived in the Liberties.
Ah the beauty of it. And if it was a sublime, once in a season day, up at James's hospital the consultant's Secretary would be polite and actually look you in the eye.
A bagful of envelopes to keep you busy back into town and you'd smile all day. 

The bad days would be pushed further back into your hard drive allowing you to enjoy the moment. 

Funny; you saw everything and everyone at breakneck speed yet could remember the slightest details, dangers, daft moves and detours in ridiculous detail despite it being a split second in duration. 

It was mind blowing.

And the track lasted a couple of years. Survive the week, drink to your survival on Friday. Regain your strength over the weekend and rock up on Monday for another show; a combination of Mad Max, Gladiator, Ben Hur and Apocalypse Now. Then do it again and again and again. 

And as long as you didn't think about what you were doing too much, it became routine, almost banal, certainly normal.

It was just an awesome time.

For me, the green country boy, it could not have been more removed from where I'd come from. I'd always been getting away from something but now I was being given a wage for it. Everyone I worked with was doing it for the buzz. There were easier jobs that summer, better paying too. Yet the 'freedom', speed, risks and energy was unbeatable. We were ghosts in an endless summer of excitement; unseen yet glaringly obvious, invaluable yet outsiders, part of the electrical current running under the city.

Urban myth 4. Truth.

I don't know what it was. I think it was one of the bad days. It was the end of a tough year at Quickstream. A courier company that extracted the last drop from us. That day I'd hauled a postal franking machine to and from a post office, delivered a human stool sample (suitably sealed in a transparent test tube) from a hospital to a solicitor and around lunchtime I'd done the wages run from the bank to Pearse Street and watched as the Teller in Donnybrook had counted out 11,000 pounds in front of me. I kinda had a small meltdown. Now I'd blame the heat but back then I had stared at the cash before putting it in my satchel thinking how broke I was in night college, how much of a bloody Clydesdale horse I was for Quickstream and how tired I was.
Yes I delivered the cash but I'll admit a lot of scenarios ran through my head along the way.
My next job took me to a pick up in a nice office in Holles street. The Receptionist said I'd have to wait fifteen minutes. I radioed in the delay and asked to use the bathroom. The Receptionist was manic trying to get the delivery ready and told me the bathroom was on the next floor.
She didn't tell me it was super plush! Wall to wall tiles, showers, towels and infinite gels and shampoo....
Door now bolted, I stripped and had an unbelievable shower. In those few minutes I washed the dirt of the previous year's work as well as that day's carbon grime from my skin. The Receptionist noticed nada. But her urgency to get the package across town didn't stop me from a detour I'd planned in the shower. I rode around to a rival courier company and asked for a job. Quickstream was then behind me and I moved faster than ever in the city.

Urban myth 3. Skeletons

Scotty walked up to the 'Green and said hallo to us. It was quiet and there was a good bunch about. It was Autumn. No more idle lunches sitting on the grass or sunning ourselves in the park whilst watching the slowly basting office talent.
Scotty was agitated. His tanned and skint head bobbed with what he had to share. A big and pulsing vein popped on his forehead. He stood into our circle and swore us to secrecy.
"Noot a menshun rye?" It was alright with us. Sure we'd wait til he'd gone before spreading whatever it was like wildfire.
"Soo aye wer dune n da fookin sella agin en aye wer diggin lye a JCB, ri?" "Right", we chorused although to be fair only two of us spoke pidgin scots.
"Wha deed aye deeg oot de wull oonly a fookin skull! A hool skeleton aye til ya! A hool fookin ole vikin! Sword n all! Am no kiddin ya!"
Scotty was doing a nixer while scratching the welfare so he landed a labouring job digging a basement in a Dame street pub. Digging up a Viking skeleton wasn't the problem. Sure Temple Bar was Viking central. The problem lay in declaring the find. If the builder rang the authorities the show would shut down 'til the Archaeological boys had sifted the site. Months. No work for Scotty, no finished pub, no builder paid.
We were all curious. Scotty looked happy. We should have guessed. "What did you do Scotty man, don't keep us in suspense!"
He sucked a centimetre off his badly constructed roll-Up.
"Ye min da skeleton?" He was some boyo for building tension. "Ooh aye....Ach wee fooked et inda skip!"

Urban myth 2. Lunch break

Marks Brothers was ahead of it's time. Really healthy food and a cheap and cheerful young crowd without even a whiff of the Hipster era to come decades later. Sitting in at the back with Kiki, one of only a handful of female bike-messengers for company, I was enjoying my Friday. I was planning beers and hours in the arms of Morpheus. Kiki had other ideas. We had a josh about other bikies and plans for the new place she was moving into. One of the lads had joked that he'd have loved the contents of the hoover when Kiki was cleaning her old place up. She was planning to buy a motorbike to do bigger jobs and earn real money. We wolfed down our food and as I had just got paid I stumped up for lunch. It was good to have her rapier-wit and Scottish put-downs for company. She had just got back from the GPO after posting a cassette tape to one of her friends back home, filled with fifty quid's worth of cannabis and a whole lot of curry powder to throw the sniffer dogs off at the sorting office.
Fridays were always flat-to-the-mat. As if every firm in the city felt they had to show something for their salaries by sending documents post haste. Messengers could do savage numbers on that one day, saving a quiet week. Kiki was flat out too. After wolfing down her healthy grub she reached into her satchel and brought out a wrap of speed and unceremoniously emptied it into her orange juice, stirring it with a dessert spoon until it dispersed enough to swallow.
"Something to get me through...." And that was that. Kiki liked to party. A lick of amphetamine would get her through a manic working day and into Friday night where the real stuff started. Out Friday and Saturday and back to work Monday it was a vicious, candy-consuming circle. I was having lunch with her at the point when a little whizz got her through Friday, followed by a savage weekend with Bacchus as company. And Mondays needed a little pick-me-up to jump start the working week.
I was never into tarot card readings but that day I could have predicted the future like a clairvoyant.

