things get a whole lot worse

I cough myself inside out. It’s not a persistent cough, nor a gravelly cough, nor a woof, certainly not a hack. It’s a surprise cough that comes out of nowhere. Suddenly something (nothing really) is lodged in your throat and you convulsively turn your throat inside to rid it of the intruder.
Each bout leaves me gasping helplessly, eyes bugging, nose blocked like the emergency exit of an Indian cinema on fire. If I move about things aren’t too bad. So I’m OK when I wheel the Red Rocket onto the 9:02 out of Croydon. On the train my throat threatens constantly to erupt.
How will I MC tomorrow’s forum?
Finally the doors of the 10:15 to Bendigo peel back. Passengers select and occupy seats while I tether the steed in the bike bay. Then the announcement none of us wants to hear. The train will be replaced by buses because a rail is broken near Diggers Rest. Bikes can’t travel on buses.

We stumble and bumble our collective way to the bus bays several blocks away, but no buses, just the passengers from the 9:15, waiting. I about-face and head for home only to discover the vagaries of the new timetable: to wit, mid-morning trains to Lilydale don’t run through the loop.
Three trains later I’m on the Lilydale train using two mobile phones to right the ship. Gifts for speakers; the logo to the admin person making the badges; rearrange the parcel I’m taking to my daughter; contact each speaker for final briefings.
Dan pokes his head over the back fence and recommends an expectorant. My daughter says honey and lemon. Everyone has a suggestion. Everyone has good intentions and advice to offer, but none of it gets you upstairs at the Savoy.
Later my good woman pops in. She’s cruising the eastern suburbs supervising her team of psychologists. She brings goodwill, lavender, cough drops, cherry cake, and makes scalding caramel milk. She’s an angel.
Finally I lie down, but the sickness is upon me good and proper. I cough and spasm under the mohair rug and no sleep comes.
The V-Line website says that trains will run again in the afternoon and evening. I hope to be on the 8:15. I’ll sleep on the floor at my office.
It’s ten to four. Tomorrow afternoon at exactly ten to four I will walk to Bendigo Station and ride the 4:02 back home. The forum will be over. My head will throb, my throat will be raw, but I will have nothing to organise, no deadline, nothing to do but sleep, if I can, and plan Saturday’s ride into the Dandenongs.

germ warfare

Sometimes there’s no hope for it. Whatever’s going on out there is a conspiracy against you that nothing can ameliorate. Right now I’m sick, but I can’t get better. I need to rest, but rest is impossible.
On Friday afternoon in Mildura I have the proverbial splitting headache. I lie on the floor of a borrowed office, then wander the streets in desperation.
Saturday I run a five-hour training session, drive four and a half hours to Bendigo, and hop the last train back to Melbourne and Croydon, walking in the door just before midnight. A big, big day.
Early Sunday afternoon I’m a happy little couch potato, dabbling in the big Saturday broadsheet, alternating with the Blues slapping Brisbane on the box. A sudden irresistible urge to cough catches me. Two hours later after more coughing I’m suspicious.
Late Sunday afternoon my good woman and I confabulate about a movie and sleepover. It’s a long weekend. I warn her that I think things are not quite right with me. Will she risk contamination? To her eternal credit, she does.
I fight this damn thing for three days: scummy throat, bleary eyes, aching back. On Monday I ride, but feel crap less than a kilometre down the road. I baulk at the foot of the Dandenongs and ride a weird 35-kilometre, late-afternoon, up-hill-and-down-dale circuit through Kilsyth, Montrose, Mooroolbark, Chirnside Park, Wonga Park and Warranwood.
I plan to ride Tuesday and don’t feel too bad, but work grabs me and won’t let go. Wednesday I have Donna on my mind. I need to grind up an inexorable ascent. Three Wednesdays from this one I’ll be in Paris en route to the Massif Central, the French Alps and the Pyrénées. I figure the ride up Donna will either kill this bug or kill me.
I can’t sleep. I get up at 3:29 and busy myself around the house. I pack for my commute to Bendigo. I’m running and hosting a forum on Friday. Thirty people are coming from all over the state. So much to do.
I cough and cough and sneeze and blow, and marvel at life’s ability to remind me how insignificant my woes are even in the pantheon of minor events.
And things are about to get a whole lot worse.

eight degrees of eight per cent

To say I promised myself the ride up Donna Buang is one way to look at it.

Nick at the bike shop says it’s harder than Buller. I disagree, then check the interweb: Buller averages six per cent, Donna is 6.4. Score one Nick. And he’s right. The climbs are of almost equal length at between 16 and 17 kms.

After days of fog, this day begins just the same. I roll out of the pub car park at Launching Place bang on midday. It’s eight degrees. A thermal base layer, my Ground Effect two-timer, and full-fingered gloves moderate the chill. Right on twelve thirty the sun finally burns off the fog.

For ten years at the start of each winter I had the free flu vaccine offered by my employer. The jab kept me cold- and flu-free. The past two years I’ve missed and had three respiratory malaises, the current disease featuring a dry cough with the power to turn me inside out.

At Warburton I unzip and remove the two-timer’s sleeves and swap the gloves for mitts. As soon as you swing into the road to the mountain, the gradient leaps to eight per cent and stays there till it arcs up to 12 just before the turntable at Cement Creek.

