Greg's first blog

Being a bike rider isn’t, on the face of it, relationship, social life, working life or family friendly. I train between 12 and 16 hours a week. That’s when I’m at home. And come the season, I’m not home a whole lot at weekends. Oh and the odd stage race – Like the Tour of Taiwan, which I’m starting with the team on 8th March, can mean a full weeks’ absence.

During my early 20’s I lost a number of girlfriends thanks to this pattern of behaviour. Je regrette rien. My bike would be freshly washed, my kit bag neatly packed and labelled and the pasta meal partly digested when it would be observed that, once again, I was off ‘somewhere nice’ on my own. Those labelled kit bags had somehow been cast as symbols of my intended escape.

I love being away at a good race. Ideally a stage race somewhere - with nice weather, reasonable hotels and me in good form. You can switch off your brain, (and your phone) ignore the outside world and concentrate on putting yourself through hell for four or five hours a day for a week. Nothing beats the clean feeling of nightly exhaustion that comes from menial physical labour. Particularly when self imposed. When you’re working hard in a break, when it’s bloody killing you, when you’re being sick into your mouth and lazily dribbling it onto the top tube and dashing a bit off your knee caps, you can always stop pedalling. It would be the easiest thing in the world to just stop pedalling. Only you wouldn’t get that nightly clean feeling. You wouldn’t have got it all out. And anyone who’s ever been nearly serious about bike racing knows the clean feeling would be replaced by a strange, needless, acute sense of self loathing.

Life moves on. I found a girl who, if not understands exactly, recognises my needs. Oscar, our son, has yet to form an opinion, but one of his first words is ‘bike’ (to be accompanied by a vigorous pointing gesture) and he knows his dad is intrinsically linked to the numerous two wheeled items that inhabit his tiny world.

So I’m going to be away again. For as much as I need to go away and torture myself on the bike every now and then, the baggage labels, as ever, direct me home again. These days I write them out in capital letters. Not symbols of escape, then, but an unspoken promise, always, to come home.