Urban myth number 1

Pickles was as skinny as a lat and white as a ghost. His welfare glasses and baggy trousers made him look worse in every way. He was always pale, even in that three months of heat-wave we had in '95. On those blue-sky mornings he was the white, fluffy cloud. Joint in hand, slowly circling Stephen's green to where his mates hung out. I'd watch him from my perch on a stool outside Bendini and Shaw at the top of Grafton Street. He cycled like treacle. On Moroccan black.
I didn't see Pickles very often as his company gave a lot of motorcycle jobs to the push-bikes. They could be anywhere...out in the docks, Chapelizod... mindlessly boring runs for a pittance. I felt very lucky jobbing between the canals by comparison.
And then all changed. In Bruxelles our gang heard the news over a pint. Pickles...was still alive!! 

Let me explain! Pickle's company had the blood run. Pelican House up on the canal was where the Blood Transfusion Service Board had a ready supply of blood. And the quickest way to get emergency bags to city hospitals was by bicycle. Think about it! No traffic lights, no jams, no waiting.
Pickles was halfway through his run, two bags of A-negative buried in the satchel over his shoulder when, even at his snail pace, the worst happened. A Daisy. Daisy , a derogatory term given to the old dears on high-heels tottering out of office blocks all over the city, ramped up on Prozac or valium or whatever it took them to get through their grey lives; Daisy happened. She stepped out off a kerb at Busarus (pronounced Bus R'Us by yank tourists) and Pickles was knocked onto the broad of his back in the middle of the road.
So far,so good. But there was a perfect storm brewing. A newbie cop from around the corner in Store street station kept the crowd and traffic away. Pickles was alert. Life was about to go on. Blood. A pensioner saw blood. Blood flowing from Pickle's head. A lot of crimson blood forming a fan shape around a very pale and disoriented accident victim. Some old dear screamed. An ambulance was called. Pickles tried to sit up but was forcibly held down lest he parted with a wee bit of his brain.
Pickles protested. His glasses were out of reach causing him to squirm and search like a desperate man. His radio, attached to the satchel underneath him crackled and barked orders looking for 16. "Sixteen where are you?","Come in sixteen!". The Guard wouldn't let Pickles budge. The newly arrived ambulance crew tried to comfort the obviously brain-damaged kid who was fighting,fighting with all his might and shouting that it wasn't his blood! Not his blood at all!
We all sat in Bruxelles that evening, heaving with laughter, celebrating Pickles finest moment.

Fiction

Doctor Hutch in Cycling Weekly often speaks of his cycling buddy Bernard, a semi-fictional friend who often becomes the butt of funny incidences. My Coach's friend Russell is the same. Even though I've met him, the way Coach talk's about him its obvious he is semi-fictitious....

And in my life right now its Mick. Honestly, he exists! Mick is a mine of information and generally has me in stitches on an average [steady-hard] bike ride. A reformed character once fuelled by IPA or a crisp, he is great company. Sunday was no different. He has a cold. I'd just feel miserable, hot and bothered by the remains of a chest-infection. Mick however was "sweating like a gypsy in a tax-office" after our first and only drag.
He is in the middle of beet harvesting at the moment. He has a super reliable harvester that seems to have nothing electronic in it's operation. Just levering and clutching to beat the band. Mick is understandably tired after a long, dawn to way-after-dusk day and I suggested it was like driving a stair-master. Stair-master? He wouldn't hear of it...driving a whole gym was more like it. For twelve hours a day. I was left picturing Flann O'Brien's character who cycled so much he was half bike/ half human.
And it's not all joking and joshing. Mick can speak in depth on most subjects that affect his fellow man. More cerebral than your average cross-bar jockey. The balance is there....Yet he has no time for the pretentious. Rounding a bend and encountering what I described as a murder of crows reciprocated a withering look from said Mick.
Somewhere in there on Sunday was a knee-op that became a...dare I say it...well, something quite sexual [You had to be there]...and be careful what emojis you use and when.... just make a good fist of it....
You wouldn't want to be afraid to pick up a shovel or brush around Mick either if needs be, you'd get a well deserved bol***king.
And as we are both early risers 'coz we have a lot to get back to, I'll mention this little gem from before 8am around harvest time.... Cresting a hill side by side somewhere not too far from Ramsgrange, Mick takes a sharp inhalation of the morning air, smiles, and says dead-pan..."I love the smell of Roundup first thing in the morning...!"
So what's the moral? Well I'm not very good at maths but if my friend Mick is anything to go by and there's lots of like-minded bike-nuts that I'd call friends, then an algorithm suggests that as a tribe, cyclists are generally good fun to be around. If I know lots of cyclists with both a sense of humour and a head full of ideas and opinions, then most cyclists must be as lucky as me, so exponentially the world is full of fun-lovin' cyclists by the thousand. Go find your Bernard or Russell or Mick, laugh out loud, shoot the breeze, inhale the Roundup and live a little.

