Time of the day this journal entry was written: 3am again, unfeasibly; Kilos: 84, that’s minus 1; Cigarettes: none, but of course I don’t smoke; Alcohol units: 18, many people to dinner during the week; Injuries: unfortunately my foot bone really is attached to my lower leg bone, which is attached to my thigh bone, rattling some mis-alignment up and down my lower back bone, which is just a general mess. It needs sorting, see below; Close shaves on the steed: one, skip removal man on a side-street looks me straight in the eye at 50 yards… and then cheerily turns sets off into my path on Kew Road, rumbling insouciantly across my lane (for the sharp-witted, this was in a section without the cycle lane): he would have clipped me with his chains, or simply run me under the rear axle if I hadn’t braked hard. There was no point of shouting at the bastard, he wouldn’t even have heard.
Oh, I thought, an adventure; all that physical endeavour, that’ll suborn the (anti-) sleep demon, defy the Voice in the Night. Now, having signed up for this race, I find the enormity of the adventure itself is waking me at 3am. Is a 50-mile training ride, three hours of system-depleting exertion, not enough to send me to the Land of Nod? Apparently not, and the irrational wakefulness brings a veritable dam-burst of doubts, a cascade of concerns (and yea, a waterfall of worries, but I promise to stop this liquid alliteration). The probing anxiety is there all right… How the hell will I manage to get everything ready… and that’s just to reach the point where I can wonder how the hell I will get through the race… And by the bye, there’s another bed-borne problem, an impossibly stupid situation, but a sleep-defier nonetheless, best encapsulated in the inadequate notion of… Duvet Dysphoria.
These are just some of the things I need to get ready.
The body: I can build myself up by training all I like, but to prevent bodily breakdown I need to get myself mended. Off to the physio…
The lower back: once I actually managed to wrench it bending down to put a fork into the dish-washer, and by throwing the (old, see below) duvet onto the bed, so you can imagine that there’s a bit of form here. My back has served me well over the years, uncomplainingly carrying vast weights and being repeatedly compressed by running, so now it needs a little care if it is to remain er… ‘stable’. An MRI scan a couple of years back was not a pretty sight, apparently.
But dependable James the Physio is doing his best to resurrect me. So, stretches, arches and curls, twists and furls. And recently a few extras: weird squats and calf-extensions. And a plank or two.
There’s another issue. I have a pretty ugly problem with my left foot, which has declared itself as arthritic (unsurprisingly, as a left-footed jumper and habitual ankle twister who ran on it for thousands of miles - so I can hardly complain about that either). However, if I am going to make approximately a million pedal strokes on my left foot between Krakow and Tarifa, then I had better make them as comfortable as possible. I was encouraged into seeing a gait analyst, who moulded me for my defective feet (yes, frozen big toes and the ankle on the way). And these are just the serious issues… (minor complaints will be mentioned in passing).
Then there’s kit…. I have finally got some aerobars (if you haven’t come across this term before, they are the forward-pointing mini-handlebars, horn-like additions to the steed, used by triathletes for aerodynamic trim). As far as I am concerned they’re mainly a chance to vary my cycling position, so that I don’t lose the feeling in my hands and feet as quickly as I otherwise would****. Inevitably I cannot use normal aerobars because my shoulders are knackered (habitual dislocater, both arms…), so I have had them adapted.
There have been countless other ‘Oh, just another £300, sir…’ moments. A new pair of moulded inserts for my old cycling shoes,a lightweight bivvy bag for dossing at the roadside, electronics and all their leads… just kit, kit and more kit. Even a bit of bike-packing ‘luggage’ in which to carry all this kit. Aaargh, a new gps. (When my Garmin wasn’t having an existential crisis - ‘The GPS is off’ it once stated… what?! – to which I asked ‘what is a GPS if its GPS has turned off?’ - it was losing charge in 30 minutes). And a bike fit, sir…? I haven’t had one in a while so yes, anything I can do to make the ride less stressful is probably a good idea. People take one look at my sagging skeletal frame, scratch their chin tolerantly and add: ‘Well, people do change shape over time…’ (this is just polite for “you’re getting old, mate”).
