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On the eve of that thing I am doing on my bike, which is nuts and insane and off the right-hand side of the standard deviation curve of reasonableness, a little letter to my friend(s).

You know who you are.

We ride our bikes together because it’s a metaphor for life.

We ride so it gives us an excuse to be, to talk, to share, to experience and to create memories that we will think about when we can’t ride a bike anymore.

It’s too hard. It doesn’t fit in with the life that we have and it disappoints us because we would rather be better.

At times it feels great, but mostly it feels like crashing against the wall, time and time again wondering why we do it. Falling out with our families because of the time we spend which only results in disappointment.

It breaks our hearts because sometimes we get hurt and can’t do it, and sometimes the best laid plans are not best laid at all.

It makes us think that we’re someone we’re not when we watch the cyclists on TV or they flash past us on the rare occasions that they’re close to where we live.

And then, just for a tiny moment, in an all too short instant in time which evaporates or bursts like a soap bubble, we realise why it’s there and why we do it.

We taste it, see it and it stretches out in front of us.

We sit at the top of a hill, usually a big hill, and look and see what we have achieved through our own hard work. The satisfaction of what we have overcome is almost overwhelming and often brings me to tears.

And then we celebrate.

Sometimes just with scrambled eggs and sausages and other times with beer. Then we dust ourselves down, wash our bikes and clothes and pull our aching bodies out of bed and start again.

Maybe I’m done now with the crazy big stuff, maybe Alison is done with putting up with the nonsense of me chasing these demons only to find a bigger demon around the corner.

But what I am not done with is riding and getting to the top of a hill, however slowly or long it takes, because in the end it was never about the race, it was about spending time with people that understood.

It was an excuse.

Blog post number: 1771