Happy Anniversary

My Dad passed away 24 year's ago tomorrow, the 16th of October. I knelt in mass this morning at 9am looking around me for calm and inspiration. Knelt in the same pew with my brother as my Dad would have.
I tried to get into my father's head, wondering what he would have been wondering at early mass long before that blondie-haired Joe arrived. Was he like me? Thinking of the race ahead? Thinking of what he had to do? Would his bag be packed up in Cross Lane, ready for the great escape? Wondering was he too, constantly worried as I am these days? Did a darkened church clear his head occasionally but not always too?
I know he worked himself into a box. From the poor diet of the war years through long, wet and cold incessant days on the buildings, stress, and never the pay he deserved for the hardship endured. I know I don't share his work ethic or morals but I did inherit his ready smile and compunction to see the good in others. I surely don't share his engine either. Maybe I have his need to exceed and compete but only in sporting terms. He, like me, couldn't sit still much.
And in that pew this morning I looked up to see the gilt-edged frames of yesteryear containing the stations of the cross. Right beside my seat was 'Jesus is stripped of his garments'. I was instantly snapped back seventy years to the corner of a sloppy field in Kilinieran in north Wexford. My Dad, then a pigeon-chested young athlete was stripping off his cross-country kit in exchange for dry gear in order to take on the long cycle home. No cars, no cash, no regrets. And he was smiling and joking with my uncle Mick and the gang. And I was sucked back into mass and he was gone again.
Until I pulled on my skinsuit 45 minutes later in a parking lot in Oylegate.
I'm not pigeon-chested or ever been Leinster champion but I still smiled and shook hands with all those I care for. I belonged. I didn't shed a tear at the coincidence until I was warming up on the road towards Wexford. I cycled. I looked at the ploughed furrows in countless fields and felt, definitely felt the season and the reason and tick-tick-ticked to the make-shift start-line and laughed with the time-keeper.

And for the first time in a very long time...I time-trialled fast and well. I didn't win. Not close. But I became my old self for the ten minutes it took me to cover five miles. I didn't panic. I started easy and opened the taps one kilometre in. Never changed position and rarely changed gear. I was alone and switched on. My heart was free and functioning, my blood warm and flowing but in someway stone cold, for I felt like bending the bike under me. My grimace was a smile when I glimpsed my gold chain, a beautiful blur.
I know how my Dad must have felt when he won alone [and that was often]. Kill it, drive it, push, push, push until you are away from all the pain and stress and carnage that life hurls. You cast open your vestments and bare your chest to life and God and the elements and know you are free...absolved from it all.
If only for a moment in time.

Gluten free roulade.

Always fancied myself as a rouleur. I can do most things on a bike quite well. Its hard enough to drop me up a hill, I can win the odd sprint and whilst I dislike time-trials I know I'm not the worst at them. That all may change soon. A slice of roulade yesterday made me think. Well, ok, more than a slice of roulade. It was a conversation about diet and diets that did it. Turns out I should be changing a few things. Getting the weight manageable, leaving out certain toxic foods, you know the drill. This conversation took place over a superb roulade. And as I cycled home I pondered if a gluten-free anything was as good as the full-sugar, full diabetes-inducing bad stuff I'm used to. I persuaded myself that I felt light-headed because there was no sugar rush. And ate a banana. Which apparently isn't totally right either. So its looking more roulade than rouleur next season.
I've been looking at organic meats lately and realising I'm not rich enough. Honestly, the price of an organic chicken in some places has me picturing a hen doing a pimp-strut down the supermarket aisle weighed down with gold chains. Like a Mr T with feathers. And without the Snickers diet. Ham is the same. A chunk of organic ham is equal to the price of a whole pig in some places. And then, as was pointed out to me, I'd be boiling it in fluoride-rich water which would probably undo all the good. And farmed salmon seems to be so toxic that a weekend sunbathing in Chernobyl would be preferable. But if I stay eating as I am I won't be IN the grupetto next year, I'll BE the grupetto.
Still, I worry. Cellulite appears like a road map on my body. Albeit a road to nowhere. My arteries are hardening as the rest of me goes soft. What should I do? Today's foods cause me stress...Life's stresses make me want to eat. A dietary Catch-22.
Age isn't all bad. I know I'll have to work hard to shed weight and I'll just have to get to it. Also, weight might have a lot to do with it but there's plenty of skinny-latte cyclists not finishing races I'm doing and likewise I've been roundly beaten [pardon the pun] by guys much heavier than me, even on rolly courses. Diet isn't everything it seems. Beetroot juice made me flatulent as hell. So in theory it works if you count jet-propulsion. Gels are just a nicely wrapped version of a banana. Artificial monkey food. I thought keytones were the noises my house alarm buttons make. And over the roulade it was suggested to quit potatoes, breads and crisps. Lee Child had a novel a while back entitled "Worth Dying For". I thought it was about those three foods.
Sitting here writing I feel as if I'm in the middle of a perfect storm. Tiredness and stress are part and parcel of my life. Cycling helps. But so does wine [Merlot has loads of antioxidants!!!]. Food gives me energy and I don't have the time to belt out a salad of Nigella Lawson's standard. [Although I suspect she may be covering her lettuce in chocolate sauce....].Half a bakery a day fills the void and gives me the energy to play with the kids, bamboozle the students and fulfil family commitments on top of a sneaky spin. I know I'm slowly killing myself off and doing myself no favours but its all I've got to give right now. I might try fasted rides although I'm confused as I thought a fasted ride was getting the shift outside the Colosseum disco before you got to the chipper....











