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!!!
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