When the going gets tough, the jittery get nervous

I'm riding my first 10 mile time trial of the year tonight.  It's at the Olympic Park in London.  That makes it sound rather grand.  It isn't.  A local cycling team, of which I used to be a member in a previous life, organises it.  It's really low key stuff, and no-one, but no-one will be paying a blind bit of attention to what I'm doing, and yet I'm as nervous as a kitten in dog-filled caravan.

And this is route of my problems with tt-ing.  One must be in control of oneself to execute the event correctly.  You must mete out the effort over the entire length of the course, slowing increasing the pace until you hit your threshold with a mile to go.  A mile can be sustained at this intensity without cracking.  Any earlier than this and you get into oxygen debt and the game's up.

You can see the dilemma.  Your energy levels are at their highest at the start of the event, so you have to go slower than you know you can.  That's tough when there are other people on the track who are faster than you.  The temptation to follow them is huge.  But it's a temptation that must be resisted.

I've never managed to resist in all the time trials I've done, and that's troubling.  I'm always left with the knowledge that I've not shown myself in the best light to the other riders.  Tonight, it must be different; I must be calm and controlled.  

Chris Froome likens time trialling to rolling out a huge, heavy, furled carpet.  At the start it unfurls slowly, speeding up as it goes until it hits its maximum just as the finish line approaches.  And Chris Boardman describes it as more of an art than a science.  I'm quite good at art.  I'm artistic.  I just need to show it.  On a bike.  At twenty-four miles an hour.

Groundhog week

Oh, god, here we go again.  I can't really fathom why but I'm spectacularly bored at the moment.  I facking dread Mondays, not because my work is too stressful or the people are unpleasant.  It isn't; they aren't.  It's just that it's become so very dull.

The department I work in has become denuded to just two staff, and there's not much stimulating group banter to help the hours shuffle by.  It's also been taken over by a manager who's been promoted above his abilities.  This happens all the time of course.  These professional shortcomings can be circumvented, however, as long as the person in question is (a) organised and (b) happy to give his or her more able underlings their head.  Unfortunately, my current boss has the time management skills of an indulged 5-year-old with a major Ritalin problem.  He's also the only person in the firm who doesn't realise he's floundering.

This means I have no direction in my professional life.  He just meandering about the place, flapping.  He also drops me in it from time-to-time by not getting his fcuking ducks in a row and leaving me with unrealistic deadlines for the poorly defined and cock-headed projects he does actual see to their lacklustre fruition.

I can't deal with boredom anymore.  I'm going to crack, and end-up wandering about the place like swinging a cricket bat Vyvyan from The Youngs Ones.  I don't want to see that, and nor does anyone else.  So.  He needs to go.

Au bout de souffle

Well, it's been a breathless 16 hours.  As reported, we had a general election here in the, hitherto, UK.  It had been slated as too close to call.  All the smart money said we were heading toward another coalition.

The poles closed at 10pm last night.  Literally seconds later, the BBC revealed the results of an exit pole, which suggested a huge swing to the Conservatives in England and a clean slate of victories in Scotland for the SNP.  This flew in the face of seven separate opinion polls that suggested otherwise.  The first results were in the north east, traditional Labour heartland.  The exit poll suggested they'd win and by how much.  We held our breath.  Both Labour candidates won and by slightly less than the predicted margin.

Labour were in for a long night.  I turned in after these results, and awoke this morning to the news that Labour had been destroyed outside London and Wales.  The SNP won Scotland almost absolutely.  And the LibDems - ah, yes, the LibDems - they were basically wiped from the British political map.  They no longer have any say in matters, and it's difficult to envisage their recovering from this in the mid-term.  They might never completely get of over, such was the scale of the damage.

I've been predicting the LibDem decimation for the last five years.  Clegg didn't understand his own constituency, and that's fatal to a politician.  The people who voted for him are left of centre.  They could not forgive being taken in like this.  "I voted for a social democratic centre-left party, and thanks to them I now have a Tory PM."  Revenge is a dish best served cold.

Nick Clegg is 48 years old.  He's been deputy prime minister of the United Kingdom and not he's out in the cold.  His party hates him.  Chances are he'll be forgotten, save for his calamitous stewardship of the LibDems or course.

Au revoir, Nick.  Or is it goodbye?

A simle game, complicated by idiots

In preparation for the upcoming time trial season (bikes, that it), I have fallen into the same trap that all men of a certain age do when faced with a perceived challenge to one's sense of self worth, and started throwing money and technology at the problem.  The problem in this case, of course, being my feeble engine and unwillingness to train properly.

