A winters ride

I open my eyes and my body is already protesting. It’s so warm under these covers, why would you want me to get up? The sun is not even out… are you crazy? It’s too early… go back to sleep. I spend the next few minutes struggling with my other self, but knowing that in the end there is no argument. I’m still going.

Slowly and half-reluctantly, I push away the covers. Why do I always do this to myself? It’s cold, windy, and my girl is asleep next to me. But somehow I push myself up and pull on the clothes I carefully laid out last night, thinking that if I hadn’t bothered to do it I would still be in bed. Just another excuse.

In the kitchen, I put on the coffee and spoon some dry oats into an icy pot. Already, I am feeling the chill in the air. I turn on the gas and start to warm my hands over the ring of blue heat. Later, with my mind miles away, I sip the coffee and scrape the last bit of porridge from the bowl. How much time has just gone by? Five minutes… ten minutes? Time to move.

It’s astonishing how, in the space of just a few hours, your thoughts can hurl you from one end of the scale to the other. What you had thought was going to be a tremendous early morning ride, a ride to get in some base miles, very quickly changes to a feeling of sickness in the stomach, thoughts of failure, and sheer loathing, not only towards the ride but also towards yourself. I pick up my helmet, grip my bike, and make my way outside.

I find that when I’m on a ride it frees up the little hidden paths in the mind. Not completely, of course. You still think about things that have happened, analyse what you could have done differently. But it feels as though you’re not really looking at it in the first person, but once or twice removed, as if you’re looking at you looking at it. The wind you feel seems to echo your thoughts. No matter which way you face, it always seems to be a headwind. It chills you to the bone. Your hands start to go a little numb and you seem to have lost most of the sensation in your toes. But you grip the handlebars tighter and carry on. Your mind clicks into another gear.

With a touch of surprise, you notice you have just started a long climb and your mind switches back to the task at hand. An endless climb in the endless darkness. Yet, before you know it, you’re up and over, feeling a strange buzz like no other. Then, a warm and waking relief that you made the right call. That you didn’t stay in that warm bed. That you didn’t use yet another excuse.

And just like that, it’s over. You find yourself riding that last one hundred metres. You pull up, not even noticing the sun that has finally made a hazy appearance. What does dawn on you is how fast the cold is setting in against your shirt, slick with cooling sweat. All you can think about now is jumping inside for a well-deserved hot shower. You don’t even register that you have just done three hours in the saddle, or that you will be facing this again and again for the next three months. But why would you? You’re a cyclist.