Further

1

The Half-day from Hell

Cycling has a self-satisfied saying: 'The worst day on a bike is better than the best day at work.' To which I say, maybe you've just never had a properly bad day on a bike?

I am going to start out by telling you about one of the worst days of not just my bike-riding career, but my life. It failed to be the absolute worst only because it was something I did entirely of my own free will. It wasn't a bereavement, or a shipwreck, or a house fire. It was only a bike race, one where no one got hurt, and so decency demands I keep a sense of perspective, however unwillingly.

It was the British National 12 Hour Time Trial Championship, all the way back in 2000, in Bedfordshire in England. These events, based on how far you can ride in a set time, on your own and with no chance to draft behind anyone else, are very traditional and rather old-fashioned. You can trace them back to the Victorian era just by reading the little plaques on the trophies. This race, which started near Biggleswade, was based on a course that had been in use for over 100 years, and the whole event felt like an antique. There was a level crossing, and beside it sat an octogenarian in a deckchair with a stopwatch and a clipboard, timing how long you were stopped for if the barriers were down. It was that sort of thing.

There were about 100 of us who set out at dawn on a windy morning in early September to ride a complicated series of laps and out-and-backs up and down various main roads around Bedfordshire and Cambridgeshire, finishing on a shorter six-mile circuit which we'd lap for the final couple of hours to allow the timekeepers to calculate an exact distance.

I had only decided to do the race 10 days before it happened, because I was having a racing season where everything I had touched turned to gold. I'd won almost every event I'd entered, including three other National titles, one of them by the biggest margin seen in three decades. By September I believed, in essence, that I could do no wrong. I was wrong about that. I had very little idea what I was doing. I paced the race badly. My nutrition was all over the place. I hadn't really thought through how I might cope when the going got hard. What I did have was proper motivation - I really, really wanted to win the event, because if I could, I'd have won a series of British championships across an unprecedented range of distances, from 10 miles to 12 hours, and that was something I very much liked the idea of having on my CV. In sport as in life, incompetence and determination is a fabulous combination if you want to dig yourself deep into a very unhappy place.

By the five-hour mark I'd started crying. I kept crying till the end. The first hour or two had been all right. But I'd started out too hard, and I'd tried to eat too much as I went, which quickly made me sick. By five hours in I was leading the race, but I was a mess. I don't remember anything actually hurting in an acute way, other than my backside and my feet, which wasn't anything that I couldn't have dealt with. What I was sinking under was a deep, rootless fatigue. It was dizziness, nausea, blurred vision. It was a despair so vast it didn't really have a location. Just keeping going, against the overwhelming scale of the seven hours that were left to go, was almost more than I could do. Every turn of the pedals felt like an individual challenge.

I cried for seven hours, out of disappointment with myself and my inexperience, and out of the loneliness that came from only seeing my support crew for a fleeting, on-the-fly hand up of a bottle and some food once an hour. When someone asked me afterwards if I'd thought about stopping, I said yes. When he asked how often, I said just once, but the thought had lasted for seven hours.

I was sick, frequently. But I also knew I had to keep the energy coming in, so there were instances when I took a mouthful of energy drink, vomited it back up instantly, took another mouthful and repeated the process with a sort of resignation. I think that if you'd watched me doing it, you would have concluded that it was what I was trying to do. Compared to the way I felt about everything else, it wasn't a big deal. In a similar scenario in a similar race, a friend once smeared energy gel over his forearms because he had become convinced he could absorb carbohydrate through his skin like a mollusc. He was a normal, intelligent person who would not have believed this under any other circumstances. He finished the race pebble-dashed with flies that had never experienced a sugar bonanza like it.

I kept going by working from landmark to landmark. 'Just ride to the junction.' 'Just ride to that sign in the distance.' 'Ride to the level crossing, and with a bit of luck it will be down and you can stop and have a chat with the guy in the deckchair.' The crossing was never down, and just as well. When that approach got too hard, instead of just riding to the junction, I promised myself that if I rode to the junction I could give up when I got there. I must have made this deal 100 times, but never took myself up on it. Every time stopping just seemed like too big a thing to do, too final, too weak. I think I kept racing because I lacked the breadth of imagination to stop - although in some ways that's just how bike racing works.

In the end I did actually take the championship title. I covered 293 miles, to take the win by just 2.5 miles, or around five minutes. I was not in good shape. A magazine report noted that I was still visibly shaking an hour after I'd finished. A friend who was a nurse and at the race as a spectator went to fetch another friend who was a doctor. She was anxious that I was about to go into cardiac arrest because I'd gone grey. ('And not a good grey, Michael,' she later told me. 'Even your hair seemed to have gone grey. Apart from the bloodshot eyes, you looked as if you were in black and white.')

Another friend later told me that my experience had reminded him of a 12-hour he'd ridden in the 1980s, on the hottest day of the summer. 'When my support crew caught up with me just after the finish, I was in such a state that they thought I was going to die,' he said. 'When my wife got there, she thought I was going to die. When the paramedics got there, they thought I was going to die.' I wasn't quite that bad, but it felt like it.

At the time I didn't think the result was worth it - I remember waiting for the prize-giving and thinking I might never be quite the same again. Now I'd say it was, but only because when the 'worst day on a bike' discussion comes around, and it regularly does, I normally win.

It was not a good race, and despite the result I didn't take much pride in it. I was almost embarrassed - not by the result, but by the state I reduced myself to. It didn't feel very professional. Also, I didn't really know quite what to make of the experience. I was a good bike rider, especially a good time trial rider. That season I'd won championship races over 10, 50 and 100 miles, and finished second in the 25-mile event. None of those had been especially traumatic - they'd all been well-executed, straightforward races. They hadn't been easy, but nor had they been especially difficult. They had gone according to plan. I'd been in control, of both the race and myself, which was how I liked it. At no point in any of them, even when they were at their hardest, would I have voluntarily stopped. I enjoyed riding them, because I was riding at my best. In contrast, I did not much like the drawn-out, vomity misery of the 12-hour, where despite the result I felt like the victim rather than the victor.

The final insult was that there are two potential physical responses to that sort of ride. One is that a week or two later you get a spike in fitness, and a few weeks of all-conquering race form. The other is that it takes weeks of feeling lousy for your condition to recover to something you'd describe as 'bad' rather than simply 'this person is not an athlete', and you probably don't even manage that before the end of the season. Guess which I got.

I was not good at this sort of long race, I decided. It would make sense. My shorter distance career was founded on a huge aerobic system. I had, essentially, the heart and lungs of a horse, and over anything up to four or five hours it was very effective. I'd like to say up front that while this is a sort of a brag, I didn't do very much to deserve this. It's largely genetic luck. My perception at the time, right or wrong, was that if you wanted to race over what I had come to regard as stupidly long distances, you needed a different toolkit, one that leaned more heavily on things like efficiency and the proportion of your maximum effort you could sustain over time. That, and the ability to eat and drink a lot while riding a bike without getting into the territory that is delicately referred to in the literature as 'gastrointestinal distress'. I hadn't seemed especially blessed in that area either. I decided the whole thing was not my forte and went back to the things I was good at.

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What I was good at was short to middle distance time trial riding. Very simple races against the clock, at distances that traditionally consisted of 10, 25, 50 and 100 miles. Time trial riding is part of elite international cycling,...