My sporting history looks like it has come full circle. But I expect it to disappear off again in a new direction.
At school I played the usual sports, and had good speed playing rugby and whatnot. But the other boys got bigger and I didn’t, and my ball handling/kicking skills were never up to much (unlike my younger brother). So I guess I fell towards running, and probably with very little training ran a bit of cross country and a bit of middle distance track. I did okay but had no guidance that I remember, and I often wonder what would have happened if someone had directed me and helped me structure some training. So running never really got going for me and by the time I went to sixth form college I was becoming very interested in bicycles.
My parents were a great help in giving me my first really nice road bike, some of the components of which I still have today and have been used on recent bikes. I got a Saturday job at Williams Cycles (their website isn’t much better than the cringeworthy local cinema ads of the time when I worked there) when I was 16, which helped pay for many shiny bits and got me involved with mountain biking thanks to the great guys that I worked with at the time.
I raced in some mountain bike races and did rather well as a junior, finishing fourth in my first race if I remember correctly. But when I began road racing I never looked back and raced almost every weekend through the season. A friend introduced me to the Severn Valley Cycle Racing Club (they don’t seem to have a website) and I learned about training to race probably from the club, books and from my A-level studies in biology and chemistry. I found a focus, and must have started to pile on the mileage pretty quickly. I still have my training logs stored somewhere and I should dig them out to compare with what I do today. I remember racing on each of the four days of the Easter weekend holiday one year. That’s me and Garry Jones in the photo above in the red and green kit and dark glasses. The photo’s from the May Hill Road Race, I think.
In my final year as a junior I earned enough points through good race finishes (including a win) to get my second category license and entered my first senior cycling year confidently with much race experience, good legs and many stories. This was also a gap year for me between my A-levels and my anatomy degree, and I worked part time in an NHS laboratory. That meant that I had plenty of time for training, and this was probably my downfall.
(I’ll continue this when I next get a chance & will hopefully dig out some more old photos).
