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It's Not a Hill
by Tom Southam | 12/08/10

I woke up in a huddled mess at the bottom of a mountain. At first I didn’t know it was a mountain; scale and proximity must have been playing their games with me. I was sure it just looked like a hill when I started the climb you see, but honey lately, after climbing slowly up this bloody thing for three months now, I am realising the task of getting back to full race fitness is indeed not a hill, but a mountain.

Part of this realisation I think, is that I know what I am doing, and to be honest, knowing what you are doing can be the most difficult thing sometimes. It makes me think of all the bands that make great albums when they are just playing for the love of it, then they learn their trade, they learn what it takes for things to work, and they just can’t seem to make another good record.

Sometimes it helps to be myopic, but I’m afraid that is the blessing of a blind uneducated faith that comes with youth, not born out of an unshakable belief in yourself, but simply because you know no better.

This has been the first year that I have understood how hard cycling is, really I have always found it relatively easy. I mean I suffered like hell day in and day out and hurt and struggled and all the other superlatives that you might find in a David Millar interview, but I have always been dabbling around at the top of the mountain. In the few infrequent instances of serious injury or illness that have dropped me back down said hillock, I have always had the blessing of youth to propel me quickly and seemingly effortlessly up through the cloud line and in sight of the summit.

All those months back in the hospital, as I was still dizzy from the gas and easing out a long accepting but oddly relieved breath, the doctors with me explained the complexities of recovery for my injury relative to my job, and I just kind of shrugged and told them not to worry I had broken the right elbow too, and it had healed completely and quite quickly, with no hard work, just a stiff arm for a while. The doctor asked immediately how old I was at the time and I innocently replied that I was twelve; his laughter was swiftly followed by a serious suggestion that things heal semi-magically when you are twelve.

I am twenty-nine now, and oh, how things have changed. I’ll have to take the good with the bad on this one though, I mean, I enjoy coffee, olives, nuts and whisky now, all things that I couldn’t understand the appeal of as a kid, but as a trade off my body seems to have trebled it’s repairing time.

The shock wasn’t quite so brutal as I took off for my first few skewed bike rides, my as yet still fully un-extendable arm has meant that I have been twisted on the bike and as a result I have had to keep the rides quite short and sweet. I rode with the guys down here in Bristol and apart from the uncomfortable pace, I still felt ok. But the real hurt comes when you return to racing, you can keep up in training you see, people pay attention to your suffering and you can always just slow down.

The temptation, when you are way down at the bottom is to take short cuts, or to simply miss out on that hard graft that will gain you a bit of altitude, recovery is so slow and the increments so small, that it is easy to miss a bit, skip a session for a brew ride or forget about it completely. But then you race, and you know exactly what you have and haven’t been doing.

Getting back into racing is like the moment when you stand filling up your car at a motorway service station, listening to the speed and roar of the passing traffic, you think to yourself, ‘how the hell was I just a part of that? And how the hell am I going to go and dive into that madness now’.

The thing is; I have learned, in the hangover of my impetuous youth that these things need to be done slowly-now, and step by tedious step. There is no more bounding back up the path to top form while still dusting myself down. These days it’s a long walk, one eye on the path, one eye on the drop beside me.

So, once more around the bend we shall go. The blind corners will turn to switch backs and I’ll see the rapid ascension in my progress, and it won’t be damn moment too soon.

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