the excesses of Summer holidays

Cycling's Silly Season

'Tis that time. Autumn. Time of change. The colours, the temperature, the air. For a racing cyclist its time to let off some steam with IPAs by the bucket, Hunky Dorys by the skip, Rioja by the vineyard and chicken boxes by, well... the box. In this downtime cyclists are prone to look inwardly and, as a result of not cycling enough to expend excess energy, find fault with themselves, their club or something that requires a bit of angst. It might just be the grease from the late night bag of sinful chips that makes us feel guilty and in need of venting our unhappiness. I know the vinegar does it for me.
Sometimes its easier to just go play soccer and pull a muscle. Sometimes we want to run cross-country or a whole marathon. That's good. That's focus. Sometimes we can drink enough to not think at all. But that has it's own drawbacks. Yep, unfortunately, we find time to think at some point.
Jumping ship is easy. You get to let everyone know how you feel and you go to another club and life is better. This happens. I know, we all know a lot of cyclists super happy in their present club. Like me. Actually, lets look at me for a minute. I left my present club a number of years ago and regretted it. I'd had a great season. My club mates were fundamental to that success. But I didn't recognise it at the time. I left and spent the next few years beating myself up about it. I was the problem. I had sat around at this time of year thinking I could do better elsewhere. I never once snapped out of my Leffe-induced coma of arrogance enough to realise that if I had even the tiniest problem with anyone it was up to me to fix it. A new club wasn't going to solve anything that I could fix myself. And I listened to others. Big mistake. Thankfully I've rectified that and, guess what? I've found my mojo again in the club I should never have left! Longest way round is the shortest way home and all that....
Look, sometimes you have to leave. You could be in a shambles. I have seen that in the last couple of years. There are sportif clubs that have little, lost racers in amongst their ranks who often deserve better.
Similarly there are racing clubs that can't or won't cater for anyone else. Sifting through old cycling calendars will show you a huge increase in the number of clubs. Cycling is booming. But take a closer look and you'll also see many towns with two or three clubs where there was one.
Makes you think!
Look, its completely natural. There's an inherent, Neanderthal want in us humans to expect or seek change in Autumn. There's also an inherent want in us Irish to take out our frustrations on everyone by saying nothing but doing something. Before you send that e-mail why don't you look in the mirror and ask yourself a couple of questions. How about looking at someone that changed clubs a couple of years ago. Are they better? Are they as adrift now as they were? Did they just need a coach? And how about you? Is your grievance one that you have internalised so much and argued with yourself about that really it probably only exists in your own head?
Or the flipside. Will you add something to a new club? Will you cause friction by joining another club? Did your racing year necessitate being part of a club at all? And the jersey...some of them are god awful. Only some clubs are great. Are you good enough? If you are a separatist in your present club won't you just be the same in another?
Really the off-season should be a time to buy beer for your club mates that really are great human beings that share the same mad passion for our gladiatorial sport. Does a silly season even exist considering racing is pure madness and the winter is for building ourselves up to that madness again? Isn't it all silly?

Mercatone uno

I doubt Marco Pantani was well impressed with Joe Rossiter when he slid past him and into the team camper van outside Dublin Castle in 1998. Its not like he would have thought "Wow, skinny feckers them Irish..." would he? I, on the other hand, was mesmerised by the diminutive climber. I mean he was just tiny. Tiny. Likewise Fernando Escartin the Spanish Kelme rider with the hook nose of Coppi. I wished him good luck in Spanish and he too was smaller than any good-sized chorizo I'd ever eaten in Madrid. They were heading for a team hotel after the Tour presentation for a good rest and an IV while I was plodding off with my pals to Temple Bar for Guinness and Tayto crisps. I know I'll never be that small or powerful or lean or talented but it just struck home today what damage I might have to undo just to be average.
As I said, Marbella in August was my Winter break. Add a slightly lax week of personal celebration after securing the local league and I now have a gut. Doing a new skinsuit justice is gonna take either a good tailor, surgery or a bucket-load of training starting tomorrow. Sobriety isn't always a given but its going to have to be from now on. And the watershed on TV is mimicked in my personal life by a similar limit. After 10pm if still awake...well, put on Liam Neeson's voice in Taken and picture me in a darkened kitchen talking to biscuits..."I will find you..." etc.
There's two things I can't afford to do any longer. Not training for any length of time is carcinogenic to my body. And a lack of sleep is my nemesis. I start back training tomorrow to shock my system. That's that. And so long as I get 5 hours of sleep a night I can in cycling terms only, keep going like Ron Jeremy.
I feel 'hungry for road' too. Still motivated. I know that putting in the miles will sort both moobs and mood at the same time. The only hormones my body may produce in common with Marco and Fernando will be serotonin and growth hormone but at least they won't be administered by a shady doctor in a hotel room. And in present circumstances where I'm not getting a lot of sleep due to stress, I could do with that Seratonin. Catch 22. The upside is I'm back to health. I can go cycling. Speaking to the Barber today, turns out he snapped his leg at his 50th Birthday party and won't ever ski again, a past time he is passionate about. And there's the dudes that go straight to pub or off-licence at the end of every working day to start the second shift...the one to oblivion. At least I pulled the halter before that beast had bolted.
I'm a lucky kid to be where I am, I just have to convince my body to tag along.

