A Holiday

It is somehow typical of me that the start of my life as a lady of leisure began with … a holiday. I mean, start as you mean to go on. But it was, in fact, an actual holiday, involving flights and a hotel. Something in fact, not typical of me. My life hasn't really been one with standard type holidays; sometimes I wonder if, in fact, anything about my life has ever really been standard. I aspire to standard. Holidays for me have normally involved a tent, and seldom included a flight. I'm either unadventurous or a cheapskate or perhaps just someone who genuinely has never felt the need to pamper herself. Anyway, this was a holiday with a difference. Because we took mountain bikes. It was a guided mountain biking holiday (boot camp) in the Pyrenees.

As is normal for me, I was the slowest in the group, but with a bonus prize of having company at the back of the group from someone who started the holiday as a stranger, but by the end of the third day of riding became a partner in crime, a fellow giggler, and indeed someone with whom I had developed bizarre in jokes with in a very short time. Who knows what the others made of us? As with any cliquey association, shared phrases began to crop up. The language which excludes other people, even if only in simple ways. “it'll be fine”, “we can do this” and the one which made me chuckle so I could hardly breathe was “we're better than this”. And we laughed our way around the trails.

The Pyrenees are high, and there are a lot of them. Gradients steeper and longer than anything I've ever ridden in the UK. Climbs which took what seemed like hours, descents which took more, much much more time than ten minutes, rocks which were in the places the landscape had put them, not man. I rode for longer and I rode closer to my limit for longer than I ever have before. Then, and I was not alone, after three days riding I got sick. Proper sick. The entire hotel was filled with the chorus of vomiting, spewing, hurling and retching. Instead of a rest day, the Wednesday became a sick day, with Thursday a rest day to recover. Yet strangely by Friday, despite being as bloated as a jellyfish and as unable to digest anything as an acid worm bin, I not only managed to ride, but actually felt good, bouncy, in fact. Even though, after much serious consideration over what the hell my body could actually try to digest, I spent the day on chocolate brioche. When in France …

I've been back now for … over a week, I guess. Already life outside work is peculiarly affecting my ability to distinguish days from each other. I felt hugely fit on my return, only to crash myself back to earth with a lacklustre circuit of Llandegla trail centre. But this week, I've been in Scotland and things have changed …