Thursday 30 August 2012

Shining Moment

I had planned a triathlon for yesterday.  Having volunteered to reclaim a works van left in Chepstow and drive it to Manchester I started to plan.  Originally I'd lined up folk to climb with at Wintours Leap Crag which was all weather dependent, but the weather proved not to be dependable.  So plans rapidly re-jigged to involve a walk along the Wye Valley Path from Chepstow up to Lovers Leap, collect the van, take it to work, cycle home then grab climbing stuff and hit the indoor option in Stockport, a generally solid plan to avoid the raindrops.  It didn't happen quite that way in the end with the normality of the M6 clicking in, and a curious shut in the back of the work van with just my bicycle for company incident on arrival back at base in the car park of the Manchester Velodrome.

What was food for thought was the walking.  Walking alone gives me untold confidence in my ability to travel the world solo.  I'm totally capable of being on my own in my own head for the periods of time associated with walking. In fact, there are times when I seem to need that solitude and refuge.  How many times do we make time for unhurried, uncluttered thinking, I mean the pure thinking not aided by google, not propped up by bouncing things off friends, but the purity of unhurried personal time, problem solving, putting thoughts in order.  No fear of what thought might come into your head next because the time is actually there to pursue every thread which frays from the pattern, and to look at each dropped stitch without the worry that you won't have the time or ability to work it through properly. 

Walking for me is a time when I lose track of how long a moment endures.  Normal life moments live a few seconds, some a few minutes, but walking you feel they could last a lifetime.  A three hour moment is entirely possible, even longer, much more so than riding or driving, because your body is on automatic, and your mind is not interrupted by sights but accompanied by what your eyes take in.  Interpretations of views is affected by mood as much as the view is affected by clouds or winds or sunshine, you won't see the same thing as the person following you.  When I see a pink scarf hanging from a tree, my mind is lost in speculation, a faint feeling of wonder and of the rightness of it's being there.  The moments can last a lifetime, how good is that?

One Shining Moment.  Splendid.




Tuesday 28 August 2012

Grizzly Ghouls

Cue hyperventilation as I enter the last two working weeks with British Cycling.  Suddenly there is substantial knee quivering, gut gurgling terror, and I'm starting to worry about things which are just gremlins and goblins.  Some of this I can clearly do something about so I'm trying to put the irrational in its place behind me, and facing up to the things which I'm hiding from.  There's a clean page in front of me if I can only sweep aside the dust and cobwebs, and of course it's one of those times where anything worth doing is going to take proper proactive action, not a passive crossed fingers approach. 

It seems to be a time to re-focus, pause, breathe, look down, look up, breathe again and make a thoughtful forwards movement just as I do every single time I come off the mountain bike.  I know this from much weekend experience.  It's become a really odd ritual for me whenever the bike or the hills beat me.  Back in the saddle, look down, breathe, look up, breathe, plan and enact.  Ever watched a rider prepare to ride the Kilometre time trial on the track; it has that feel of bringing in calm focus where once was frenetic brain activity.  Cycling and life, maybe they work the same?

I've ridden with other people and groups a lot over the last couple of weeks, and can't remember any more the last time I rode alone other than the work commute.  I need to ride solo again, need to dance to the beat of my own drum on the bike, my pace, returning a sense of me, of confidence, of grinning joy.  I need to slow it down, even if briefly.  Cycling and life, maybe they work the same?

And in the words of Michael Jackson:

"You try to scream but terror takes the sound before you make it
You start to freeze as horror looks you right between the eyes
You're paralyzed"


Saturday 25 August 2012

Life Sentence

I realise sometimes when I talk to people about the things which I get giddy joy from, it sounds as though I only have any kind of history over the last 6 years.  I was not in prison prior to that. Somethings date back longer - the soon to be left workplace has been mine for 14 years, and the house I live in has been my home for 12 years.  But yes, everything else somehow seemed to start 6 years ago and I don't really talk much about what came before that.  But I've not been in prison, it just sometimes sounds like that when there's this gap, this lack of history of me before six years ago.

