A painful honesty

There are some things you don’t want to write about. There are some things that perhaps should not be written about. Then there are the things that you know you must write about in order to drop the weight that the thoughts create, so that you can move on.
As previously mentioned, I am fat. I am also a little bit unwell – nothing which stops me working any more, though at first it was very difficult and took some getting used to. My legs sometimes have moment when they teeter on the edge of working or not working. If I’m going through a bad patch, I can’t sit down for too long, need to keep moving, and even then sometimes the numb fairy comes to visit. I’ve got a dopamine deficiency which means my calf muscles don’t understand quite what the rules are when it comes to contracting and flexing. They get the wrong messages sometimes, and as a result, walking up steep hills can be quite painful. They hurt constantly. I take pills every night to help them quieten so I can go to sleep, which also thankfully stop the electric shocks and twitches which nearly drove my partner mad.
I get migraines if I physically exert myself too much for too long a period of time. Sometimes I get them because I’ve talked too much, bounced around too much, not had enough sleep, the barometric pressure needle is in the wrong place or the winds blowing in the wrong direction. Okay, not the last one but sometimes it’s like walking a tightrope – one wrong move and you’ve got a migraine and you’re out of the field for the next 2-3 hrs. As a knock on effect of this, my central nervous system sometimes goes into meltdown, with messages being rerouted the wrong way – this can result in some hilarious and not so hilarious physical reactions.
I’ve also got endocrine problems. I’m not telling you about those. Suffice to say the myths of medical problems occasionally having a knock on effect on your metabolism and the functionality or not of your pancreas are not, in fact, myths. My nutritionist says so and empirical evidence of watching my own body backs this up.
So what relevance is all this? Firstly, let me make it absolutely clear – I’ve asked every specialist I’ve seen whether problems are being caused by being fat. One answered yes, and it wasn’t the neurologist. In actual fact, exercising makes some of these problems worse – exercise raises your blood pressure and I need to be careful because that can cause migraines. Exercise certainly doesn’t convince my brain it should produce more dopamine either. Cycling with calf muscles that think they’re supposed to be 2 inches shorter than they are is a challenge. The position of my feet on the pedals is not the same as yours. Pointing it out won’t change it. I can’t get off and walk up a hill if I am struggling to ride it, that hurts even more.
So why am I riding my bike?
Everyone, I think, has a choice. I could sit on my sofa and refuse to move until someone had helped me sort out my calf muscles. I could sit on my sofa and refuse to move until someone had sorted my migraines out. I don’t. There is one fundamental reason why I don’t, and that is control.
Illness of any kind removes control from you. Illness which results in complete unpredictability when it comes to the behaviour of your muscles, mobility, brain function and eyesight is frustrating and a little scary. There is nothing you can do to change it, nothing you can do to fix it, you are entirely reliant on someone else having an inspired idea about what’s causing it and finding the magic pill which will fix it. Ultimately, you have to make peace with the fact that there may be no magic pill, and no concrete answer either. So you have to find something else. The something else, for me, is mountain biking.
Riding up hill hurts. It hurts your muscles and it hurts your joints. Both these states are temporary, or at least I assume they are for most other people. They are not temporary for me. The pain carries on past the climb, into the descent, in the car ride home, through the night, into the next day, and usually beyond. Separating the pain caused by the riding from the pain caused by the underlying crap is difficult. They tend to merge. You might imagine this is a bad thing, but actually it’s the thing which keeps me going. You see, I choose. I choose to go out, ride up a hill and feel my quads burning. I choose to carry on through the pain until I get to the top of that hill. I choose to ignore the slight soreness in my knees because I know why it’s there and it’s acceptable damage. I choose to battle with my breathing and keep it under control. I choose to sit at the top of some of those hills, gasping for breath, incapable of holding a conversation for 5 minutes. I choose to go fast enough down the other side of the hill that falling off would hurt. I choose to go exploring and encounter corners and rocks I can’t deal with which result in me falling off and yet more bruises and pain. I choose to wake up the next morning, limping a little thanks to pushing a little too hard.
I chose these things because I can. My body decided it was going to take control away from me and now I am taking it back again. 1.5 years it took, before something in my brain snapped and I decided I’d had enough. I decided I wanted to choose my own battleground, choose my own weapon, choose my own challenges and win my own battles.

So, perhaps I am not exercising for the traditional reasons. I wont deny that sometimes on the ups I daydream about one day fitting into a pair of proper mountain biking shorts. It's not dresses, oddly, that motivate, nor the cake I can eat at the end of the ride. It's how I'll feel as well as those shorts. It's the feeling of peace, of a battle won, of serenity. No one knows these things when they see me battling up a hill. No one knows my motivations. I share them here because perhaps I assume that none of you reading this will ever link these words with a person you might see out on the trails. There is no requirement for sympathy or even, really, understanding. Just an honesty and also perhaps a hope, that someone else out there will read these words, comprehend the reasoning behind why I continue to get on my bike, and be inspired to pick one up themselves.

You too can choose. You too can reach the top. Anyone can do this, it's simply a matter of believing you can, because your body is designed to be pushed, and it wont let you down. And believe me when I say, you walk a little taller, every single time you fight and win.