While the bottom seven kilometres is steeper, the long drag around the face of the mountain is tougher, ten tedious kilometres of long stretches of slick road. Grubby patches of snow fringe the bitumen above 1000 metres.

The sign at the summit says the mountain is 1250m tall. My computer has it at 1268m, but why quibble? The climb from Warburton is over a vertical kilometre and I add 40 or 50 metres by ascending the tower.

By meteorological happenstance the tower platform is windless, and warmer than any other place on this ride. I take two photos and email them to my good woman, and reply to a request for a quote to run some more training in Sydney.

A motorist, the only person also up here, comments that I have nothing more to do as it’s all downhill from here. I can’t be bothered disabusing him. I put the sleeves back on the two-timer, pull the hoodie over my bonce, and don the full fingers and gilet. The sun shines but the temperature is seven degrees.

The downhill chill factor is substantial. The road surface switches from slick wet to muddy wet to dry every fifty to a hundred metres. The bike wants to gallop off under me but I’m curbing my usual enthusiasm for the descent and keeping the rims warm. I want to go to France in one piece.

France is ever so close. My plane will lurch into the air at 2:05 pm on the fifth day of July.           

the dandenongs, the hard way

Today I ride up Mt Dandenong—the hard way. I usually don’t feel the cold, but to add to the thrill, it’s bitterly chillsome.
There are a few ascents of Mount Dandenong from the Melbourne side of the range: Mountain Highway from The Basin, under the misnomer of the One-in-twenty that averages less than five per cent; the Tourist Road from Montrose, mostly four to six per cent; and the Tourist Road from Upper Ferntree Gully, a brute with long drags nudging double figures.
The tough way is known only by locals: Inverness Road. It runs off York Road and joins the Tourist Road just below Kalorama. Its gradients are all in double figures. The final pitch from the corner of the aptly named Wilkilla Road is a long straight of 13 per cent with a no-spare-gears ramp of 18 per cent in full view.
Throw in Ridge Road above Kalorama and the detour to the Sky High Restaurant and you have yourself a couple of extra clicks with grades in double figures.
I you want to add a bit of thigh-burn, scoot down Perrins Creek Road and swing right into Sassafras Creek Road at the bottom. It winds through the rain forest, gradually increasing gradient, morphs into The Avenue as it runs back up to Sassafras, and arcs up to a cool 15 per cent at the top.
This was my ride this morning.

shit happens

Shit does indeed happen. And far too often as far as I’m concerned. When I walk the JRT with my good woman she’s amazed that such a small dog can contain, and then not contain, such enormous quantities of fecal matter.

Bendigo by-laws require anyone walking a dog to have a plastic bag about their person. For an hour’s walk I need four bags in my pocket. The lad has Crap One almost immediately we leave the property: dogs adhere strictly to the principle that one should never crap in one’s own backyard. That’s one bag.

Crap One is the plug, fairly solid and of moderate girth, your typical barker’s eggs. Crap Two is what happens when the plug is removed; less solid, less bulbous, more like something extruded from a sausage maker, not easy to pick up. Bag Two.

On most days I hang on to the first bag, knowing I’ll soon complement it with the second deposit. If the second evacuation is delayed, wondering miles with a thin plastic bag of excrement—hot, squidgy and smelly—in one’s free hand follows.

The search for a bin in which to deposit the offending material is the dog-walker’s final tribulation. I know every public bin in a goodly radius of home. Some are private bins just inside front fence lines. Garbage days are godsends.

Shit happens not only to dogs. Human shit happens too and it can’t be dropped urgently on the pavement then scooped deftly into a bag. Human shit is notoriously unpredictable and has no timetable. The body’s capacity to retain shit for the time required to find a toilet diminishes with age. If caught short, you’re in deep doo-doo. The intestinal fortitude required to reach safety is not always forthcoming.

A barrister I shared a room with once told me that after 50 a bloke should never trust a fart, never pass a toilet, and never ignore an erection.

Hence, I don’t dare to leave home without having a dump. Some mornings the JRT implores me for a walk. I point my sphincter at the porcelain but nothing happens. I know that 500 metres from home my gastrointestinal tract will activate.

This morning we’re in a bushland reserve that has a toilet block that also houses a cleaner’s store and a windowless office for visiting park staff. The toilet is usually open but today the door is padlocked. If the female toilet is open, I will use it. Who could be in there at just after seven on chilly morning?

But here’s a miracle: the office is open and a park ranger is within. She has a pert bum despite her ranger’s dungarees. I alert her with a small cough and ask if she has a key to the toilet. Her key opens the padlock. She says she is pleased, but not half as pleased as I am, I tell her.

I drag a reluctant JRT into the cubicle and urgently bestride the metal bowl. Wisely I carry my own paper supply. I flush. The water rises steadily, then rapidly. The dog and I leap out of the cubicle as it surges over the rim. Instantly it’s an inch deep on the concrete but my stool remains poised on the lip of the bowl.

I report a blocked toilet to her of the pert bum and decamp quickly. For once the JRT seems to understand how things are this morning and spares me the trouble of Bag Three. Small mercies.