Glutton intolerant

God almighty. So the gluten-free diet died a death after a few days. Beige food that tastes like a Cornflakes box and hard-bread alternatives that resemble beef jerky just ain't me. Likewise the wine instead of beer approach. I'd rather have a light beer occasionally rather than a bottle of wine that renders me comatose. Now if only I could stop impulse buying tortilla chips and family bars of Fruit and Nut chocolate, or, for that matter...eating anything resembling a sin, it would be great.
I'm at an age where every dietary mistake makes seeing my shoes less likely. If I race my bike I'm up against kids possessing the metabolisms of a rocket launcher. Their bodies haven't known stress, their minds are free of worries and they are as fresh as sushi. I on the other hand sometimes need a glass of wine to decompress. I have bills and kids and commitments. Food is often a Xanax alternative. I'm telling you...the odds are stacked.
Approaching fifty has left me with a few scars. A 32-inch waist is becoming a luxury. There's more grey-hair growth from my ears and nose than anywhere else. I'm beginning to grunt getting up from the sofa. 'Older' people seem to know my name. I could be a grandfather. I spend tea-breaks talking about aches and pains. I see problems as chores rather than challenges. I'd more easily unfriend rather than befriend. Actually, I must be a right old pain to be around.
So is it possible to reverse the effects of nature? No, but can't I keep on laughing, keep on pushing myself physically, try to fool myself into believing I'm younger than I am as long as possible? Some people are born being a forty-nine year old. Thankfully that has never been me. Damned if Spelt bread, couscous and mouse-shit flavoured Ryvita will change that either.

Gloves off

Sitting in Ardkeen yesterday as the nurse picked staples out of my elbow, [now christened Frankenstein],{The elbow, not the nurse!] it occurred to me that it's been a tough year. Waaay too much going on to get into here but its been a nightmare. And it also occurred to me that if I didn't have bike racing to look forward to, or training to do regularly, I'd be in a bad place. Once those staples were out I knew I wanted to go racing. I needed to retrieve something for myself by racing and I needed to repay a hell of a lot of people for parking their time to look after me in whatever capacity. As it turned out it was good fun and well worth the pain. I'd had my Winter break in August, reading 'til the wee hours on the balcony every night accompanied by a vineyard. Then straight to hospital upon my return for the op to unwire my elbow to return it to full motion. Bloody anaesthetic. Not my friend at all. Then tentative steps on the turbo. Not a friend of mine either. Four hasty road spins of dubious duration and there I was in Camross, league hingeing on me getting a single point but feeling like I wouldn't get that unless I was the only entrant. Tom Simpson once put a deposit on an extremely expensive car. Something to aim for. He had to race and work hard to get the car. I'm not Tommy so I just told my team mates I'd get that point. Something to aim for. I was forcing myself to go for it regardless of the fact that on the way back from hospital the devil on my left shoulder that said don't go racing was knocking ten bells of crap out of the angel on my right. I took a leaf out of Zippy Doyle's pre-race primer and filled myself with so much espresso my passport would have read Ethiopian/Kenyan blend under Nationality. I wore my skinsuit but had to put a jersey on top because Camross exists in a micro-climate labelled unpredictable. After 10 kilometres I wanted to vomit/stop/sell my bike/feign a puncture/ease myself out the back and hide in a field. But every time I looked around a friendly club mate would ask how I was. And going through the finish I had David and Sean looking at me. Two guys that had given up swathes of time to let us have a regular run-out. I'd like to say I was out to show the purple and gold to it's full lustre but really I hoped to survive and get around without catching my tongue between brake block and front rim.
And then I came round. Thought the least I could do was a long range sprint to lead out any of my team that wanted a free ride to the line. Funny then that I ended up watching Street Outlaws at midnight last night. Its about street racing and that's exactly what materialised 500 metres out last night. I was getting ready to go when my friend Hughy got the jump on me 50 metres early. Mark Cavendish or Peter Sagan will tell you every tiny detail of a sprint. I'm not them but in what felt like 20 minutes of a sprint last evening I was looking at it like it wasn't me. Hugh on the left torqueing it down, myself on the right talking it up. Both of us hitting the nitrous and waiting for the end of the world's longest quarter mile. I just hoped my club mates were on my coat tails and they were. I needed a point. I got two. First four in the bunch sprint were Wexford Wheelers. And one up the road. Sweet as! Moral of the story? Sometimes you are better off sticking at it although everything points at failure.