I've been riding bikes for years, but they were transport not fun from the age of maybe 10 when I first borrowed my sister's Raleigh Eighteen to do my cycling proficiency.  There was always a bike in my life from then right up to the present time but they were there to do a job, to carry me to work or to do shopping, heaven forbid there should be any fun in these times of austerity.  I think it was four years ago now I hired a hard tail at Llandegla for a ride with friends, and not long after that the Decathlon £100ish starter bike was purchased.  18 months now since I treated myself to Christine, the Boardman hardtail, and only last month did the first road bike, the Kinesis RaceLight come into my life.  The curious thing about starting to ride in mid adulthood is that I'm ridiculously early in the learning curve.  Everything is new, exciting and it's hard to express how much giddy fun it is, doing things that maybe others with a longer time in the sport take for granted.  I approach everything with the fresh outlook of a five year old, and it makes for incredible giggly joy.  I feel so grateful that I have this chance, and the untarnished first time experience of a child at this age.

Climbing only entered my life in 2006 too, and again, it's all about exploring, learning, enjoying, everything new and surprising.  Long distance walking, trekking, wild camping, kayaking, the list goes on and on and on of the things I have only found out about post 2005, embraced, made part of my life.  Maybe indeed made my life.  It explains my (hopefully charming) naievety and the sense of jubilation over new experiences and new discoveries.  It's how everything stays sparkly.

But I wasn't in prison before then, I was married.  Dave died in 2005, and I kept trying and trying at the things we did together as a couple, but as a single person they just didn't work, or maybe just didn't work for me.  The memories were perhaps too strong, where once there was joy and happiness, how could that be replicated with just one sad and grieving widow finding the contrast between then and now too hard to contemplate.  I didn't reject my past, not at all, I just explored me, got out, tried things, worked out what this one lonely woman could find some kind of delight or contentment or at least not an active dislike of.  Because the early days were really hard; finding joy of any depth or duration was never ever going to be possible, and simply finding distractions or brief interludes of less grief had to be enough.  It was a happy marriage, one where we both felt we never stopped dancing from the day we met in 1995 through to the rough times of terminal illness.  It took me a long long time to find happiness in being me, I was the world's greatest shallow facade for a long time.  The surface displayed a smile but there was vacancy underneath.  I'm different now.  My smile has depth and warmth and authenticity. 

It was a truly horrific, life breaking thing which happened to me, and in some introspective moments I do want to yell out at the unfairness of it all.  But you can't change what happened, and you can't find a reason for it, I learned that near to 7 years ago now.  But look at me now, in some ways I feel fortunate, because I've been given this chance to find out about me, to truly know me, to explore my life, what I want, what I like, what makes me happy.  I know how to be happy with me, and that's something which sometimes stops me in my tracks.  Stops me dead because I feel blessed by this opportunity, not cursed by my past.

And today, for contrast we're singing this ...


Thursday 23 August 2012

Your dreams

Remember this one?  Drive by The Cars:

"Who's gonna tell you when, it's too late
Who's gonna tell you things, aren't so great
You can't go on, thinkin, nothin's wrong
Who's gonna drive you home tonight"

Yesterday I picked up the Campervan.  It's compact, and a real one woman vehicle.  I'd forgotten but in one of those moments of feeling complete in myself I'd signed up to a slightly smaller than standard bed to give more space for the bikes.  So the van seems virtually moulded around the shape of one 44 year old 5'4" woman.  That would be me.  I love the feeling of being held tightly by my one person tent, and suspect I'll feel the same way about the van.  Like it has arms around me, security and comfort.  I probably have childhood return to womb issues.





This is a quick shot of the front seats of the van.  Again, that feeling of being cradled applies.  I love my bright colours.  The back matches and is entirely pimping.  It's almost scary small but every new person who comes and looks at it with me (I have had a lot of visitors, and not all of them have had to be dragged in), I gain something from.

