Sunday the 3rd of July 2023 was supposed to be a different blog than this.
It was the blog that I had written well in advance about this journey through my 51st year and since my 50thbirthday to, the night before the biggest physical events I’d ever taken on.
Through the past 10 years of my life I had, in some way, managed to mitigate the damage of rocketing to 18 stone in my early 20’s and pulled back from that, completing iron distance triathlons, crazy one-day bike events and 24-hour rides and 3-day stage races in Europe.
This blog would be about the next level of stage race, the 5-day Haute Route Pyrenees where you ride for hundreds of miles in 5 days and climb twice the height of Everest over some of the most iconic mountain climbs for cyclists in that part of the world.
It would be this enormous adventure in the most magnificent of scenery and I would be at the fittest I’d been since I was 17.
But sh*t just doesn’t play out like that.
I use this training software called TrainingPeaks which is really famous in the world of endurance sport and I can tell that it was the 17th of February that I realised that there was something significantly wrong.
I had been off work for all of January and had cycled in Tenerife and was heading towards the best fitness level on TrainingPeaks that I’d ever achieved by about the end of April towards early may.
On the 17th of February I couldn’t finish a hard 90-minute FTP session in the shed and I wrote a message to my coach on TrainingPeaks after I stopped at 14 minutes that said “not feeling it today”.
The next time I trained was the 20th February, trying to do the same session. I told my coach that I wasn’t sure what was going on and that I’d actually stopped for 2 minutes in the middle of the session for a rest (I never, ever, ever do that). I couldn’t understand why my heart rate was so high.
A month later I got a call from a doctor after a series of blood tests to diagnose my HYPOT.
I’d put on a stone in 6 weeks and pretty much lost the ability to ride my bike and so, the blog that was planned for the 3rd of July would be different.
The last 4 weeks I’ve been better as things start to stabilise a little bit, but I’ve got further advice to find and further measures to take to be back, even to where I was in January let alone where I was in 2018 when I was at my best on a bike and where I look back to as the highest point.
And so, on to tomorrow and to this week.
If you read this when it’s published at 6pm on Sunday, I should be in my car with Carl Dunstan (our super physio/business development director/friend and support member), Alex Jones (my friend and amazing implant surgeon and restorative dentist and even better cyclist) and Louis Dunne (our boy wonder and aspiring professional triathlete) and we should be about 5-6 hours from the French and Spanish border in the Pyrenees.
I’m going on this event even though I’ve never rolled across a start line on an event and not finished it.
This will be the first time that I ever do that.
I will roll over the start line on Tuesday morning in stage 1 of the Haute Route Pyrenees (we’ve named it Mission Improbable for our kits and that’s now exactly what it is) and I’ll ride as far as I can on stage 1 and then I’ll stop and get in the car and then I’ll ride as far as I can on stage 2 if I possibly can and then I’ll get in the car.
The final stage is short by comparison from 8-9 hours on Tuesday it will become 3-4 hours on Saturday.
Maybe I’ll manage to ride the stage on Saturday to the end, but I won’t get a medal and I won’t get a t-shirt.
One of the things we wanted to do for this event was raise money for Cancer Research and particularly because it’s something that has touched the lives of Alex and his family several times in devastating ways but all of us in some way or another.
We wanted to tie this up with efforts from our team at the clinic and so, last week some of the team did the Race for Life and the link to their JustGiving page is here and they’ve already raised over £1,700 and Alex and his family have already raised nearly £6,000 so, by the end of this week we would really like to make it £10,000.
The link for the Haute Route Pyrenees JustGiving is here.
If I’ve ever been of any help or use to you then follow what we’re doing on Instagram here and here and we’ll tell the story of what’s going on through this week.
I’m sorry that I’ve set this up and then will let people down by not being able to do it, but I will try my best to do whatever I can and to shout loud and to ask people for money for Cancer Research through this week and hope that even though I will not achieve what I set out to achieve, we can still make a difference to people who have less than we have.
It should be fun; it should be entertaining at least and there will be plenty of stuff on our social media channels that I know nothing about.
I hope that you’ll engage, and I hope that you can put your hand in your pocket.
Blog Post Number - 3130
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