Back on the bike

We've all experienced it before - That Setback which punches you in the gut, deflates you like a burst balloon, makes you feel utterly miserable, close to tears, empty and hollow with deep despondency and frustration. Even as, all the while, you still try to bash through the disappointment, rationalising to yourself: it's ok, this is not the end of the world, I'll do better next time, don't be ridiculous this obviously doesn't mean I'm going to be a failure for the rest of my life, rejection happens to the best of us - think Sylvia Plath, May Sarton (on the rejection of her poems - "I feel as if all twelve of my children have just been murdered"), Vladimir Nabokov, Somerset Maugham, Joseph Conrad..... Yet you can't help but feel that structural damage to the self-confidence, get shaken by the hit it took, the poisonous, insidious clammy gnawing of self-doubt and inferiority. Everything becomes confused and unravelled: even as I was allowing myself a little cry, inside my head I kept snapping at myself, "stop it, you're being so pathetic."

The wonderfully wise and totally dynamite Professor Naomi Segal (at the University of London School of Advanced Study) once said to us: "Get back on your bike" (I still have a copy of her Powerpoint slides to prove it). She meant it as a figure of speech, of course, but it couldn't be more apposite to me, as cycling is one of the activities which most appeal to me and, more importantly, Lance Armstrong is one of my heroes. One of the strongest impressions I retain from Armstrong's biography It's Not About the Bike is his early experiences of being run off the road by trucks and cars while training, leaving him lying by the roadside spitting a mouthful of dust and waving a finger at the driver (no, not the index, ring or pinky). And then back on his bike. Throughout his cancer and recovery, he always, almost heartstoppingly, went back (or tried to) onto his bike. Then, after crashing out again and again in his first pro races after his cancer, he quit Europe, went back to America, became, in his words, " a bum". And then that now infamous ride at Boone... he got back on his bike, started training for what would be his first victory in the 1999 Tour de France. And then his second, and then his third, until his seventh last year.

"Get back on your bike."

The funniest thing that strikes me about getting back on the bike is this anecdote I recall reading about Lance Armstrong, the most tested athlete in the world, fielding yet another never-ending question about alleged drug-taking, common in competitive sport and very much so in the Tour de France, and which Armstrong, in light of his victories, always have had to face. Asked "what are you on, Lance?", he replied:

"What am I on? I'm on my bike, 8 hours a day."

Allez, Lance, allez, allez. Go Armstrong.