an ordinary beginning

Christmas day. First serious training ride. Fifty-two kilometres around the north and western fringes of Bendigo, averaging 26.2kph, and done with a broken scaphoid, grazed elbow and bruised fingers.

My deposit is paid, my ticket bought. I fly to Paris on Tuesday 5 July 2011 and depart for home four weeks later on 3 August, arriving just in time for my sixtieth birthday, Alpe d’Huez and the Col du Galibier in the bag.

The Cervélo is serviced and ready to roll—bent hanger straightened, new chain, and then, of course, a new 39-cog chain-ring. I like to tell people that the bike is superior to the rider, and indeed it is. A year of spamodism has seen to that.

Spasmodism is an easy-to-acquire syndrome if you don’t race and are not obsessive. It means your cycling happens in fits and starts: some weeks you’re all fired up about something—dropping a couple of kilos, getting back into the beauty of pedalling—and you rattle up 200kms for the week, no worries. Other weeks are blighted by zero kms: work spreads across the week with meetings in Melbourne or Mildura, or inertia, sloth or a good book keep you off the bike.

There are false starts, like last week. You book a friend’s holiday house at Venus Bay, lug two bikes down there, intending to ride 80kms a day, and the weather turns viral: the sky is livid, the rain is horizontal, and the coastal breeze blows the spots off your dog.

Then the VDO Z1 bike computer dies … well, the battery anyway. So I lose all my data and spend half of yesterday setting it up again—synching with the two wireless transmitters (speed and cadence), keying in wheel-size, clock, personal stats, blah, blah. But it’s no bad thing. I’m starting from scratch, ground zero. So is the Z1.

Yesterday I suffer a get-off, my first for some time. I ride the Red Rocket up my street to deliver a card with the wrong address on it, misjudge the gutter I’ve decided to hop, and land on my left elbow and right hand, losing skin and bruising everything, including my dignity.

This morning I wake at half past two, step out for a piss, and never get back to sleep. I do some interweb banking, bake Anzacs, strip and canister some dried oregano, talk to my good woman in Serbia on Skype, eat weeties and toast, scoff two cups of char, and wait for the dawn.

It’s light enough to ride just after six. I’ve promised myself a decent hill every time I straddle the machine: this morning it’s One Tree Hill, a mere 700 metres, but with two pitches into double figure gradients. I struggle; a year ago I caned it.

There’s a long way and a long time to go. But I’ve begun.