amazing grace

Back spasm usually lasts three or four days. This episode begins on a Friday and ends the next Friday. But, not quite. On the eighth day I move more freely, but still carefully. I sit with only minor discomfort. I can climb out of a chair, get in and out of a car. The depression lifts.

Early Saturday morning I finally ride again, out to Hartland’s Eucy Farm in the Whipstick—52.17kms at 29.2kph. Spinning the pedals is a joy and my average speed is impressive after such a spell off the bike, even though the terrain is dead flat and I hardly touch the shifters. I feel fine, fine and dandy.

My daughter’s gone up north with her partner and my grand-daughter for four weeks. I’m dog-sitting her heeler. Dog-walking has been a trial; bending to get them on and off leads, doing my civic duty with biodegradable bags, and restraining them when we unexpectedly encounter another hounds.

I walk them after my ride, finishing at the wooden grandstand at the velodrome. Always hungry, the heeler hunts for food scraps. The JRT rolls his ball down the steps and catches it at the bottom. Again and again and again. I do some gentle stretches, the first in over a week. Carefully I lift each leg onto a low bench-seat and lean forward ever so gently to release the hamstrings.

The instant I bring the second leg back to earth I feel it. Something not right. The lower back deteriorates rapidly in the afternoon: the muscles aren’t ‘grabby’; they’re not tender to touch; they’re dully, acutely, alarmingly achy. A descending depression guillotines the morning’s zest. Frustration turns to sullen anger.

Sunday morning I’m physically distressed, the slightest movement an ordeal. I’m distressed about my training, distressed that this is no back spasm, but something worse, something to do with discs or nerves, to do with loosening my wallet to expensive medical specialists.

My good woman is distressed too. She sees my agony on Skype: the webcam doesn't lie. I’m literally on my knees, can’t sit, can’t stand. She wants to drive to Bendigo and bear me to Melbourne, into her care. But I’m a bloke, a fiercely independent one. All that living on my own. I’ll get by. I’ll crawl to the toilet if need be. I don’t do ‘care’, don’t know how to give in to it, to accept it with grace.

Later in the day she gives me a sternly gentle lecture about people and partnerships. Sense prevails. My GP is in Emerald, much closer to Melbourne than Bendigo, and I need my GP’s referral to that expensive specialist, a physiotherapist, an osteopath, maybe a radiologist.

Grace prevails too. My good woman wants to tie my shoelaces so I can shamble along the footpath, dry between my toes after a shower, laugh with me as I grimace, and help lift my leg over the top bar so I can keep riding. She understands: she gets it.

back spasm

Were there a God, back spasm would be his bounteous gift to unbelievers like me, his way of making me scream his name.

I perch on the edge of a chair as I write, unable to sit any other way, and probably unable to stand when I finish writing. Back spasm—the agonising grab as the back muscles resist almost any movement, especially straightening the back.

Seeking medical rather than numinous explanation, I ask Dr Google what causes back spasm, but his explanations don’t match the half a dozen causes of my personal experience: tying a shoelace, picking up a bath mat, reaching for the toilet paper, vacuum cleaning, and masturbating.

The sixth was the first and it happened in 1976 during the final minutes of the penultimate game of the season between Newstead and Campbells Creek when an opponent knocked me off balance as I executed a handpass. My hand missed the ball. I was pinged for a throw and pinged my back in the process.

My first and most excruciating experience of back spasm and the only cause I regard as legitimate. How can reaching for toilet paper warrant being rendered helpless for several days? Back spasm is the single most debilitating insult (injury is not the right word) to a person’s physical and mental well-being.      

I ask Dr Google about treatment but he doesn’t have a definitive answer to that either. Years ago I asked a physiotherapist treating my broken shoulder what to do for back spasm. She showed me some exercises.

So I clamber with tremendous trepidation from the unlofty height of my own 178cms, bent at 45 degrees from the waist, to the floor, where I lie groaning: “Oh God, oh God …”

On the floor I lie flat on my back on a purple exercise mat, compose myself, then lift my legs alternately into the air. Not far into the air. Five on each leg. Then I lift and cross each leg over the other. Five on each leg. I curl into a ball.

I roll over gingerly onto my front and repeat the leg-lifting. Then it’s onto my back again and curl into a ball. Finally I stretch full length and ‘walk’ my buttocks away from my torso.

Gradually these exercises restore me to myself. One day soon I will be able to get from the floor to an upright position without the aid of table legs or door frames; I will be able to wipe my arse without sweating fearfully; I will be able to turn over in bed in less then five minutes; and I will be able to throw a leg over the bike.

My training program already in tatters and now this.   

up the hill

When I lived in Croydon and rode the Dandenongs, I blithely referred to it as ‘up the hill’. Today I ride up the hill for the first time in a year.

I start at the gridiron field in Croydon. It’s about ten klicks from there to The Basin. From The Basin to Sassafras is seven kilometres on the road known as The One-in-twenty, or ‘up the hill’ to me. It’s a classic time trial climb and every cyclist who pedals this strip of bitumen knows his best time.

I guesstimate this to be close to my hundredth ascent over a period of ten years, but probably only my third in three years since I moved to Bendigo.

My best time is 19:19 when I chased a veteran but brilliant competition cyclist named Dave Moreland to the top. He was having a leisurely chat with John, the bloke I set off with from the bike shop in Croydon. Half way up Dave asks John where that other bloke went.