Logistics officer speaks to me about saucepans and the nestling nature of these, as well as about bike racks.  PA to Head Coach talks to me about power connectors, leisure batteries and scatter cushions (I have dismissed this girlie talk), and the Talent Manager talks of muddy bikes wrapped in duvet covers and of locking systems.  The Logistics assistant clambers up into the roof bed and makes the whole van bounce, apparently if the van's a-rocking, don't come a-knocking.  So I'm not only feeling embraced by the van, but weirdly by my colleagues. Who I am leaving, in just over a fortnight.

Vroom.

Wednesday 22 August 2012

The Line





This is the line.
The line between winning and losing
Between failure and success
Between good and great
Between dreaming and believing
Between convention and innovation
Between head and heart
It's a fine line
It challenges everything we do.
And we ride it every day.

Stolen blatantly from the Team Sky jersey appropriated for a fleeting visit to France this summer to watch a Tour de France stage finish.  The word line keeps cropping up.  Something to be stepped over, something to be trodden, some concept of limit.  But lines have started to feel very much artificial constraints.  I don't feel lines right now, not in any hard concrete fashion, not even as guidance.  My lines aren't even drawn.  It's like the tide line on the sand, nothing permanent, nothing that stays, and something incredibly soft and shifting. 

It's funny hearing indignation in bike terms about a poor guileless walker accidentally presumably standing in the most obvious mountain bikers' line.  Do we feel we have a right to our line, to chose it, I wonder.  Do we really need that line?

Monday 20 August 2012

Every Mile

I fear I may never wear a skirt again.  Well, perhaps in hippy drop out style an ankle length something or other, possibly tie died, maybe with layers.  But definitely nothing that reveals my shins.  The weekend involved a sideways slide into a ditch and a certain amount of whipping with nettles.  Sounds a little Fifty Shades of Grey, eh?  All the rain has kept people off the paths and trails and has also encouraged growth in the undergrowth.  Nettles are so high that there is a danger of slapping strands of foliage across not just your legs and lower arms but even your face.  All a little interesting for the very average rider who kind of struggles to maintain direction on a narrow single track at the best of times, so when you try doing it with your eyes closed to avoid the worst of the nettles ... well, just interesting shall we say.

The weekend was one of those where plans were made, plans were changed, and everything worked out just about right anyway.  Possibly with the exception of the Sunday afternoon downpour anyway.  A sneaky Friday off work saw me in the Lake District on Thursday night, where giggles and wine seemed to be the order of the day followed on the Friday by a rather sedate walk which included coffee, streams, information boards and gardens.  A sense of how I might have been in my 40s if life had somehow been different kind of lingered, but that was one of the many parallel Alisons who seemed to exist this weekend.  Friday night was expected to see a move to the South Lakes, but a stop in a layby and a study of the weather forecast (aren't Smart Phones a great thing?) saw an abrupt change of direction.  Peak District it was.

Peak District.  There are a lot of ... well ... Peaks there, aren't there?  I think we found a number of them (Garmin tells me 1000m of them).  My legs stopped recovering after the hills, which I've never known before.  They hurt, proper hurt, not the kind of hurt you can just tell yourself to Man Up and deal with.  Ow.  But I didn't cry that much ... ... ... staying off the bike for a few days this week.  Curiously.

And because I love this song by Train, the way the words move:

"On the other side of a downward spiral
My love for you went viral
And I loved you every mile you drove away"

Thursday 16 August 2012

New Life

How, I wonder do people who do Triathlon, Iron Man and Adventure racing manage it?  It's a perpetual juggling act to try to maintain some kind of credible and acceptable (to me) levels of ability in three different activities.  To cycle, to climb and to walk.  None of them is ever at the level I think I am capable of, and if a week or two goes by and one gets neglected I feel like I've gone back a step.  Except I kind of know it's not true, fitness and body memory don't fade that quickly.  