And finally, back to fitness. I kept up the training over the winter, so I am reasonably ready, but there are oddly fundamental questions here too. What is fitness when it runs over two weeks or more? It’s hardly the ability to sustain a sprint, nor the sort of fitness that enables a person to run, say, a marathon. This is more to do with the resilience that enables you to keep cranking it out unquestioningly over hours and hours, to keep the discipline tight over days and not to allow the suffering to get in the way of the prize, the finish line, over two weeks and more. Yes, that is, to wake up at 5am after just a few hours’ sleep, struggle out of the bivvy bag or (occasionally) the hotel bed, and get back on the road, banishing the demons of discomfort and of well, too much comfort… Endurance carries you into a different psychological domain and the longer an event the less it depends on physical ability and more on mental fortitude. Which begs the question, do you need to do the training in the first place? Or how much should you do? Perhaps resilience is just a part of you.
Above, I mentioned a speculative concept: Duvet Dysphoria. This isn’t the Voice in the Night or the elusive nature of sleep while exhausted. It is that essential but frankly ludicrous exercise of successful management of bed linen. Which surely ranks with fridge discipline** as one of the most useless of privileged early 21st Century problems. Hardly something to lose sleep over, you say, except of course that this is exactly what occurs.
Not long ago, She who Knows bought a new winter duvet, and nights have been complicated ever since. The duvet in question is massive, about 500 tog, I should say (a weight that might actually do your back in while remaking the bed), with dimensions so vast that in addition to the bed, it warms the floor half way to the window. Making it impossible to manage any sort of heat release. In order to regulate my temperature, either I must triple-stack it in the middle of the bed (risking even more furnace-like nights), or I have to create a heat ‘valve’, in order not to wake up next to some frozen, insensible lump of limb… You’ll appreciate of course that I run hot, particularly when the body is in restoration, replenishing itself after exercise.
First, to general tutting for my unreasonably vigorous movements, I try to Swiss-roll my feet (oddly for a pocket furnace, my feet can get cold, their nerve-endings having been shredded a few years back****), while at the top end I arrange the duvet under my chin and pull in my arms. Now for the complicated bit: I have to arrange a vent for hot air, but not too exposed… Hah! I have a plan. I clasp the edge between my knees - fine if I am facing the window, just a little difficult when looking the other way. A double twist sometimes does it. There is jeopardy here; if just a flap of duvet slides off the bed I’m back in the furnace, irritatedly awake and getting all negative about the future of humanity and my place in it. There’s that old joke of being so pathetic that you couldn’t fight your way out of a duvet; it has become scarily relevant…
And all the while, She who Knows snores happily away next door to me, at a perfect temperature. (Sorry, I know perfectly well that She who Knows does not snore. She assures me of it. And She does, after all, Know…)
* With apologies to Bridget Jones
**Fridge Discipline: is your fridge as full of clutter*** as ours is? I wouldn’t say it’s inefficiently packed, of course, because that might cause a row, but it means that I open the fridge or freezer door to grab something with one hand (let’s say, er… the butter, which after all, is needed only five or ten times a day…), only to spy it right at the back, hiding behind tubs of hummus and yoghurt, blocks of cheese and unknown substances in Tupperware. Logistical questions aside (how did it get there, behind the tin of coffee grounds and last Tuesday’s leftovers?), what should be a simple ‘reach and grab exercise’ now becomes a 15-phase operation… (put down whatever you’re holding, muscle into the stupidly narrow doorway, slide items, Tetris-like, left and right, until the butter ends up at the front...), grab, close door, pick up the rest of your breakfast again and, finally, proceed to the table. Alternatively, with a little Fridge Discipline, it could be achieved in one movement.
***Freezer Clutter: I opened the freezer door the other day, only to see the contents teetering ahead of me… Moments later I was holding back a deluge of items. Just one of which made it past me. Guess which… Perhaps some Haäagen Dasz*****? A tub that bounced neatly and rolled off in a semi-circle? No. Or a frozen pizza, which might have rolled away, scattering nothing more than small ice particles ? No. It was a bag of frozen peas, which as you know are always barely frozen and break apart easily. The bag split on impact, naturally. The result – 200 individual peas each in their own tiny space on the kitchen floor.
****Shredded Nerve endings: this is a weird by-product of long distance cycling (and probably ill-fitting shoes); the surface sensation of your feet (and hands) is lost. Luckily the deeper {is that proprioception?) remains, so I don’t fall over (from that, anyway). The feeling returns after a few months, but a side-effect is that when the rest of the body is in close-down, my feet do get freezing cold.
*****Ice Cream: I am not sure of the spelling of this and can’t be bothered to check, because while the product itself is a fine ice cream, its name is a ludicrous confection, the delirious imaginings of some person with a made-up marketing job******. It tastes good enough to sell without all those mock Central European accents letter combinations.
******Made up marketing job, with apologies to Paul Merton and Have I got News for You.