Team Cycling Plus will be updating you each week with the highs and lows of their training as part of the team. This week Sam’s doesn’t cope well with getting man flu…
Team member: Sam Shaw
29 year old Sam who lives in Stirling weighed in at 20stone in 2006. But through discovery of his love of bikes he has shed over 6stone and is still losing. Beginning with tentative 5km commutes, working up to include an 18km detour with 360m climbs, and now braving sportives and time trials, Sam’s newfound obsession has changed his life. His goals are to get down to 13stone and wear lycra with pride.
How do cyclists handle a week of illness? Simple answer: badly.
I use my bike every day for transport to and from work, I use it to control my weight, get exercise, train for events, for enjoyment, to save fossil fuel (not money – we all know that cycling’s NOT cheaper than driving a car once you invariably get stricken with upgradeitis), to feel good and for a whole host of other reasons that are mainly for my own benefit. The other thing is that I really love riding the Verenti Millook! So when it comes to not being able to cycle for a week, I really feel lost. This illness, some would call it ‘man flu’, started with a heavy cold which then turned into an ear infection; so a visit to the doctors and some antibiotics to clear that up, but the pain was still there in a different place; so a visit to the dentist for a root canal treatment on a tooth that had become infected. It really wasn’t a good week.
It did leave me time to ponder why we ride and what we miss about riding when we cant, for whatever reason. I don’t have the physical or mental ability to stick myself on a bike and hammer the pedals when I’m feeling absolutely rotten, like Pro Tour riders do. My livelihood depends on me being at work, not being on the bike so there’s always going to be a compromise if cycling when ill is going to affect my work. So the decision to drive to work and not do a single minute of training for the last week really had a pre-determined outcome. It was particularly hard to stomach this week though as it was the last big week of training prior to a 10 mile TT I have on the 19th August, then the 100mile, Ken Laidlaw Sportive on the 22nd of August, to which my training has been tailored for the last few weeks. The last thing I wanted to do was to prolong my illness and potentially miss either of these rides so I had to accept that the bike would be waiting for me when I feel like getting back on it.
This still doesn’t make it any easier though; even when lying in bed dozing with a temperature, I’m thinking of what I’m missing – what training other people will be doing. And that’s what gets us on our bikes. We enjoy cycling for many different reasons, I think I love it for them all judging by the answers I read whenever there’s a “why do you love cycling” question posed on the internet or in print. Ultimately we will always have our reasons for wanting to get back on the bike, we all know the story of Tommy Simpson who heroically died trying to complete the ascent of the Ventoux but sometimes we just have to accept that we’re ill and we’ll get back on soon enough!
Who are Team Cycling Plus?
Team Cycling Plus powered by Verenti are readers Andy Ward, Kay Bowen, Malcolm Ratcliffe and Sam Shaw. We’ll be following them in the magazine for the next few months as they train towards their personal cycling goals under the guidance of Team Wiggle’s Ben Simmons and we will be publishing their weekly trials and tribulations here too. For regular updates check our Twitter page and the Team Cycling Plus Facebook page.
This entry was posted on Friday, August 27th, 2010 at 10:30 am and is filed under Blog, Cycling Plus. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.
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