An inconvenient nostalgia

In which I think about why I stopped racing, and wonder if I'll ever go back

The Transcontinental Race set off from Geraardsbergen last week, and I’ve been noting my reactions to it with interest. I hadn’t expected to experience something approaching envy.

Image credit: Kristian Pletten

Since I stopped racing, I’ve deliberately maintained a certain distance between myself and this event – for a whole collection of reasons, not all of which need to be discussed publicly. I’ve declined invitations to commentate, and I’ve avoided following the race in very much detail, though I’m unavoidably interested in who’s riding, and how it’s all going.

I think on of my main reasons is the futility of trying to recapture past glory. And it’s not just that I wouldn’t stand a chance of winning these days. (Standards have risen, and even if I did get myself back to the heights of fitness I enjoyed six years ago, my serendipitous style of racing, and my fondness for café stops and mountain detours, would mean I lagged a long way behind today’s champions.) The thirteen days (10 hours, 28 minutes) I spent on the road in 2016 hold a magical place in my memory. They were thirteen days when the difficulties of my everyday life were left behind; where a lot of things went right, and those that went wrong were within my capability to fix. I remember saying, early in the race (possibly at Checkpoint 2 in Grindelwald), that I hadn’t been through my first really hard patch yet, and that I was eager to get to it, because of the anxiety of knowing it inevitably lay ahead.

Here I am arriving in Grindelwald. I’m not sure who took the photo.

There were numerous hard patches during that race, of course (and you’ll know about them if you’ve read Where There’s A Will), but I remained happy for almost all of it. A few months after I got home, I remembered that I had sent voice notes to Jack Thurston every couple of days, for a podcast he was making about the race. I listened to them with some trepidation, knowing full well how these things can work – a stretch of intense misery and discomfort on the bike can be recast in comfortable hindsight, as a moment of joyful heroism. Perhaps I had actually been miserable for two weeks, and just conveniently forgotten about it.