As many of you know I finally made my eagerly anticipated and long awaited return to Blighty with much fanfare reminiscent of the England Rugby Union team's return from Australia following their victory in 2003; the similarities were uncanny. Anyway, after a couple of days of recovering following the epic journey undertaken with Tony Mills Junior at the helm I went to the doctors to ask about the persistent problem in my right knee, it turns out that I have very mild tendinitis in it caused by overuse. The ramifications are not as bad as maybe first feared, I was offered 2 options; either I stop cycling and rest up for a month or I persist with racing and let heal over the course of about 3 months, but during this time I shouldn't train if I'm doing 2 or 3 races that week, if I'm doing just one then I can do one or two training sessions that week instead. I will having to wear a knee support most of the time, even at races too. The good news is is that it is minor and if I decided to continue racing on it I will not be doing it any further damage and that I will get over eventually.
I have decided on the latter due to the fact that by racing on it I'm not damaging the knee irreparably if at all and you have to weigh up the loss of form and fitness that a month lay-off in the middle of the season would do for you for the rest of the season.
So on to the SERRL Stage Race, a race that I was really looking to, but 25mins into the first stage the race was cancelled and the rest of the weekend was subsequently cancelled too due to a motorbike marshal colliding with a car resulting in his, the motorbike marshal's, death. I'm not going to describe the incident as I feel it would be inappropriate, but I will comment on it. This tragic event, as well as Junior Heffernan's death, highlights the desperate need for the road racing scene to have closed roads, or, if not, at the very least make sure an ambulance is following each race and/or increase the powers of the marshals to stop traffic, these would have massively helped in preventing these incidents occurring as they will improve the circumstances in which we, the racers, and the organisers are operating under. Sadly it appears that this accident on Saturday will also go unheeded by British Cycling who have failed to deliver any findings on the cause of Junior Heffernan's death; the brief, sentence-long statement about the death of the N.E.G. rider who died on Saturday with it also being seemingly purposely hushed-up as shown by the fact that news of it was only briefly shown upon the Road homepage on the British Cycling website and has subsequently been buried underneath multiple links to reach the statement. Neither, but more importantly the former point (as there has been more time to react), were good enough for British Cycling to act upon and make a revision to their 'Get Britain Cycling' petition with which they are lobbying government. There has been no real public backing of Paul Morton's campaign by British Cycling or other authorities in the wake of Junior's death to increase the powers of the marshals and the N.E.G. also who regularly put themselves in harms way for free, completely voluntarily.
When is British Cycling going to act upon what a large portion of its members actually desire? It's all very well having this 'Get Britain Cycling' petition, but your average cyclist does not possess a British Cycling membership, every racer has to. British Cycling surely need to get their priorities in order for when you encourage people to cycle naturally some are going to want to race, how can they in such an unsafe, unworkable environment? It seems at the moment we have reached a fork in the road, how many more incidents need to occur before we jump across to the other road, one we should have gone down long ago?
Following on from this I had a relaxing weekend with family, friends and Verity instead, but this was tempered somewhat by not only what I witnessed on Saturday, but what was to come. On Monday, we had a little family get together to celebrate my little brother's first birthday, unfortunately he decided to choke on a crisp so now I'm fully aware of how to do the Heimlich manoeuvre on a baby, obviously pretty scary at the time.
Afterwards I met up with some uni mates in Camden for a few drinks, had a good bubble and it included one Mister Timothy Butt who had just got back from Portugal and who was racing (or meant to be) in the SERRL Stage Race. He's a good athlete and friend, but unfortunately he suffered a cardiac arrest the next day on Tuesday, fortunately the doctors have worked wonders and Tim is quite the fighter and he has finally awoken from intensive care today properly. This highlights the important work that the John Ibbotson Fund and C.R.Y. do in trying to increase the amount of testing done on young people to prevent such cases like Tim's and John's from happening.
Now I'm back sitting here in my house in France, alone, I wonder about the great moral lessons I maybe should have learnt, for me, it might be a little to close to home at the moment to really consider the questions and issues that inevitable raise themselves upon mere preponderance of the recent occurrences in my life. All I can think about though is thus, the Grim Reaper on closer inspection does not seem to possess the same sense of geniality as DEATH in Discworld.
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