Other uses for Crivit cycling gloves

12.39am. What the hell am I doing? Can't sleep. Heart rate higher than a Hooker's heels. Smiling like an idiot. I won a race last evening. Or, at least, I didn't really win, just felt terrible, got a lead-out that looked like the Wexford Hurling team streaming out onto a pitch and used my brute strength and ignorance to finish it off. Its been years since I felt this proud and the last time was in a Wexford Jersey too.
Strange then that as I suffered around Camross I had a head full of the Tour de France. Or rather, a Tour I'd like to see. At a straightforward league race we had multiple attacks, subterfuge, unpredictability, mano a mano, testosterone fuelled shenanigans and a game of chess. I wish I'd see that on TV a little more. No slow death by strangulation in a league race. Anyone having a go got something out of it. There was no soup-kitchen queue of also-rans waiting for something to fall off the table for them. Everyone agitated and made the race.
And nobody noticed that my handlebars were loose! Halfway round the second lap I was honking on the bars when I realised I was waaay more forward than I should have been. More forward than a drunk that hasn't scored at the disco when the lights come on with the first bars of the National Anthem. To be honest I looked like I was trying to climb over the front of the bike and perform tricks like a Chinese circus act on Speed. Every time I leaned, the bars went down. Every time I pushed on the drops, they went up. So I tried not to lean on the bars at all. Thought about stopping for an allen key. Not gonna happen. Thankfully only one of the four bolts had worked loose, leaving a little bit of leeway. So I bobbed up and down for 25km like a kid's toy.
I love book-ending. You know, where a story comes full circle and you are back in a similar situation. At the outset in For Whom The Bell Tolls for example, Robert Jordan is hiding in a pine forest, very much alive, only for him to be in the same situation hundreds of pages later, life ebbing away. Sometimes for example actors book-end their careers with an Oscar. Last night I discovered a different version of Book-ending. Camross is now a sleepy hamlet of few inhabitants. Back in the day the hall there used to play host to big bands. There was always a dance or something going on. My sister still has Alvin Stardust's glove, thrown from the Camross stage to his adoring fans, probably thirty-five year's ago. Honestly, that place was a Mecca. I've raced around Camross for years, loving it's unpredictable nature. And last evening was no different. Maybe it was the hall itself, or the shelter belt of evergreens at the finish, or the kink in the road towards the line but every lap I felt a drop in the wind close to the finale.. Maybe it would suit a long sprint??? It did!!!! I went early, got some lengths and held them. A vacuum that asked for filling. I felt like a star before the line, a ridiculous belonging for the moment it took to get my hands in the air and NOT scream in a primeval manner to scare the locals. Or push too hard on the 'bars and 'do an Abdu...'
But the book-ending took a different course...
Having an amazing bunch of club mates and friends help me all the way to the launch-pad from way out, and starting the race with a dicky, pringle-addled stomach, put pressure on me. I had to deliver for the faith the boyos had placed in me. Pressure and stress....It wasn't until most of the way home that the stomach cramps got so bad that I had to jettison my shorts in the gateway of a recently cut silage field and let loose.. A small price to pay, right? Wrong! Ever try to find a roll of toilet paper in a shaven field?? Thankfully Lidl did a great range of cycling mitts a coupla years ago. Now I have a link to Alvin Stardust's glove, Camross, and a perfect book-end to my tale! I may be down a mitt, but that's ok in the circumstances and a small price to pay for a Saeco lead-out!!!

Mount Leinster Challenge

But really it all began 3 days earlier. I'd been too busy to get my usual 2 litres of water a day, or the Dioralyte needed to hydrate properly. Fast forward a few days and my legs seized like my timing belt had gone. I got over the Corrabutt, cycled towards home, 50k away, like an old man. My pedals were lead weights, my quads like a corpse's, my voice hoarse from shouting at the pain. I cycled and screamed through a downpour in Drummond. Luckily no locals were about to see the demented fool seep through, anger and snot and rain-water running down his lined face. If I'd seen me I would have been worried for my health.

Let me ask you a few questions! Do you love the Mount Leinster Challenge as much as I do???? Where else would you climb a hill called the Dying Sow? Where else would you smile through agony on a 20% incline to have your photo taken? Where else would your marshalls have begun a nationwide cyclist awareness campaign, or won significant races or know your name? What's not to love about a food stop that was a pleasurable challenge all on it's own? And the mountain itself? Like Ventoux, a leviathan sitting there waiting to slay you for a moment's hesitation or lack of respect. Who didn't smile on it's slopes at the mere achievement of being there, on those very inclines?

Where is the beauty in hurting yourself? I suppose it's the theatre of war. You see, every spin I go on gives me a feeling that I'm fighting. I'm not just talking about driver ignorance. It could be the simplest of things to fight against...the comfort of the couch, could be family or personal health issues, time-thief guilt, financial or work stress etc. Or a combination of all the above. But I'm fighting. Always.

However, the Mount Leinster Challenge is a beautiful theatre of war. You might meet your inner-self out there but you'll both be looking at the view! An Alpine valley that resembles a cascade of vivid green paint spilt from top to bottom on the East-side of the mountain. Or the heavy ramps resembling Caporetto sapping your will as you cycle the funnel of the 9 Stones. Or as your heart is sinking but beating furiously there's that pastoral quilt thrown over your right shoulder on the summit of the Corrabutt. County Carlow laid out like a giant's picnic blanket to the West. Hurt yes. Worth, definitely. The fact that you can endure all that in sound company and live to tell the tale is even more sublime.

