Sunday, August 14, 2016

Escapism

‘Stewart anvallen!’
‘Stewart attaque!’
‘Stewart attacks!’
Up the road was my district. No need to glance at the start sheet to know I was racing.  My heart was the master, but sometimes it couldn’t keep up.
Tough times transpired, but the toughest occurred when no one was there to watch.

My hardest day had impeccable beginnings.
Dad left for work, slamming the door behind him. Roused by the shutting, I soaked in the sunlight melting through the curtains. The perfect summer morning had a golden glow.
The sun shines brighter when you are 16 and enslaved to revision.
Today it was irresistible.
I was going for a bike ride.

Ferris Bueller traps set, I departed for the ride of a lifetime. A great man once said,
‘Never let a good education ruin a great cycling adventure.’
Azure skies smiled down upon me, as I pedalled the teenage kicks out of my life. Heading away from Newtownards, a tremendous tailwind whisked me towards freedom. Cadence climbed and speed surged, as I clocked up the kilometres.
Spying southern showers, I swung left at Kircubbin, to loop back and head home.
A wet bike can be detected.
A puddled garage can be detected.
Detection was to be prevented at all costs.
I caped-up.

Or tried to.
An opportunity to practice the mobile application of waterproofs. Plucking coat out of pocket, I got to work on wearing it. Inside out, the first task was readying it for installation. Pulling the sleeves out, I proceeded with the conclusive slipping-on of apparel. Surrounding hedgerows whirled in excitement, holding the wind back from disrupting the ceremony. One arm in, the other en route, the deed was nearly done…
And then everything went wrong.

They say one doors closes, another opens.
In this case, a closed gate had created a field opening. A field opening which invited forceful crosswinds to snatch my front wheel away from me.
I was helpless to nature’s barbarism: arms trapped in a waterproof straight jacket, I crashed onto the tarmac. Wrists, chest, knees, face; I slammed into the ground.
My day in paradise swiftly went to shit.

Pathetically twisted, I probed for a neural response. Messages hurtled back in horrific haste, as pain invaded my body.
In a moment, I had cascaded from euphoric enigma to arthritic sloth.
Worse was yet to come.

Money doesn’t rule the world, but it can buy you a taxi home.
Departing the house, I’d disregarded this principle. Capes, bananas, optimism had been abundantly stocked, but not money. There was no quick way home.
Pride was in my blood; it didn’t need to be packed. It prevented me from calling Dad, explaining the situation, so he would leave work and come to my rescue.
Pride was going to overhaul pain and get me home.

Hauling myself onto a completely functional bike, thanks to human-cushioning, I pondered my next move. Cracking my wrists in the right direction, I thought about which way the crow would go home.
Sickening realisation came upon me.
My route was a U-shaped peninsula.
I was at the U’s bottom.
I was the longest possible distance away from home.
I was fucked.

A foreboding fifty kilometres approached. Opting for following my tail, I doubled back towards home.
The gale, gratified to launch me towards Portaferry, now fought to keep me there. Pedalling into the gust, I resisted the wind’s change in mood. Twelve miles-per-hour into a block head involved more power than a tailwind, and my body felt it. My hands shook, as my wrists struggled to recover from the earlier impact. My knee swelled, reminding me of its hardship with every pedal stroke.

Forty kilometres elapsed, and I’d felt every one of them.
The wind died down as I hit the towpath, but I barely noticed. My body was on red alert, aching from all areas.
Vision blurred as I soldiered on, bloodied from head-to-toe. A now-ripped raincoat, hid the majority of collateral damage.
But Mother Nature had not finished.
The wind had died down for a reason. Black clouds glared down, before spitting out thousands of icy globules in my direction. Wind had had its moment, now it was hail’s turn.
Red alert flickered to mayday, as my heart begged me to stop. My brain knew this wasn’t an option. I continued the mission, in a scene of desperation, determined to see my front door again.

Beckoning over my hysterical self, was my beautiful front door:
‘Congratulations on your victory, Daniel,’ the Front Door praised, ‘but remember, it’s half three, and you don’t want your cover to be blown! Hide the evidence.’
Nodding at my orders, I hobbled to the garage. Dusting down the bike with a dry sponge to prevent puddling and evidence, completed the perfect crime.
After a shower and outfit change, I was happy to learn all my wounds could be hidden under clothes.

Four o’clock came, and Mum walked in.
Greeting her calmly at my desk, I performed an Oscar-worthy of studying show.

They’ve never noticed the scars on my wrists.

Monday, June 27, 2016

Thrift is the Gleaner Behind All Human Effort

It’s Friday.
In Belfast.
You’re tired.
And angry.
A horrible day.
Fury clogs your blood channels: towards customers, workers, voters. They’ve added acid to your future’s skeleton.
You await the bus. Workers drive past, sardining the road. They suffocate in homemade gloom. Your glower burns holes in all directions.

Aboard the bus, you glare at the Hope Wall with renewed irony.
You feel agitation, ceasing to be settled, leaking from your core.
Sweat and slurs surround you, but nothing is present to soothe you.
You must override this issue from within.