“He’s just behind us,” John says. “I think he’s going for a PB.”

We stop at Olinda and they ask if I got my PB. I tell them I did but decline to claim it because I sucked wheel all the way. Dave tells me not to be silly: a PB is a PB however you get it, he says.  

So 19:19 is way out there. Until this Beamonesque achievement, breaking 21 minutes is a monumental effort that I manage maybe twice. Otherwise I regard any time under 23 minutes as acceptable, a sign of good form and fitness.

I know I won’t crack 23 minutes today. My training hasn’t involved any serious climb like The One-in-twenty. All I want today is to find a rhythm and to stay strong. I do that.

I probably negative split—do the second half quicker than the first—but I only look at the stopwatch when I hit the 50kph sign at Sassafras. I’m OK with 25:40 but it indicates that I need plenty more time up here in the Dandenongs.

Another three kilometres and the ride tops out at Olinda. From here it’s all down hill.

And indeed it is. My training regime falls to pieces. The next three days I work in Melbourne, training teachers and mental health workers on Wednesday and Thursday, and an all-day meeting in the city on Friday. I don’t get a chance to ride.

On the Saturday I return to Bendigo but my rhythm is broken. I don’t ride and I don’t write all week. I go to pump class and cycle class at the gym, but I’m not on the road. I could ride two or three times but I’m stuck. Stuck? Yeah, just stuck.

Approaching the weekend I’m psyched and ready for a big comeback, when disaster strikes. At Friday pump class I ‘tweak’ my back before the class begins.

Proceed immediately to my next post. 

the end of the road

I am at the end of the road. Not figuratively. Literally. There is no more road. There is no more Australia. Unless you count the seven kilometres across the wilderness to Tasmania's Southeast Cape. This is where Australia ends and the Southern Ocean begins.

We arrive at Cockle Creek late Thursday afternoon. A friend has bought a house here, a memento of times past, when he and mates, me included, came here to embark on epic journeys into Tassie's wild places: the South Coast Track, Precipitous Bluff, the Arthurs and Federation Peak, the holy grail for hardy souls.

This is a magic place for it's solitude (population 3), it's remoteness (no electricity, solar-powered phone), and it's transcendent beauty (glittering bays, beaches clean as silver gulls).

The French were the first Europeans to land here in 1792; Bruny D'entrecasteaux came with two floating laboratories of scientists and philosophers. His mission: to find the missing explorer La Pérouse and to examine everything in 'the South' while disturbing nothing.

The French got on famously with the Aborigines. The English arrived ten years later bent on pillaging the place of its wood and its whales. They slaughtered the indignant indigenes. The fuckers fucked it up, fucked it over, and fucked off. (The French, of course, behaved shamefully in other places, but not here.)

We walk and walk and walk. It's four-wheel drive in and out of Cockle Creek, but while here, feet are the only means of going places. Despite her sore little toes—tripping on the back door step (left), and bumping into the corner of the couch (right)—and the shoes that give me blisters on my Achilles tendons, my good woman and I set off across the hills and plains for South Cape Bay.

The South Coast Track to South Cape Bay has everything: every surface—boardwalks snaking across boggy lowlands, benched footpads skirting higher places, rocks and roots to clamber over; every vegetation—the tallest, straightest trees, fern glades, impenetrable ti-tree thickets, sedges; and every vista—distant and not-so-distant bluffs, a moonscape above the ocean, rocky ridges descending the dark dells of gurgling tea-coloured rivulets.

In the evening we walk again. To the Whale Sculpture. Next morning when the rain stops we walk to the sculpture and beyond. The beaches sap the calves of energy and spring;  rock-hopping is doing endless lunges. But it is not training. It's not the bike.

In the end it is seven days without riding. I excuse, I explain, I rationalise: it is a holiday, a retreat, a break from the drudgery of racking up the miles that I have been telling myself is no drudgery at all. It will do me good, refresh me.      

it takes all types

Riding to the gym yesterday evening, I spy a kid, maybe fourteen with blond hair down to his arse and a German WW2-style helmet, mono-ing his BMXer the length of the block along the footpath. As I overtake I suggest he might go faster on two wheels.

In the length of the next block he shoots past me down the centre of the highway, still on one wheel, and speeds away.

“Serves me right,” I tell him as he recedes into the distance.

This morning I’m at the velodrome before six thirty, expecting to have the stadium to myself. But a trim figure with bright flashing tail-light and another halfway up her back is already doing circuits. Is there anything more alluring than a cyclist with a thick plait dangling out of her helmet? I think not.

I whiz around for an hour. I think, according to The Program, I’m supposed to be keeping a high cadence in a low gear and maintaining a moderate heart rate. So I pedal at 85rpm and 126bpm. I cover 31kms at 28.8kph.

Daylight saving pisses me off big time. Nothing to do with discombobulated cows or faded curtains. It discriminates against the morning classes—pastry cooks, dog walkers, cyclists—in favour of the less deserving—beach lollers, window shoppers, and alfresco bon viveurs. We have to do things in the dark while the hedonists get the light.

We’re not halfway to the autumn equinox and it’s barely light enough to be on the road at 6:30. It is, of course, really 5:30, but your average slugabed wouldn’t know.