Lesson 5: If it is broken, fix it

The first four days were tough, but tough in different ways. Day One was physically tough because of the profile. Cornwall is most definitely not flat.

Day Two was mentally tough. My friend who’d signed up to the event with me and I had had a chat the night before, after Day One. While riding around the flat roads of Essex we are quite evenly matched speed-wise, but in the undulating terrain of the South West he was clearly quicker than me so we’d agreed to both go “at our own pace”. It was the right thing to do but left me to solo nearly the whole way from Exeter to Bath, up Cheddar Gorge and over the Mendips. It was emotionally tough as well, Bath is where I spent 10 years at school and so the familiarity of the environment played tricks on my mind too.

Days Three and Four were physically tough but not because of the terrain this time. Since struggling on Day One with bad cramping I’d doubled-up the energy drinks I’d been having. While this had enabled me to get through the days energy and cramp-wise, it was starting to have a terrible effect on my gut. I will spare you the details, but riding a bike was a challenge, bib-shorts were not my friend and sleeping in a tent several hundred metres from the nearest portaloo wasn’t much fun either.

Days Three and Four were, by quite some distance, the shortest and flattest stages on the ride, and many people referred to them as “recovery days” before things got going again in the Peak District and into Scotland. But on top of the physical and mental challenges of the previous days I realised afterwards that there was something else about the flat days – they were really, really boring. I enjoy riding my bike because I like going fast. I don’t really mind the climbs, because although they’re hard and I’m really slow up them, and I’ve changed the way I look at them and have chosen to see them as the bits of a ride that join up the descents. There’s little I like more than hooliganing it down a hill. But on Day Four there were no descents, no nothing. It was just flat and had little to make me excited. I was no longer able to find the fun in what I was doing, in fact I was in such a dark place that I was genuinely hoping I’d get hit by a car. Not badly hit, obviously, but hurt enough to be unable to continue the event, because at least then I’d have an excuse for giving up. Imagine being in such a bad place that you want to be hit by a car…

At the second pitstop on Day Four, on a park bench outside a Community Centre somewhere between Nantwich and Stoke-on-Trent, I’d had enough. It wasn’t quite a “I can’t do this” moment, but it was definitely a “I don’t know how” moment. I didn’t know how much more I could take, and I didn’t know how the on earth I was ever going to get to John O’Groats if this was how I was feeling despite two “easy” recovery days.

Seeing the state I was in, the Race Director, Andy Cook , came over for a chat and asked how I was. I told him that I was done, and I didn’t know how much more I could take. He simply asked:

“Are you done done, or will you get back on your bike in the morning?”.

There was a strike system on the event, if you failed to make a cut-off by a certain time or if you skipped a stage you’d get a strike. Three strikes and you’d not be allowed to continue. Somehow I’d reached this far without a single strike, so I replied by saying that he was going to have to pull me off the bike before I was giving up. What he then said to me then was the greatest piece of man-management I’ve ever experienced

“In that case I’ll get you to John O’Groats. I know you’re a cyclist. Just sort the non-cycling things out, and I will get you to John O’Groats.”

He sent my friend inside to get me a beer, and he called Luke, one of the race medics over to give me some advice about body-management. In that moment he knew what I needed to hear, that I needed to find the fun (hence the beer), and that I needed some help in finding the things I could change.

With the fresh advice from Luke about relying on proper food rather than energy drinks ringing in my ears, I rode the remainder of that day and that night when I got to Basecamp, I didn’t have a protein shake, I just had a proper supper. Then a second one, just in case the first wasn’t enough. The following morning I didn’t lie in my sleeping bag desperately hoping for 5 minutes more sleep, I got up and got into breakfast early, and rather than filling my pockets with energy bars and gels I made myself peanut butter and marmite sandwiches and grabbed several bananas. I taped my knees up and stocked up on pain killers. If I was going to get to John O’Groats I was going to have to make some changes and approach the next few days differently.

Having made the case for trusting your processes and extolled the virtues of accepting the situation and being at peace with where one is at, it would be wrong to say that if something isn’t working then you shouldn’t try and change it. Identify the things you can control and do something about it.

The challenge, is to know what to fix and what to leave alone.

Click here for Lesson Six...