Well I made it! Quite how I will never know....but rather similarly to the pro-riders it seems it was largely thanks to a heavy reliance on drugs, not wanting to let my sponsors down, and that I had bragged to far too many girls to back out at any stage.
Since climbing the Tourmalet for the last time on stage 17 the tour has slowly wound down. Distances have got shorter, the terrain has got flatter and the pace has got slower. I have to admit to having a mixture of feelings as we neared Paris. Joy and relief were met with a sense of loss and apprehension. The questions that were fired back and forth throughout the peleton seemed to summarise what we were all feeling...What am I going to do on Monday? How do you top this?
I am now back in London and I don’t like it.
I keep wanting to fill up imaginary water-bottles and my eyes our peeled searching for fluorescent arrow signs that have been guiding me for the last three weeks. My legs are tingling with a sense of unease and my bum cant seem to get comfy on my soft office chair.
Does Lance Armstrong go to a shrink post tour? Or is that why he keeps coming back?
The only solace has come from the enormous amount of congratulations I have received, the vast amounts of guilt-free alcohol I have consumed, and the knowledge that I don’t have to squeeze into festering lycra at 6 in the morning.
There is always a rather excessive use of the phrase ‘life-changing experience’. This was not the birth of a child, a loss of a limb or a win at the lottery. But it has started a no doubt life-long fascination with the Tour, a new understanding of quite how incredibly tough these pro-cyclists are, and the knowledge that my pain-threshold is much higher than I ever thought it was.
Will I ever be getting on a bike again? Of course...I have a race on Sunday. Reading is not quite the Pyrenees but I can’t help myself.
Thursday, 15 July 2010
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment