Thursday 24 January 2019

Cowboy-maverick-starwars-helmet-stetson just joking my 2019 team isss Storey Racing!

Because of the Storeys and their vision, I can be a respected athlete taking up space in the cycling world and owning my place on their team for the third year in a row. I wanted to write a twisted, mysterious thankyou card and, like all my blogs, I've had it brewing (like Black Circle Coffee) for a while.

Best version of you: at first, the Storey Racing hashtag might strike too close to the 'live your best life' cliche pedalled by affluent, genetically-endowed instagram influencers. That is until you get shaken up by a big scare.

Say you're sitting in the doctors' office and they say you might have cancer. Then they follow that up by saying even if that's not the case you're in for significant surgery. Whilst you're trying to ignore the life that has started flashing before your eyes, they put you into a big blank, humming metal tube of oblivion (otherwise known as an MRI machine) where there isn't anything else to look at apart from your past regrets.

Then you realise, with a kind of floaty feeling, that you have been living your best life and are, right now, the best version of you. You realise, if you got given the grimmest of diagnoses you wouldn't change many of the big things at all.

I'm just saying if your world did flip for a second and you did see the world from a refreshing, if mortally terrifying, point of view (that turned out to be totally ok, in this little narrative) that you'd take the #bestversionofyou hashtag to heart, more than ever before.

The Storey catchphrase is on (and in) the hearts of their women's pro-cycling road team. Fittingly (tight fittingly...in the nice Le Col team Lycra) we have a heartbeat trace like a superhero logo on our jerseys. Actually, when I tried on the kit for the first time I felt very like one of the Incredibles.



 It is just as true now in 2019 as it was when I joined the team back in 2017 except there's Incredibles 2 which is even better than the Incredibles and is more about the supermum and super huge gurgling baby with multiple powers and a rather sleep deprived superdad...remind you of anyone ;)?

 The *best version of you* heartbeat is on each one of us and in us, powering us round our races, one maximal heartbeat after another. In this team though, it's not just about the self. Yeah, Sarah/Barney have got their name on it but we're all different and encouraged to be- road, track, cyclocross, youngster to experienced, para and/or legs of the gods. You can find it all in the team.

2019 to 2020 will be the qualification year of the cowboy-maverick-starwars-helmet-stetson of Huub Wattbikes' AND the victory & passion heartbeat trace of Storey Racing (so Mod that Team Wiggins brought out similar kit to us). I'm so grateful for their continued support as Mount Fuji's shadow draws nearer. Thanks to the sponsors for making it all possible:

Helmet? KASK 
Glasses? Adidas Eyewear UK 
Coffee? Black Circle
Gels? Secret Training
Power meter? Jam Cycling
Trike components? Brother Cycling/Phil Jones
Charity? Boot Out Breast Cancer
Healthcare? HMT Hospitals
Kit? Le Col
Recovery drinks? Lamb and Watt Tonic Water, Eisberg Wine😉
Soft tissue therapy? Holistic Life

Mon and I 💙💗

Tuesday 1 January 2019

How I'm Going to Live my 2019 [trigger warning: suicide]

How I'm Going to Live my 2019.

A wee medical intervention has got me twiddling my thumbs this New Year. I'm now going to try and and twiddle them over my laptop keys in hopes that a blog might happen.

Beginnings and endings are so artificial. It's so rare for a baby to be born exactly 9 months after inception because that's the average of from small population samples. The true variability is huge. Everyone likes a neat little prediction anyway: 9 months, 1st of January. I'm one to talk- I'm a sucker for a clearly defined start line, a finish flag, little orange cones barring me from the roads I shouldn't go down. Really though, beginnings and endings are never so predictable.

I started this piece the night after I got home from seeing them in June:

"I went out with my friends last night and while they got progressively drunker and I stared into my alcohol-free Kopparberg... one of them, on his fourth vodka, had launched into a speech. It began 'no one would have taken the bet on Hannah when she was born' and I immediately tensed because I wasn't drunk enough to hear this, well not drunk at all because I had my Cycling World Champs in a few weeks..."

At first, I titled this 'Know One Knows' and the main theme was going to be my staggering ascent (and I mean staggering in the walking sense) to ambulation and racing... all the usual solipsistic mush blah blah blah.

As with many unfinished blogs on my blog account, it stayed there. It stayed there and then he was gone, all of a sudden on a Tuesday night in summer aged 23. No one knew. I don't think anyone could have known.

It was one who had given me the speech he gives to wayward kids in his career advisory role. The speech that had made me write the blog. It has sat here like the lump in your throat when you hear the words suicide prevention, taboo or talk. 

 The thing was, the speech was awful, cringey, sensationalist, littered with disability-cliches and pity but the final sentence really did tie my future up in a neat bow for me right there, in a small Glasgow pub: 'she doesn't ask people what she wants to do in life, she walks up to them and tells them how she's going to do it'. It was so profound that I rushed home to write your words down.

Exit stage left.

(for D.)