In classic avoidance style, I've taken to getting the tube to a nearby cycle superstore to buy shoes, handlebars, heart-rate monitors - anything really to offset my feelings of worthlessness.  All these fine consumer durables are part of a transparent attempt by my personality to dig out the essential "me" - the me that fears nothing and no-one; the me that works hard and treats the twin impostors of success and failure with haughty disregard.  Just like the unfortunate scarecrow in The Wizard Of Oz, I need a symbol to fool myself into believing in me a bit more.  Had I had access to a faux potentate and a clockwork heart, I could have saved myself an awful lot of time and money.

What's more, my back is hurting, which means I can't train today even if I wanted to.  Back down Halfords tomorrow then.  Perhaps I'll buy a bell.  A titanium one.

Words don't come easy to me...

I have to be brief today.  I've got a book review to do for work, so I'm going to talk about that immediately prior to doing it.  Very postmodern.

It's a book about Muhammad Ali.  They must have been done to death, eh?  I suppose.  But this one's different as far as I know in that it is a list of Ali pro fights, all 61 of them.  The author is a grizzled old boxing journalist, and knew Ali when he was fighting, so the prose is crisp and to the point, but he also puts Ali pronouncements in some kind of personal context.  The spiel and the slating was a performance.  They were two reasons for this according to Ali: 1. to sell tickets and 2. to give him a psychological edge.  Ali admits in the afterword to being physical scared when he entered the ring.  He needed his opponents to fear him, particularly ferocious young fighters like George Foreman.  This would give him the space he needed to pick them off.

The book is a great overview of Ali the boxer.  You need to be in your sixties to remember Ali the fighter; his legacy is rather lost to the rest of us, his celebrity overshadowing it somewhat.  The book changes that.  You are left in no doubt what a remarkable pugilist he was: fast, brave, audacious.  Like all real geniuses, Ali first mastered the textbook and then ripped it to shreds.  He was the greatest, and not because he say so, because the record says so.

Days of wine and roses

We had a bank holiday weekend here, in this united kingdom, the weekend just gone.  It was super.  The weather, which was predicted to be terrible, was nothing of the sort.  It was largely sunny, warm and spring-like.  Just watch the doctor ordered.

Friday night we launched festivities with a couple of jolly old ales at one of our locals.  Every pub in the vicinity was packed, but everyone was in gerr-ate spirits.  There was real feeling of optimism and comradeship broad; it was lovely, like being at war, but with rationing and carpet bombing.

On Saturday morning I continued my preparations for the up-coming time trial season by going on a 2-hour training ride out in the sticks.  Post this, I had that euphoric feeling one gets, a mix of endorphins and hubris at having done some exercise.

This feeling was bolstered by a 2-hour walk in the Essex countryside with the missus, followed by a slap-up binge dinner for two with fine wines and ice cream.  Marvellous.  I slept like cadaver on Saturday night as a result.

On Sunday we trundled up to Cambridge, which is pleasant enough for a couple of hours.  A vegetarian scone and a browse around England's sole surviving independent bookshop then home.  We met friends for noisy, drunk bourgeois drinks that evening to see the sabbath out.

Yesterday (Monday) was spent at a dog obedience show and then in the West End browsing around expensive shops, which is the quintessential British bank holiday Monday in a nutshell.  It's liberating to be cliched from time to time.

Huzzah!

When the go and get stuffed.

It's time trial season again!  That's cycling time trialling, I should make clear.  I knew it was looming, but had managed to wipe it from a my mind.  I was in cycling denial.

As soon as I found out my first one is two weeks away, I leapt into action.  I cut out food for the most part, well the foodstuffs that afford pleasure.  Food for an endurance athlete, even one as modest in his abilities as this one, is fuel.  It's not to be enjoyed; it's to be endured.  The only upside to food when one is training is that it stops you shaking when you've overdone it on the bike.

As well as not eating fun stuff, I've cut the portion size of the rest of it by at least a third.  I do feel lighter, which is good.  It's all about power to weight ratios, this game.  Which brings us to the second part of the preparations: training.

I went out after work last evening and did my first interval session.  Intervals involve going hell-for-leather for a short period and then having a rest.  You do this eight times.  It's quick.  Unfortunately it also makes you look like a loon.  You ride along as if all is well with the world, and suddenly, apparently for no reason, go crackers.  You ride with the intensity of a man fleeing a hippo.  Ten seconds later you stop and calm descends once more.  Other cyclists can and do take offence at this type of training.  Understandably so.  You fly past someone like he's going backwards, only to sit up and let him catch you shortly thereafter.  It looks like you're taking the piss, frankly.

I'm feeling it today.  I can scarcely keep me eyes open.  Luckily today is the portal to a bank holiday weekend, so I couldn't give a shite.  A couple of real ales this evening, a homemade curry will restore the tissues.

Right, home time.