Round about right now seven years ago I was getting ready to set off on a 24 hour bike ride from Manchester Velodrome to somewhere near Olympic park in London.
It still goes down as one of the biggest weeks of my life in exercise because the Sunday before I had completed the Outlaw half triathlon in what would be my best half time ever (although of course I didn’t know that then).
We set off from Manchester on the 8th June at 11 AM as a group of 20 Dentists and people associated with us and amongst a group of about 250 in total.
It was all smiles and families and sunshine and clean bikes and clean people.
We rode through the day in the sunshine from Manchester into Derbyshire and then into Leicestershire in the early evening and then onward.
We were nervous to start and then resolute and resolved and then in the picture you see here in the middle of the night none of those things.
The picture you see is one that was given to me by my friend Stuart Reekie who photographed the whole thing for us and produced a book which I have in my office.
He gave me that picture though in a frame as a special ‘memento’ and it sits in my office at work.
It was taken round about 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning (I can’t remember) at a place which I will call the ‘lasagne stop’.
We alternated routine hot and cold food stops and this was one of the hot food stops in a school gym.
I couldn’t eat anything, I felt sick and beyond exhausted and fed up and could not understand what I was doing there.
I sat at a table with some of the other guys for a little while but I hated them all and so I took myself around the corner and found a crash mat in the gym, took my bib shorts off my shoulders and lay down and went to sleep for 10 minutes.
In his infinite wisdom Stuart thought he would take a photograph of that.
The hardest bit is getting back up again and putting your bib shorts back on and your coat back on and sitting back on your bike with at least 8 hours of cycling still left.
Bizarrely that wasn’t the toughest part of the night, that would come about an hour and a half later in Marlow when I was so close to sitting in the back seat of my car and giving up.
Today’s the day that ‘dentistry start’s back’ and while it should be a celebration and everybody’s wishing everybody else good luck, I’m sure lots of people are wishing they weren’t going back.
The thought of ‘getting back on the bike’ and pedalling for another 8 hours might seem almost impossible to some.
This is the game though isn’t it?
This is the job.
It’s easy when it’s easy, it’s not about when it’s easy.
It’s about getting things done when it’s difficult.
It’s time to get up and go together to wherever we go next.
Of course it’s not about ‘wherever we go next’ it’s actually about the going together.
Blog Post Number - 2393
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