Ep.35 Back in the saddle

It’s an early, soft, pale grey Saturday when we raise the e-bike on top of the car alongside David’s road bike for the short drive to Drumnadrochit from where we’ve marked a flattish route – well, flat but for one pretty major hill but you can’t really live in the Highlands and avoid hills, they come with the territory.  I’m nervous, hot palmed, swallowing down a small fist of fret that curls quietly in my abdomen.  This is significant and we both know it, it’s loaded.  The process of getting ready is convoluted and I fuss.  I can’t remember what to wear and pull out countless bib-shorts, tops, vests and jackets, strewing them across the bedroom floor.   I’m rusty, lacking the fluency I used to possess for all this.  How many times have I done this very thing?  How many Saturdays have found me pulling on lyrca, stuffing my pockets with food bars, filling drinks bottles, charging my Garmin, so why does this feel so alien?   But I recognise this physical fidgeting, it always surfaces when I’m anxious, and as a result the muscles in my back starts to twitch and fuss too, even before I’ve sat on my new bike.  

For weeks each Saturday I’ve watched David drive away to ride with our friends in the cycle club, then I drop B with her dad and find ways to fill the hours til David re-appears.  I try to approach these days as loose and gentle, a time to move more slowly through the world, to consciously choose where I place myself.  Sometimes I walk, along the shore or up the hill, high above the house, climbing up and up, exploring the various tracks and paths that thread through the woods.  Occasionally I message David, laughingly handing out co-ordinates for finding my body if I don’t return, occasionally I detect fleeting concern in his ‘you ok?’ reply. But I like these solo expeditions. I like to be alone.

One time I sat for a couple of hours in a café drinking coffee and writing, it felt wildly, luxuriously self-indulgent, a sneak preview of the possibility held by a post-BBC world.  Like bunking off school and ordering the biggest hot chocolate possible with extra whipped cream and marshmallows.   We joke that I’m being abandoned but while I envy David’s ability to get on his bike and ride for hours, I don’t resent it, I will never let cancer steal from him too.  So I make each of these days feels like a treat, I fill them with an activity big enough to act as a counterweight to the loss of being able to cycle with David.

I guess we have an unusual relationship in terms of our cycling.  We know lots of couples who share a love of cycling but fewer who choose to cycle the way we do, always side by side, handlebars sometimes just an inch or two away while we talk and laugh or one in front of the other, alternating turns to take the wind or sit on a wheel.  And although David’s always been stronger on the flat, my smaller height and weight means we’re more closely matched on the hills, but even so we’ve no appetite to leave one another, we like riding together.

Every cycle event we’ve entered together we’ve ridden together – Etape Lochness, Etape Caledonia, the epic 100 mile Ride London which we take part in every summer, the monstrous Mallorca 225 and 167. The idea of not cycling in unison is unthinkable.   Thinking back over the many finishing lines we’ve crossed, side by side hands raised in triumph, brings a wash of emotion.  We’ve shared thousands of miles in each other’s company.  It’s not for everyone but for us, it’s what we do.  What we did.

Like many strong bonds ours was forged over misfortune.  Early in our friendship, long before we were partners, we were out cycling with our friends in the club.  It was a glorious late March day, clear spring skies and no wind.  6 of us had ridden 40 or 50 miles, laughing, chatting, loving the freedom presented by a warm day early in the season.  As we approached the outskirts of Inverness, just a few miles short of our finishing point, we started a long descent, all of us speeding up, carefree, on the home strait.  We flew down the hill in pairs, spreading out, a distance opening up between myself at the back and the front group where David was, I was further up the hill, laughing and shouting, not looking when it happened.  The first I knew of David’s hitting the car was the realisation that everything had stopped up ahead, time seem to have frozen, then the shout from Simon, one of the other cyclists, to call an ambulance.  From that moment everything went into slow motion.  I saw David sitting in the middle of a junction between two roads, blood pouring from his head, the bottom half of his face torn, shredded, hanging.  Everything was silent apart from a low, almost animal, sound he was making.  I threw my bike to the ground and ran to where he was then sat behind him with my legs wrappd either side of him, holding him against me.  He tried to stand but I just quietly said ‘you’re going to have to let me do this for you’ and then helped him remove his helmet and glasses.  His face had been de-gloved, torn from nose to chin, his teeth lay scattered and broken across the bloody tarmac.  I took my buff from my back pocket and used it to wrap his face, holding his head in my hands while I tried to stem the blood. I was still holding him when the ambulance arrived.  Then, in a bizarre act prompted by shock, I quietly picked up all his teeth from the road, knocked on the back door of the ambulance and passed them to the paramedics.  

Perhaps it was inevitable that we’d end up together all these years later.  I suspect there was something forged in those intimate, terrifying moments which made it difficult to see past each other. Certainly when we climbed back on our bikes again only a week later – with David’s face carefully, meticulously sewn back together, inside and out, with hundreds of stitches – we were changed.  Cycling together would never be the same.

So here we are switching on our ride computers, adjusting our helmets, and this time it’s me climbing back into the saddle.  I'm nervous of failure, worried that even with the electric bike my body won't cope with the position, that the iron-corset feeling that I live with will overwhelm the rest of my senses.  I don't want cycling to be ruined.  

And then, suddenly, beautifully, wonderfully, we’re cycling.  And yes, the muscles in my back flicker and twitch with concern but not so much that it distracts me from the sight and smells of autumn in the Great Glen, the joy of a hot coffee on a cold day midway through the ride and the belly deep laughter that comes from us both when I switch my bike to turbo and fly past David up the hill out of Cannich, singing as I go.  For those 30, glorious miles, cancer recedes, superseded by the sheer unadulterated joy of being back in the saddle, cycling alongside David.