It's been a fair few weeks of more cycling, less other stuff, particularly with the arrival of the road bike.  Because who wouldn't want to be out on their new toy?  The fact is, though, that walking up Dove Crag on Monday has left the entire fronts of both thighs still painful three days on, and the IT band knots are mighty fearsome despite the dedicated self inflicted pain of the foam roller.  And I am slightly regretful that somehow walking or in to use a far more enjoyable phrase, hill fitness, seems to have vaguely declined.  Ah, gratuitous picture taken on phone coming right up:



And then there's climbing.  Leading or seconding outdoors are to me more a leisure activity than they are exercise.  After all, I guess climbing outdoors is the ultimate aim, and all the other activity associated with climbing is simply to get fit to enable that activity.  But somehow with the outside giving less feeling of exercise and physical effort, and more feeling of fear and adrenaline it doesn't feel like I'm getting the workout I kind of admit to needing to keep endorphin sanity levels in a happy place.  So last night, particularly in view of the deluge which hit Manchester, I climbed indoors again.  And as ever, thought oh dear, I've not done enough of this recently.  Except that wasn't true.  Quick warm up on a couple of 5s and soon I was onto the 6bs and then leading on the overhangs.  Lovely mish mash of plans which was originally to meet my friend Markella to climb.  We did climb together for a couple of routes but then somehow we were absorbed elsewhere, her with Andy & Sarah and me with my lodger.  The funny thing is, the lodger does a lot of climbing, leads outdoors at a "better" level than I do, but indoors he feels stretched by my climbing, so much so that he sees me do a route and believes he's going to have to do the same route or feel ... feel what, I wonder?  Certainly he feels pushed to have to do it, and makes comments about me making it look easy, and admires my technique and core strength. All quite amusing because it was him that somehow shamed me into leading last night and yet it was me that somehow pushed him to do the same grades, purely by getting up there and doing it.  And I demonstrated to him that I am incapable of doing a pull up. Oddly in demonstrating that I did managed to show that I am actually a lot closer to a pull up than ever before, and the muscles on my arms were oddly defined as I did, so much so I stared at them.

And courtesy of Nina Simone:

"Fish in the sea, you know how I feel
River runnin' free you know how I feel
Blossom on the tree you know how I feel
Its a new dawn, its a new day, its a new life for me
And I'm feelin good"





Monday 13 August 2012

Going In

So here we are in post Olympics slump, and I'm clearing out my desk drawers.  It feels glum.  Until now I've felt kind of excited, giddy, jubilant, all those kinds of words and now I'm feeling, well, just pretty pants really.  Tiredness plays a part to be sure.  I feel somehow peripheral.  In my own life, which isn't what I signed up for.  I either need to go out and annihilate myself or curl up in a corner and refuse to engage with the world.  A whole load of endings coming at once.  The Olympics, the job, and general stuff.  It should feel like a beginning.  Why doesn't it, I wonder?

Yes, tired, I guess.  Thursday saw me out on the mountain bike, Friday cycled to work on the road bike, and Saturday and Sunday I biked on the hybrid from my campsite to the Hadleigh Farm Olympic mountain bike stadium.  There's a 5  year old inside me who just wants to cry and say nobody cares.  But fortunately I'm a big grown up woman of "a certain age", and I won't do that.  Although I kind of want to.

The come down is kind of dramatic.  It's been a few months of highs, and definitely a weekend of stupendous awesomeness during which I've camped at the side of a fishing lake and learned about anglers. I learned that they arrive at 6am, that they have machines that go beep, that they shout when they land a fish, that they have hurricane lamps and curiously down in Essex they have WivesAndGirlfriends who wear black velour tracksuits with writing on the back and UGG boots.  Also they wear down gilets while I wear T-shirt and shorts.  They lean towards the heavy side too.

And because it really has felt like this for a couple of months, even if it doesn't right now, I bring you Jennifer Lopez:

"Tonight, feels like, Tonight, feels like, the best night of my life
I'm goin' in, I'm goin' in, I'm goin' in, I'm goin' in, hey!"

