It Is About The Bike

If you draw comparisons between Lance’s cycling career and mine, there are some similarities.  For example, we both trained like Tour de France riders but I’m afraid that’s where the similarity ends.  Lance went on after fighting testicular cancer to win the Tour de France seven times, and join an elite group of superhuman athletes.  I went on to lose a couple of good jobs, ruin any career prospects I had, almost lost my marriage and won very little.  But cycling changed my life.  I went from a well-rounded fifteen stone, inactive, seven pints of beer a day sort of bloke to a very intensive five hundred mile a week anorexic bike racer, which on reflection, improved my health and well-being.  Unfortunately, when the bug bit me, I didn’t know when to stop.  Like the gambler at the card table or the punter at Ladbrokes who thought he had found the recipe for success, I thought that this bike or this type of training was going to make me that bit faster.  If only I could finish work at 4pm instead of 5pm I could get those extra miles in. I was totally addicted to the bike.

Now I’m cured I can look back and think ‘what if?’  What if for the last quarter of a century I had channelled my energies into a business venture or a career and poured as much time and effort as I had pushing the pedals? I could have been a millionaire perhaps, who knows?  If you believe that rubbish, you will believe anything.  More than likely I would have carried on being the boozer and under-achiever I was before I discovered the bike. The present predicament I find myself in seems to prove that theory.