Yes I suffered like a dog, yes I would go back again tomorrow. I underestimated the Challenge this year. I rode the 32km from home, approached the mountain like it was a Dutch canal bridge and got nobbled on the dead roads between battlefields. But I did meet Ben, hoping to race around Europe this Summer in between a PHD. I did meet Andy, back from Bilbao and pedalling effortlessly. And Mick, working hard in Oxford. I helped someone get their Garmin out of a ditch on the cattle-grids, chatted to old friends from other lives , has-beens and will-be's, whippets, tryers and damn fine people all living the dream in an event organised to the max. All you had to give was your sweat and time. Screams optional.

The truth hurts

I always thought living in the past makes you repeat it. Not true. Recently I went back to my past, a local league race, hoping to rekindle some of the fire I once felt while racing there. It had been a couple of years and as I drove down I had a mind filling with nostalgia. Glimmers. The zenith of my Comeragh league experience was winning one by complete fluke, jumping the bunch so as not to get completely savaged in the sprint. I wasn't passed. A couple of scalps in there too. Fluke. And that was a dozen years ago. But I always got in the front selection over Church Hill in Portlaw and had a dig or hung on to the finish with Ras riders and race winners. Or watched Sam Bennett throw up at the finish line after using the race for intervals. These are the races that Ciaran Power would use for training and proceed to tow groups around, helping everyone. I think the Aborigines call it Dream-Time, before reality arrived.
And arrive it did. Meeting the usual suspects, the Power family running the show like clockwork, Ciaran there to race and a huge number of wizened faces that, like me, should have known better.
I blame the bastards with better tattoos. You see its one thing having your ass handed to you by people younger than you. That's life. Its a whole other ball game when they are supposed to be at your level. And its a whole other universe when their tattoos are really good, full sleeved and gnarly ink-jobs. That really got to me. I can forgive anything else. I was pulled around like one of those shot cowboys in a black and white movie that get their foot caught in the stirrup. For 40 minutes. The horse was three black and blue clad robots that took turns in proving their strength on the front. And every time I glanced back there were less cyclists. I wish that had been it.
Ah sure twas grand until the real men turned up. At the start of lap three a storm broke over the race. The sun still shone but our countenances changed from happy-but-deranged-at-a-league-race to oh-my-god-what-was-that and discovering we were out of our league altogether. The big guns caught and strode through the group as if we were at a café. And they motored on so hard, so quickly that in 1500 metres the race was spread over 500 of those. 53x12 on a false flat? If you were gone you were finished.
I was gone. A chequered 17 year history at the Comeragh leagues came full circle as I turned full circle in the road and returned to the car. No mercy. Will I go back again? Hell ya!! You can't get better unless you learn to suffer harder. I'll be back damn soon!

Biblical Belgian Toothpaste

I never once thought about climbing off yesterday. Yes it pissed rain. No it wasn't easy passing the carpark on each lap. Seeing more and more boots open, bikes abandoned, vacant stares on defeated cyclist's faces. Never crossed my mind. But I'm not Sean Kelly and tough as nails isn't my thing. Its just that its been a long winter, breaking my elbow only the half of it. When I sat and watched the TV in February I was a broken boy. The bike stayed in the shed communicating with the spiders. My mind was blank but despairing. Only my Coach Richie and one or two others kept at me, getting me up and going again. Non sports people don't get it. They are funny. If you break a bone its the end of you. For them a surge of adrenaline is an extra finger of Prosecco. For me, as a cyclist, I saw it differently. I'd invested heavily in my fitness from September to January and Richie got me to reboot, throw off the mantle of setbacks and get going again. And he was right. It was only a matter of weeks.
Fast forward to the Frank O'Rourke races yesterday. It was my club, the Wexford Wheeler's biggest event and it was time to repay their faith in me. All that time and effort to climb off? No thanks. So my legs were a purple/blue shade? So what? I was shaking on the headwind sections but hadn't I been out in every conceivable type of weather all winter? It was going to take more to get me to quit my first open race of the year. Besides, if my legs were a funny colour and if I was cold to the bone, so was everyone else.
So when Philip scuttled up the road in a break of four it was our race to lose. Albert filtered around the front running interference as the gap hovered at 30 seconds. We still thought it was crossable but a couple of stalls in the bunch and then it was a minute. Game over. Our guys had a few digs. But fourth and fifth places for myself and Dave were not yet guaranteed. After the race Dave said that he'd been way back coming into the last few kilometres. That was some game of leap-frog to play because there was no bunch, just a long, sorry line of sodden bodies marching home. I, on the other hand found myself too far up front, scared and exposed like a groom tied to a lamp-post on a stag-night.
I'd done a recce the night before. How was I going to use the south-easterly wind to my advantage? Driving up and down the finishing straight with me Ma in the passenger seat, I discovered a channel down the right-hand gutter that would be more exposed to wind-assist than the traditional left side I always seemed to be in.
Come race day I jammed it in a heavy gear and exploded down the right, two seconds before I reckoned the sprint would start. Instead of cramps, cramps and more cramps, I just felt numb. I doubt I'd have hurt myself if I'd fallen. However. I wasn't numb to the dude creeping up my left-hand side. On a Colnago. He used the same road-channel and the vortex of my escaping ass to tootle past and claim third. Just as well I like Colnago bikes or I'd be gutted.
I didn't have a sprint so much as a numb, jelly-legged wobble to the line. But the hardest part of the day was ten minutes later trying to hold a coffee cup without drowning everyone in the hall. I shook like I had the DTs. And then it struck me. If I had the shakes while staying warm by cycling, how on earth did the stewards, Marshalls and photographers feel? They must have been destroyed!!! Good God! And what about Sean Rowe, a cross between Gandalf [for appearing out of nowhere, anywhere on the course] and Captain Ahab [for that rain-cape and his single-minded dedication, bordering on obsession]. The bigger performances of the day were of the non-cycling variety. I had it easy. Hats off!!!!

