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.

Going back

They say you should never meet your heroes but that's a lie. Bear with me and I'll explain.
30 months. 30 months of my life. I'd pretty much gotten over the psychosis I'd developed from that time; 22 months straight as a cycle messenger in Dublin, spanning '95-'97 and subsequently two Summers and a Winter. I just could not get that life out of my head for more than a decade after I'd walked away from it. You see it wasn't a job, or at least, it started out as a job but wound up as an identity that shaped me and made me grow up fast. And it was a great escape.
Like a stereotypical Californian I needed to find myself in '95. Unbeknownst to my inner-self I was totally lost. My Dad had died a few years earlier, my attempts at serial monogamy were crashing and burning regular as clockwork. I was in college but as a mature student I felt like an outsider even though I was developing incredible friendships. I needed to deal with my issues. I'd even been dealt the death card in a tarot reading resulting in the clear-cut message that a section of my life was passing and I needed to lay a wreath and move on.
I somehow got a job despite my lack of knowledge of Dublin and soon became part of a community of cycle-messengers. A murder of couriers. All of them bar none possessed exuberant personalities that more than matched that type of work. You had to have boundless energy and focus. And then off the bike that would continue. Most were musical...either DJs or playing in a band. Some were writers. Many just bounced from one party to the next. Or double/ triple-jobbed. It didn't matter, there was always energy to do more. During that time I made a lot of friends and as is my thing, I spent a lot of time on the periphery. A couple of these people were absolute heroes of mine, icons, people for whom nothing would prevent their stars from burning, infusing everyone about them with vivid energy.
And so it came to pass that a couple of days ago I shook hands with Tom McDonald here in the provincial town I call home. He was back from Australia. Tom had always looked out for me and we'd instantly connected on Stephen's Green. He had stuck in my head for nigh on 20 years and when I sat opposite himself and his lovely wife and child nothing had changed. We've both moved on, through adulthood and responsibility, family and strife but it seemed to me as if we'd met like any other Friday in Bruxelles and just got on with being us. That healthy irreverence and quick wit had gone nowhere. The red dredz are long gone but the same smile and depth of feeling stood out. Nearly two decades apart and the small matter of 10,000 miles... but otherwise....
Funnily enough we both identify and deal with teenagers and young adults coming from tough backgrounds. Later my brother would point out that we probably deal with and identify with those people because we were surrounded by them in the mid-noughties or we were in fact one of those troubled young adults ourselves, albeit skittering around Dublin's warren of streets on bicycles stopping at nothing. Having coffee with Tom just seemed to give clarity and function to all that time on the streets. I know most of my family saw what I was doing as a waste, a lower-caste way of making ends meet. But I just wasn't able, wasn't grown up enough by my mid-twenties. By the time I was spat out the other side of that life-path as if I was surfing a giant, killer wave under the cliffs of Moher, I had graduated. Not just college but I felt I could deal with things, anything at all. I'd been part of something very important to me, a scene or cohort of like-minded people. Funny that most people don't get it, don't see it for what it was, and that makes it a little more special for me. For the craic you should try, just like I did, to explain to middle-aged yokels in your home town that being a bike-messenger was the experience that influenced you the most in your life. Guarantee they stare at you like you have two heads.
I just loved the freedom. Yes I was working long hours on long jobs and spent lonely hours traversing Dublin but the beers and banter in between were phenomenal. Yes it was minimum wage when you took everything into account. And yes it sometimes sucked. But BurgerKing would have been the death of me. So many of the bit-players were transients, between 'proper' jobs but I didn't care. They coloured in everything for me, influenced me with their world view and I seemed to do the same for them. I had my niche, even moving on to a bigger, better company. And I felt valued. You can unearth negatives everywhere but I just know I was very very happy at that time. For all intents and purposes it was like an extended gap year that taught me well. Mostly that I had a value way higher than I'd previously believed. I don't remember half of what I did but I'm extremely proud of my time in Quickstream and Cyclone. Tom, all the way back from Oz, helped to put a cap on the bottle, to place people and things seen and done and put it away for once, maybe labelled as vintage.
Of course the other side of that is that we could meet and have a coffee, Tom and I. We came out of that scene and kept it together. There are the dead and the broken-forever back there.Some people's psychosis [for I really do believe being involved in that world affects your cerebrum for years afterwards] kept on giving. They may have searched out other highs to get them through or travelled a lot rather than sit still, or been paranoid or friendless in the vacuum left by road-hunger. But we escaped. No broken bones, little road rash, less road-rage. A lot of cold and sleet and bucket's of rain. Maybe some arthritis but few betrayals. Meeting Tom was a good thing for me, that catharsis I'd been dreaming of, the closure of a door two decades swinging on it's hinges. They say you shouldn't meet your heroes but I disagree.