Friday 10 August 2012

Conscious Liberation

In the past decade I think there have been three occasions in total when I've stopped dead in my tracks and gone wow, I feel fit.  And fleetingly, that seemed to  happen to me yesterday.  Woke up feeling strangely fresh and vibrant, somehow almost floaty, featherlight.  Fortuitously it was a day for a bike ride.  Once again, and I appreciate this starts to sound samey, Rivington.  But it's not samey for me.  On a hot summer evening, with a good friend, and a bike apiece, it's bloody awesome.  It felt like me and the bike were dancing, a ride when somehow it would have been appropriate for multi coloured butterflies to accompany me up and down the hills.  I could almost sense them dancing through the air around me, enjoying the sunshine, the breeze and the movement.  Not a long ride, but a totally brilliant one, legs and lungs both on board with the process, and miraculously (well, if a sneaky early depart from work can be considered a miracle) we arrived back at the Great Barn cafe in time for toasted ham, mozzarella and basil ciabatta.  Loving those summer opening hours.

It's a funny old week, kind of a one out, one in type of a week as far as the car and equipment have been concerned.  Tuesday morning in went the road bike and the climbing kit.  Wednesday evening out came the road bike and climbing kit.  Thursday morning in went the mountain bike.  Thursday evening the mountain bike came out, got cleaned, and camping stuff accumulated in the hallway.  Friday morning wheels back on the road bike and off we go to work.  Friday night and the hybrid will take its rightful place in the car.  It's all change, change, change, and having earned a beer last night it was, in honesty a push to finish it sat in my pyjamas on the sofa (where I was discovered by my lodger on his return from his Morris dancing evening).

And I lay there in bed wondering why my buttocks ached, but this morning I still got up, got on the road bike and pedaled my way to work.  In record time.  It takes the hybrid 45-50 minute commute down to 35 minutes.  It's some kind of a miracle (that makes two then).  Bloody marvelous.

And in celebratory tones we're humming along with Eurythmics today while cheering to the TV in the hope it'll help Shanaze Reade who's representing GB in the Olympics BMX today ...

"Now this is a song to celebrate
The conscious liberation of the
female state!
Mothers - daughters and their
daughters too.
Woman to woman
We're singin' with you."

Wednesday 8 August 2012

National Anthem

I've heard so much of the National Anthem during the last few days of Track Cycling at the Olympic Games that curiously it's now the song which seems to strum its way through my head when I'm out on the bike.  Ah yes, the bike.  I've been out on it again. The road bike, on what, on the face of it, were proper roads.  Sunday's brief excursion was a drag strip along the A57, all about simply working out how to balance on the thing, how the gears worked, the brakes work, and oh hello, yes, reacquaint myself with the clip in pedals.  Yesterday took things a step further because there were actual hills, hilly hills none less.  Gears are not my forte but at the high level of mistakes I've been making all points towards the possibility of a fast learning curve, after all, finding out so many things I can do wrong certainly provides me with a lot of potential areas for improvement.  So it's all mostly well out on the road, I think (hope).

I probably shouldn't be writing today; it feels like a really lack lustre morning.  Combination of things I guess.  Track cycling has finished, we're now moving on to BMX and MTB XC, and for cycling I'm guessing the medal rush has eased off, although there are in reality 3 opportunities in those 4 events.  I'm tired.  There are hormones.  And something elusive is missing.

Still, administration to be done - e-mails to young hopefuls to be responded to, and maybe I'll sort out some bike and travel insurance.  A dose of caffeine and up and at them required.

Sunday 5 August 2012

Private Dancer

It's been busy.  The London Olympics finally arrived, 7 long years after I stood in Manchester Velodrome reception with work colleagues watching on the TV as London was announced the winner of the affair.  It felt like a long time away, perhaps one of those things which would never actually become real.  Yet here we are, and somehow I am in the same job, the same house, but everything else has changed.

One of the things changed today, in fact, with the taking in of a new two wheeled friend into the household.  The Road Bike Arrived.  It's a Kinesis Racelight, it's red and black, and as a girl, that's pretty much all I need to know about it.  OK, so I show an interest in the modifications.  It has, for example, a compact chainset.  I don't really know what that is but am assured by several people I trust that, for me, it is appropriate.  It has also had narrower handlebars put on.  Again, I am assured that, for me, this is required.  It's news to me that handlebar width relates to shoulder width.  Who would have thought it?  So, we're a three bike household these days.  Two of them seem to be in several pieces right now, and the dining room is beginning to look a little ... well ... unfeminine if I'm honest.  Nobody said I was a girly girl, right?

