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The sun don't shine on a sleeping dog’s ass
by Tom Southam | 09/02/09
Training camp is a lot like being in a wartime conflict. Like portrayed in the film, The Thin Red Line, that is. Intense moments of action that fly by in exhaustive fits and many long, quiet introspective hours spent waiting, and thinking. The riding is really quite easy to get through, as Tom Barras would say, “it’s what we do”. Although with us this just applies to pedalling and not winning the Eddie Soens Handicap.
It is after cycling, in the afternoon and evening, where you’ll find the really arduous part of training camp. There’s only so much of the day you can kill by riding; in our case the longest time on the bike will be six or so hours. That still leaves a good five hours until we all regroup at the dinner table, sometimes longer; we are in Spain after all.
In the past I have really struggled to use this time constructively. Cycling, although a straightforward task, is still quite fatiguing so this rules out doing anything that involves using my legs afterwards. Like going anywhere or doing anything outside of my hotel room. Mental tasks also become a struggle. The idea of wearing out my brain after I have already used up all the energy in my body was always a bit much. I don’t often read and hate wasting time on computer games, and can rarely stay awake all the way through a DVD. What to do, what to do?
Too tired to do anything, yet not stimulated enough to have felt like I used my post-ride time wisely. I struggled with this dilemma for many years, through many a training camp, Spain, Italy, France, wherever. Many hours passed watching pop music on the television and nursing a guilt complex about wasting time.
And yet now, all of a sudden things have changed. As I’ve got longer in the tooth and my life has taken a different shape outside of cycling, I find myself cherishing every single moment I spend with absolutely nothing to do, sprawled across a bed in a Spanish hotel room. There are two amazing things about passing time:
- It is great to have absolutely nothing to do, no chores, no trips to the damn supermarket, no cleaning up rabbit mess, no bills to have to go and pay. I love my home life – don’t get me wrong – it’s what I work for. But post training time here is just absolute self indulgent nothing, weightless, stateless, hey bliss. My teenage angst is long gone; the guilt of non-accomplishment is nonexistent. I am doing exactly what is required of me, what I am paid for, cycling all morning and resting all afternoon.
- There is real genius in having nothing to do, and brilliance in being as bored as you can possibly be. I discovered this a few years ago by way of Joseph Heller, the author of perhaps my favourite book, Catch-22. Wherein the character, Dunbar, is so obsessed with prolonging his life that he conceives a theory that, as time seems to drag so slowly when one is bored, if you make your life as dull and uninteresting as possible, you will in effect live longer.
I live by this theory at training camp, as I keep having to explain to Simon as he paces the corridors. It really is better that we don’t find anything to do, otherwise we will get excited, enjoy ourselves and before we know it our lives will flash before our eyes. The danger here being that, in knowing that our lives are getting so long, we may get excited about it and still have our lives flash before our eyes.
This was all well and good while we had sunshine all morning and could actually induce the effects of fatigue by riding our bikes. As it was only that it was really half a day we had to pass away slowly. Things start to go wrong when the skies open and we are hotel bound. When you have been geared up for a six hour ride, and then find yourself presented with roughly fourteen hours in which to do nada, even someone as committed to doing nothing as I start to struggle and look for something to do.
Times indeed are so tough, I think I’ll go find the maid, see if she needs any help doing the dishes or some other inane chore. That should make me appreciate a nice long day living very slowly, if nothing else will.