Aplausos

Bullfighting is a metaphor for life. Its in the struggle, the beauty, the torment and excellence before the inevitable. On the yellow yellow sand of the bullring the torero only sees the bull, the beautiful creature he will do the dance of death with. He doesn't see or hear the crowd, doesn't absorb the adulation or jeers. He only thinks of the domain of the bull and the domain of the bullfighter. Like life, the outcome isn't pretty but sometimes the living of it is a thing to behold.#################################### Yesterday was one of those days. I wasn't ever gonna be a bullfighter. I was always gonna be ordinary. Yet yesterday, for an hour, everything was sublime. I wasn't hoisted on the shoulders of the crowd and whisked out the main gate, flowers and hats floating past on the breeze...but I won a race after being in the wilderness for such a long time. To be surrounded by such a welcoming team of friendly faces and fierce team-workers made it special. And the cuadrilla at home...friends and mentors and my coach seemed a huge part of it too.############################### Yesterday we clipped in and sped away into the domain of the bull. Moving ever closer to the creature that could make us or slay us. And it was beautiful, symmetric, controlled. Mick and Albert contained everyone's effort inside an infernal metronomic pace that became the creature's undoing. The bull charged and stood, charged and stood and in doing so wore itself out. Us toreros pressed home our advantage. A sublime day where everything went right.################### The last few movements played out quickly. Pressing on, the late last surge, an energy emptying effort from the beast behind and it was over. I planted my feet in the sand, dug in for grip and for less than a second myself and the beast were one as the sword went in and the creature went down. I had finished what everyone around me had begun, getting to the line first, getting the kill for the first time in six years. It felt beautiful covering my gold and purple cape in the sweat of effort, the dust of the ring. And better still the handshakes and messages from good people who'd stuck with me during the poor times.

Alien

December. The Omens are good. I am healthy. I am motivated. Somewhere out there is a new cycling season waiting to swallow me up. As I trundle through training sessions I feel like I'm back playing Space Invaders as a sixteen year old, in the basement of what is now Ephesus Kebab in the New Ross old town. A bunch of us used to run down Goat's Hill during morning break in school, play video games for a few minutes and finally run back up the hill in time for whatever subject was up next. Askew adolescents. Anyhoo...Space Invaders...you see, you keep moving, don't slow up even for a moment, back and forth blasting the baddies off the screen. Consistently avoiding the explosion that heralds your demise, your last life spiralling into deep space.####################################I've been locked into the tractor beam of training since September and I'm loving it. 48 in a few weeks time and I've never been more motivated. Yes the roads are slippy. Yup the air is cool. Of course I could be curled up on the couch drinking port and watching Fast and Loud re-runs. I just can't. What was Grace Jone's tune from the same era as I played Space Invaders? 'Slave to the Rhythm'? That's it. That's me. Kit laid out, bottles full, tyres hard. Sometimes daylight, sometimes not. It doesn't matter to me. Out the door to stop the thoughts or sort them out. Attack the imaginary rival or watch the numbers defy my age or ability. Always a glimmer. Just a glimmer. Probably shortening my life but justifying it in the process. I've come a long way from Space Invaders down the town but I'm still trying to escape the mechanical humdrum of my greatest fears; The white noise awaiting me if I ever stand still. So don't think or blink, just keep moving.

Russet

I'm cutting into Winter in rude health, mobile, willing and motivated. Of course I'd rather be peering into a wine bottle but you can't have it every way. Isn't it an odd time though? In the last weeks bringing home pumpkins, soon to be Jack o' lanterns, surrounded by the sweet kick of huge apples in the background. Or enjoying the multi-rust carnage of the woods, watching as it all falls. I could do a poor-man's Shakespeare and compare the slow and beautiful decay to our own; of how I watched my Mother watching me as I climbed the ladder to harvest the crab apple tree at her house, feeling the moment slip by in total irony. But there is nothing in that scene that can't be better said in silence. It's not a season, it's a sense. And it should be a sense of your own self worth, as well as a timely reminder. I don't see it as a chance for one last cigarette as I sweep up the leaves in the gathering howl of dusk. I can't help but drink in the light and the chance to slow down a little imposed on us by nature. It's only a short, beautiful season, not long in the scheme of things. The mathematical buckos [first Irish builders] that knocked Newgrange together knew what it all meant. From December 21st it all widens out from quiet to a Springtime and Summer riot and then all the way back in again. Reeled in like a Marlin in the Gulf Stream. Its a beautiful, slowing time. Listen to what it says. Regroup, re-examine, relive, return.