Please indulge me one more time as I write about what happened on Sunday at La Marmotte.
I promise this will be the last time I go on about this (at least for a little while) In the after math of something like this, in the warm after glow, I love to reflect, review and see where we have come and where we can go.
It took me a little time to appreciate the real significance of what had happened as it tied in with other events in my life over the past year; but in the end the reflection came down to a reflection on inspiration where I had managed to find the will power to drag myself out when I didn’t want to. To get miles in when I could have easily not been bothered. The inspiration came from a 13 year old boy (now 14) who lost his Daddy last July.
People who read this regularly will know the story, if not you can catch up with it here. At Tim’s funeral last year his son Louis stood up and told everyone that because his Dad was 49 when he died that he intended to ride 4,900 miles within a year. He is entirely on course for that and will smash it and I hope to be there the day that he does.
The ripples of inspiration though grow into waves and then into tsunamis; sometimes the smallest pebbles create the largest avalanches.
Round about the time that Louis uttered those words I was pretty much done with cycling. I was a few weeks into my forced retirement from running due to injury and I had lost one of my best cycling friends. There was no joy there for me anymore, no motivation, no inspiration.
Louis changed that.
If after all he had been through he could do 4,900 miles in a year then I was damn sure that I could too; and so we started to ride together, in fact a lot of my training this year has been with that young man.
Because of that I decided to have a go at a bigger challenge and I picked La Marmotte and because of that I asked my friend David Nelson to join me. Because of what Louis said, David and I did La Marmotte. Because of that David trained harder and better than me. Because of that he was able to inspire me up the hills to an achievement that I would never of other wise had.
The final postscript to the blog about the unusual and amazing places that inspiration comes from is this, without any planning and any intention when David and I reached the bottom of the Alp at 16:00 Sunday afternoon, I had clocked up 4,897 miles.
I think the 4,900 came round about bend 12 David.
This is the last of the La Marmotte blogs, the last of two. If anyone has gained any inspiration through anything reading this story, then all the credit for his bravery and inspirational actions, goes to Louis Dunne.
(Tears)
Blog Post Number - 1333