I went for a bike ride this morning.
It was sunny, a little windy, I was rubbish.
I've trained a lot over the past eight weeks to get myself fit for some special riding I'm doing in a couple of weeks, but I was rubbish today. My legs were tired, and I was not really in for it.
I tried my best before I went to talk myself out of it several times.
I managed to force myself onto the bike and out onto the road.
I was cycling outside of Ruddington, the village close to my house, just plodding along, and a young lad flew past me on a bike much cheaper than mine, with gear not quite as serious as mine, looking very amateur in his setup, but very good in how fast he was travelling.
I was pretty sure he was new to cycling.
He pedalled away into the distance and almost out of sight, and I resisted any of the last small strains of an urge to chase after him, particularly just at the start of my ride.
I first started riding the bike again (after riding it as a child a little bit) in 2004.
In fact, in 2003, I started to swim and run, and then I got this little urge back then to do that triathlon thing to try and get some weight off to try and get a bit fitter to try and not die from cardiovascular disease, which there was a small risk of in my family.
And so, in 2004, I bought a bike that I couldn't even say the name of and was laughed at in the bike shop for not being able to pronounce it.
It was cheap and away I went in 2004.
I would build up over the following 11 years to do things in relation to endurance exercise that I could never ever have dreamed of.
I would qualify for a triathlon for Great Britain as an age group triathlete on at least two occasions in long distance.
I'd do a 24-hour bike ride from Manchester to London.
I'd do an iron-distance triathlon in bang on 11 hours better than I could ever have dreamed of, and I'd run a marathon faster than I would ever have dreamed of, even as a stand-alone marathon.
And then I would come over the top of those experiences and drop down concentrating on the bike because I couldn't run anymore because my knee was wrecked doing some cool things on a bike and then getting to 2020 having built the practice and being in a worse state of fitness than I was five or seven years before.
I've managed to recover some of that fitness, but I'll never be the same again.
I will never be that young lad on a cheap bike haring past people who are 'all the gear and no idea,' but I have been there and to other places that were extraordinary, and I've come back again.
This of course, is just a metaphor, isn't it for pretty much everything, for work, for life, for marriage, for parenting, for anything you care to apply it to.
I've reached the stage of age and treachery.
What happened to the young lad was he reached a set of temporary traffic lights which were about half a mile up the road (I already knew they were there), he stopped about six cars from the front of the traffic lights but I didn't, I went past him because I knew that I could sneak through at the front and turn left and I lost him on the road and never saw him again.
I wasn't faster; I was just wiser.
As the famous old cyclist Fausto Coppi said, 'Age and treachery will overcome youth and skill', at least on that occasion.
On reflection, that's probably not the case, and if you have the opportunity to run a football team, kids club, or huge organisation full of people, it's probably best to think of it like this…
Age and treachery combined with the advantages of youth and skill will overcome almost anything.
Between me and him there was a good cyclist in there somewhere.
Blog Post Number - 3922
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