Drum roll.  I have been to London for the second time this week.  I was given a ticket to the Track cycling at the London Velodrome.  UCI, the world's governing body for cycling had a few discretionary tickets available, and somehow I was deemed worthy, and even got a choice of when to go.  It was a quick no brainer decision for me.  The women's Team Pursuit.  Not only an event I felt we'd be in a good position to win gold in but also, for me, the one I feel most connection to because I genuinely like all three of the riders.  The emotional relevance was overwhelming and the choice was easy.  And in a moment of crazy joy, I got a call in my bedroom at 8:25 on the Saturday morning.  If I could be down in reception by 8:30 I could get tickets to the morning session.  Could I be packed, and vacate the room in 5 minutes.  Of course I could, for a once in a lifetime opportunity, count me in.

So, I cruise gently towards the final day at work, and the weekends and days between are booking up which somehow brings the final date closer and closer and closer.  Gulp.  It'll be fine.

Today I bring you Tina Turner, because the athletes are real people with real depth and yet somehow those I don't know seem so remote to me, so faceless, so unidimensional, and yet somehow it's normal for the public to feel they know each person intimately.  Private Dancers, and for the women you wonder if, like Vicky Pendleton appears to to my mind what they really dream about is marriage and children, and that's their true yearning ....

"I want to make a million dollars
I wanna live out by the sea
Have a husband and some children
Yeah, I guess I want a family
All the men come in these places
And the men are all the same
You don't look at their faces
And you don't ask their names"

Thursday 2 August 2012

Always Believe

It feels like it's been an extraordinarily lazy few days, limited exercise (hmm, scrub that, no exercise), no forward planning but a whole load of living in the present.  Which has been strangely good for my equilibrium.

I have been on the first of three whistle stop trips to London which makes me giggly excited.  It's weird to find that day trips to London are a source of more excitement than I could possibly have expected.  Perhaps it's the distance between me and The Smoke these days.  I grew up near to Watford, with a 20 minute simple train journey into Euston, and from a child this train trip was something we did at holidays, to go to the museums or to go to the office with Dad.  As a teenager it was something I did with friends, and as an 18 year old I moved to London to go to University, living there until the age of 29.  That's a whole load of London contact, enough you would have thought that it would make me feel somewhat blasé about the whole thing.  And yet it's not, my pulse still heightens, my eyes open wider, and I'm hyper alert to take everything in.  And I find a true pleasure in still being able to negotiate the Underground and get myself independently to wherever it is I need to be.

It was kind of frustrating to find myself at the Lee Valley Water Park watching the crazy and rather splendid sport of Kayak Slalom while my first love cycling was taking place out on the roads of London.  Text and twitter updates were avidly pursued between every slalom competitor to see what was happening in both the women's and the men's time trial.  Having worked in the vicinity of Bradley Wiggins for 14 years there was a vested interest in properly truly wanting the gold for him, in believing it was not his right, but somehow yes, maybe that, his right to demonstrate that in this event, he is the best the world has to offer.  A worthy winner.  Equally an interest in Chris Froome, having been busy during 2007-8 assisting and supporting with the paperwork to confirm his fundamental Britishness.  An Olympic bronze and he's in the background.  But he's happy with where he is, he knows his time will come.  A true team player, cyclists in the UK honour his achievements, maybe quietly but we know what he's done and gently doff our hats to him.

Back in the office for a break now ... I've done lots of reading and writing on the train, and am feeling a fundamental faith in myself and a feeling of solid confidence in my future.

For so many reasons, this song is on my mind today as the Olympic Games heads to the velodrome:

Thanks to Spandau Ballet for this one:

"oh but I'm proud of you, but I'm proud of you
there's nothing left to make me feel small
luck has left me standing so tall
gold
always believe in your soul
you've got the power to know
you're indestructible
always believe in, because you are
go"