For the past few months I’ve been fighting a battle with myself. As most of you have noticed by now, I’ve not shown my face on the start line for a while, and I’ve been relatively absent from the world of social media as well. Nothing’s been a done deal, but now the time has [...]
As the New Year has been and gone, I’ve realised it’s probably time to let everyone in on my 2020 plans in some more detail. I announced that I would be retiring from road racing and transitioning into ultra-endurance, but that’s a pretty vague statement. In all honesty I wasn’t sure myself what exactly it [...]
As I hiked my way up a climb far too steep and muddy to ride on a gravel bike, stumbling over rocks and tangled vegetation, at the end of an eight-hour ride, in complete darkness, guided partly by a slightly useless bike light and partly by following sheep across an otherwise empty moorland, I considered [...]
Coming back from an injury is always a personal journey. The pain, the progress, the setbacks, and the eventual recovery. People can watch as you work hard from fall to return; they can empathise and sympathise with how your life has been changed by the outcome, but they can’t feel it with you. During my [...]
When I first got back on my bike last year, and subsequently announced my return to road racing, the question I got asked most often was ‘why’? To be honest I didn’t have much of an answer to this, and I’ve been relatively quiet ever since as to what I was trying to achieve. This [...]
It's been a couple of weeks since the surgery on my wrist, and I'm still getting messages asking what actually happened. I realise that aside from some sporadic tweeting while in the hospital, and a fair amount of Instagram storying while I was on the good drugs, I didn't give any real details of the [...]
The big question I was repeatedly asked in the lead up to the race on Sunday was ‘how are you feeling about being back?’. Each time, I answered that I was happy but nervous. Perhaps, more accurately, I should have said that I was afraid; but that felt like a rather dramatic response to a [...]
This weekend marks my first time lining up for a road race since I stepped off the bike over a year ago. I genuinely thought I’d never say that. I was reluctantly convinced not to call it a retirement in case I wanted to go back to racing in the future, but this felt unnecessary [...]
I’ve spent the past couple of years changing my mindset on a lot of topics that I previously chose to ignore. One of these things has been the fight for equality. Call it growing up, or perhaps more accurately call it opening my eyes. It wasn’t that I didn’t know how big an issue this [...]
At the beginning of the year I announced that I would be back on the bike in 2019 and that I would be riding for Orbea Racing Team. I also said that I would bring you along for the journey and document the trials and tribulations of being back in the saddle. That starts now. [...]
Given everything that had happened it was easy for me to grow bitter at the hand I had been dealt, to see my downfall as the result of a year of ill-fated circumstance entirely outside my control. I was merely the victim of a series of unfortunate events, and all that was left now was the [...]
