After the stunning report of the A5 Rangers 31 mile hilly time trial, I missed a few days blogging. My excuse was that I was absorbed in writing an evaluation of the Irish economy within the confines of a deflationary fiscal and monetary policy. I thought that was a good excuse, until someone pointed out that there’s more to life than modelling economies with exogenous growth models. Some people really know how to be party poopers.
But, after a few days of silence, I thought I’d better wait until I had something really good to write. No point just writing a short blog for the sake of it. For example, I was toying with writing about the preponderance of potholes on my daily commute, or how I nearly got run over by a learner driver who didn’t know how to steer, or perhaps even something inspiring like Serena Williams who used a bicycle to beat the traffic and get to an important tennis game. - It’s a great invention the bicycle.
But, as the days pass, you think – well you might as well wait for something really good to make it worthwhile. Of course, waiting for that supremely good article means you end up not publishing anything at all.
It’s like waiting for the perfect conditions to go out cycling. If only outer circumstances were better, we think, I would go out for that 100km training ride. But, since it’s cold, we only have time for 50km. Then we think – well if we’re only going to do 50km, we might as well go out on the rollers. But, then, if we’re going to go on the rollers, we’d have to tidy up the garage and we’d get bored after 30 minutes anyway – so there’s no point really. We might as well wait until circumstances are more favourable. And then, before we know it two weeks have passed and the bicycle is still hanging from the ceiling and we’re still reloading the BBC weather website, waiting for that perfect day to go out cycling.
The day finally comes in June, but then we realise that Irish economy has just tanked, and we need to rework our exogenous growth model.
It can sometimes feels like that with the body. There’s always some niggle, some pain, something out of place. if we wait for the body to be in permanent 100% good health, we might never get the bicycle off the ceiling. It’s true, we have to know when to race, when to rest and when to ride through niggles. But, I’ve never known a time when absolutely everything was working as it should.
It would be even worse if we applied this to commuting. Well, I will commute to work when those cycle lanes separated from traffic get built and when all motorists learn to treat cyclists with respect. 20 years later, you are still reloading the Oxford County Council website to see where that £8,234.45 grant earmarked for cycle infrastructure has gone.
An even better excuse than the Irish economy for not writing anything, is that my last two races have been cancelled to snow and ice. I can’t say I was too disappointed to wait for better conditions. I received the cancelled notifications with relief, and I was able to look at my rollers and decide it wasn’t worth getting on my cycling kit for just 30 minutes. Instead I’ve got time to write that blog post, I’ve been putting off for two weeks.
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