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.

Finding a vein.

Phew, thank God that is over. September to the end of January is a long time but thankfully well spent. As it turns out it was 5 months investment into this past month's risky venture. A broken elbow doesn't just require a month to get over it. There's the store of memories and a lifetime addiction to cycling that helps too. Cycling has always saved me, given me that dangling carrot to strive for. This past Winter is not something I want to throw away but its the past that has got me through. The juice in my veins. The majority of my life seems to have had cycling as a pivot point, like a drug of choice. In essence its been running through my veins a long time. Its been a refuge, a way of life, a goal or a talisman since the age of thirteen. I watched Kelly win classics, followed Roche's improbable triple crown and got completely hooked. Dumped was the BMX with yellow mag wheels and bought was the Peugeot racer with profiled tubes.
Ah yes, the drug that has sailed me straight for more than three decades. For instance when things went pear-shaped in Madrid I found a Cash Converters near my apartment in Cuatro Caminos and put a deposit on a Massi racing bike, paying the instalments out of my meagre TEFL teacher's wages. But I would go out of my way every night on the way home from work around eleven, slip left out of the Metro instead of right to pass the shop and stare at the 'reservado' sticker on the handlebar of the soon-to-be-mine purple bike. And then I got it, escaped from the carnage in my life right then by cycling in the Casa de Campo up through the fire-breaks or down past the zoo where the scantily-clad Cuban prostitutes would tout for a different type of lunch-time trade in the midday heat. And sometimes I would get wing-mirrored in the ass by taxi drivers that didn't know how to get around cyclists. I could cycle too as far as the Rosalera in the Retiro park, down past the boating lake and smell the April blooms that would work like an umbilical cord connecting me to the fifty rose bushes my Dad had left behind him at home in the garden.
In fact, even at thirteen, farting around the unfinished town park in 'Ross on my BMX I guess it was escaping from mixed emotions and struggling to find an identity. Wheelies and coming of age. Except the bike just tagged along in one guise or another on the journey ahead. I may have got lost a few times but I always found a bicycle.
There was the cadex I cycled into the Dublin/Wicklow mountains in '93-'94 when I lived in Ranelagh. Seeking pain and isolation to deal with grief I sought the only vein I knew, pushed the plunger on the syringe down to the grit until I was absolutely and utterly destroyed. Then one day I found myself disoriented in Glendalough, couldn't see straight in fact...but I seemed to have found some sort of Neanderthal closure.
Of course, racing is like mainlining a speedball. League or open race, you are on a buzz from the minute you close the car door and close out the world [filled with crying babies, work put on the long finger or guilt maxed to the last] until hours later, everyone asleep, you are up like a meth-fiend at midnight, deconstructing the day like a statistician. Who did what? When did I? Could I have? In the Collins Christle seven years ago I rode from the in-laws to the sign on, rode a sublime race, got Miz to the front twice, never felt the pedals, rode back to the in-laws after Miz got his third place prize, soon drove back to 'Ross for two hours and sat up until midnight smiling at getting a top ten after all of the craziness. I had gotten married in Kilmessan, knew the finale over the bridge like my own driveway. So I sat there in focussed cocaine clarity re-living it all.
And being a courier? Escape at it's best. No real responsibility, no real consequences. Pretty much one long high. There were of course days that were down. Days I felt like crying with exhaustion or lack of fight. Days I couldn't light a Marlboro whilst sitting under Liberty Hall because I was too cold to strike a match. But 90% of it was mindless, escapist highs. Again the bike.

And so I find myself four weeks on from breaking my elbow. Whilst cycling of course. I spent a couple of weeks messed up in the head watching Friends episodes and drifting in and out of some tortuous torpor. Then watching the Bike channel, mostly cyclocross re-runs. I couldn't open the shed and speak to the bike. I didn't know what to say. But I knew the bike was there. Not when I turned my elbow into a tennis ball or when I just wasn't right after the anaesthetic. But somewhere in the white noise was a need to turn September to January into something tangible. All that bloody time turning bearings into mush in all weathers had to have a worth. And two days ago, under the watchful eye of Miz...I got back on a bike, albeit a spin bike but...I thrashed myself silly for an hour and slayed the misery and self-pity in one go. I was back straight away... instant junkie. High on the coming season, high on possibilities, high on the mere whiff of a race finish.
I make no apologies. My addiction is total. It transcends broken bones, broken friendships, caustic relationships and poor decisions. Rehab? Maybe someday. Right now I'm too high to come down for it.