I'm not a boy. I'm a girl. Possibly a tomboy thought past your teens that terminology seems inappropriate and I'd never dream of using it to describe anyone else for fear of insulting.
I'm a girl who likes getting muddy and going fast. Probably too fast. I also like challenges. I don't like competitions. I'm quite aggressive on a bike, in the right environment - if I am happy with the track I'll push as hard as I possibly can and be quite relentless about pedalling everywhere I can and pumping every last little bit of speed I can out of the track with my pathetically limited skills.
I'm still a girl.
I wear nail varnish. I even wear make up occasionally. I collect MAC pigments because they're beautiful and I moisturise every morning. I try and colour co-ordinate, I read Grazia as well as Singletrack and occasionally New Scientist too. I understand a higher percentage of the New Scientist than I do of Singletrack when they start talking about rebounds and frame geometry but I try all the same.
I get upset sometimes. Irrationally upset, but upset all the same. I try very hard not to get upset when I'm riding but it happens sometimes, mostly when I am thrown into a situation I know I simply can't deal with. Somehow I feel as if because I am a girl and fat to boot, I must never be seen to back down, never walk unless everyone else in the (male) group is, that somehow it will be noted and clocked and commented on if I girl who is fat is anything less than absolutely stellar and completely ballsy.
Well I'm not. Not stellar, not ballsy. Today I am being a complete baby, but yesterday it was even worse. I quit at something for only the second time in the last 3 years. I've endured MRI's with needles (I'm screamingly claustrophobic with a pretty bad needle phobia) and lights which left me looking sunburnt. I've walked out the house in clothing I would have rather have burnt not so long ago in the interests of being appropriately dressed for 'sport'. I've hauled my ass up climbs sticking to my rule of no damn walking. I've ridden over truck loads of dumped loose stone and stayed on, I've not touched my brakes for 10 minutes on descents, I've jumped my bike, I've ridden alone and managed to stop constantly looking over my shoulder.
Yesterday I quit because I couldn't take it and I am upset about it, damn it, and frustrated and angry at myself for making bad judgement upon bad judgement leaving me in the situation in the first place which I should have known better than to land myself in.
It wouldn't have perhaps been so bad if the same thing but differently hadn't happened at Dalby (who, incidentally, have resolutely ignored my rather irritated email to them explaining that the A5 sign which was their brief nod to people with mobility problems who had the audacity to want to watch a British World Cup event was woefully inadequate). I didn't quit then even though I cried. Yesterday was just insane.
And of course now I'm thinking, what happens if I get one of the 20 random symptoms completely out of the blue on my canal ride. What happens? What happens if I can't carry on and I have to make the judgement call? Even if it's the right one, can I cope with the explanations, the nagging suspicion that no one will actually understand how bad it has to have got for me to quit these days, that I am not the person I once was who quit at the first sign of trouble, that pain that makes me cry and numb dead legs aren't enough to make me quit but that if I can't think, if I can't string a sentence together, it's just not safe - that physical failure is easy to continue through but it's the mental vagueness which I simply cannot conquer through sheer will and determination because if anything happens I simply wont be able to think fast enough to deal with it......I can't explain brain fog to anyone. I've tried and I've tried and it's impossible. It's something akin to being stoned, I think, when you desperately desperately do not want to be, haven't chosen to be, and really absolutely need to not be in the next 5 minutes or something very very bad will happen.
I can work through it, of course I can, simply reorganising the easy stuff to coincide with the time of day it usually hits, but yesterday wasn't at the usual time and it was so out of the blue and I don't know what triggered it, have lost absolutely lost track of what happened yesterday, don't understand how it all got out of hand so quickly, how I didn't see it coming.
The rational part of me knows that it was a lethal combination of a stressful and tiring week at work, accidentally drinking 7 cans of Red Bull thanks to bottles of the stuff not cans, too much heat, my broken thermostat meaning I was in a t-shirt on Friday while everyone else was in windcheaters, a 2am bed time, the hilliest festival arena I've ever had the displeasure to meet, and a terribly nights sleep in the Premier Inn we stayed in.
I'm a girl. I'm not always rational.
There's a ride around Rivington tomorrow with my name on it. I've no idea if it's inside my skill level or miles outside of it. I don't actually care, as long as the fog fairy doesn't come and visit, because she's the only one who can mess my plans up. The physical stuff is a walk in the park, but that fairy needs shooting. And I don't have the gun.
No comments:
Post a Comment