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 💙💗

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

How I'm Going to Live my 2019.

Edit from 2025: grief is very hard to write about and I didn't do a good job here. However, this is one of my most viewed blogs. So, I thought I'd clarify right at the beginning; my friend D took his own life and on seeing the new year come in, when he couldn't, I felt he needed a blog post. 

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I started this piece the night after I got home from seeing D 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 someone holding forth on my premature birth, well not drunk at all because I had my Cycling World Champs in a few weeks..."

At first, I titled this 'Know One Knows' which is chilling, now. The main theme was going to be my staggering ascent to being able to walk after all my surgeries and then racing my trike. After not being predicted to do much at all with my body and not being able to at various points in time my current level of ability often shocks me. The blog was going to be all the usual solipsistic Paralympic mush blah blah blah.

As with many unfinished blogs on my blog account, it stayed there. It stayed there and then, on a Tuesday night in summer, aged 23, D was gone. No one knew he was going to do it; not even the people he lived with who were closest to him. There wasn't a note, there was nothing at all but the train driver who saw him do it. I don't want that to be how I think of D. 

See, D had given me the speech he gave to wayward kids in his career advisory role. The speech that had made me write the blog. That unpublished blog sat here like the lump in your throat when you hear the words suicide increase in young men. 

The thing was, the speech was awful, cringey, sensationalist, littered with disability-cliches 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, D.

That's the quote I start my 2019 with now. 

Exit stage left.

(for D.)