Arriving home, you address the abrogation, with euphoric exercise.
Soon, you’re tumbling down the towpath, anger spewing onto tarmac. But the asphalt hits back, delivering sickening blows which scintillate up your legs.
You run past a Mother, ignorant to her son’s pleas for freedom to explore. He is parried back into the pram.

You run into The Cure: The Park.
Omniscient oaks will absorb your acrimony. Wisdom will shower down, as you run under ancient ashes. You hope.
You pass a personal trainer, implementing identical exertions to identical clients. Clients paying for the orgasmic authority of the trainer’s control.
More families pass by, commencing their weekend with a potter in the park.
Content with their luxurious leisure.
Content with good grants and wages.
Irrespective to how it was achieved.

            Turning towards the trails, you ascend the hill. From its peak, the Parliamentary home of agreements, treaties and welfare condescends down on you. Growing gradients greaten gravity’s grip on your efforts. Kicking your steps into the bark, you return the earth’s past punches, with inflated valour. Fresh bark nourishes your nostrils, for your hard work, reminding you of childhood:
Of a satisfying slide, carpeted by a comparable husk.
Of a time, free of festering thoughts.
Of a time, when Unions where eminent.

Continuing the summit, you surpass the back of the building of bills. Heaving, wheezing, but pulsing; you rid yourself of the weight of frustration and contempt.
Conquering to the crest, you stop on the bridge, cohesively connecting the two regions of the park’s valley. A river flows beneath. You stare from each side:
Upstream is a bleak outlook. Murky browns colour stagnant water, coating a sandy, barren riverbed. Foliage shies away from the stream.
Downstream is more volatile. Green corpses block the water’s course: a pine, felled years ago, splays itself across the waterway. Weeds shoot up from age-old, rotting wounds. Ragged rocks befoul the scene further.
A small watery trickle, filters its way through the carnage.
The brook still babbles. There is hope.
You leave the aquaplaning bridge, refreshed.

Hurtling down the hill, the forest applauds you home, congratulating your enlightenment.
Thrift is the Gleaner Behind All Human Effort’, reads a monument’s etchings, as you exit the park. You nod in agreement, as your strides speed up with every kilometre closer to home.

It doesn’t last long.
A suited snob, blares his horn as you leave the park with your loving-kindness. Swiftly snatching your optimism, a snide snub condemns your immediate existence.
Reality sets in, and alleviations are abandoned. Exercise has done little to extinguish your anguish, as your fire returns to its roots. You sulk home to find a place to hide.

Sheltered, you soon acknowledge acceptance.
Acceptance of your fight over flight:
Fighting for knowledge.
Fighting for recognition.
            Fighting for power.

But these things don’t need to be fought for.
Thrift betters fight.
17,410,742 British Gleaners must grasp this.
What’s done is democracy, an outcome to be unchanged.
We must face the future together.
With thrift not fight.







@DanBikeStewart                                                                                                      #EURef

Saturday, May 14, 2016

Cycling Departure

I stopped cycling as a full-time occupation in March 2016.
Shame delayed the announcement.

Once upon a home voyage, I awaited a train in Nantes Gare. A soldier came across me, and I was addressed in a friendly French tongue. Grunts of bewilderment responded to his talk. Granted his audience was an English-speaking oaf, his lips tensed as he forced out foreign words,
‘You two euro? Me train Lille…’
I flipped the two euro he was short to get the man of duty on his way. With a goofy smile and a ‘chow’, I wished him well on his journey to wherever, for whatever.
When I got to Dublin, and realised I needed that two euro to get me back up to Belfast, my thoughts were, ‘I really hope your man was actually a soldier’.
That experience always made me think. Not about my lack of organisation and my general incompetence; but my reasoning to giving my last monetary scrapes to a soldier, and not anyone else.
 ‘Why should I deserve all this support when so many people are not as privileged?’ I was happy to hugely inconvenience my journey home to help a soldier out, but why would you do it for an underperforming cyclist?
Exhausting bank accounts, help and the European public transport system, I pushed my mental and physical capabilities to the limits. Money, bikes, hope, time and effort were thrown at me throughout my cycling career, to no avail. Doubt and insecurity crept into my life and laid down their anchors. Every failure hit me harder and harder.

Throughout 2015, I lived mostly on my own, in a ghost town in north-west France. Shutter Island had become embedded in the centre of Brittany; consisting of a bakery, a hair-dressers and a tabac. I hated living there. When I went out on the bike, eyes burnt into my fluorescent pink kit, as everyone in the little village documented my movements. It got to a peak, when the baker had pre-prepared all the things I was going to ask for, before I got there.
            Paranoia haunted me. I needed to know what these people were thinking of me. I needed to know why I wasn’t getting results. Going out on my bike wasn’t solving my problems anymore, but creating them.

In November 2015, I encountered Jake Bailey upon my phone screen, whilst staying with my girlfriend in London. Diagnosed with terminal cancer the week before, the head boy of Christchurch Boys High School rolled onto the stage in a wheelchair, delivering a scintillating speech, which soon became a viral YouTube hit.
Bailey was so pale and so weak, but the fire still surged from his eyes. Two brown microcosms of optimism and passion radiated into the camera, rejecting his body’s degeneration. Enthusiastically, he urged his peers to make the most of their gifts, in a moving twenty-minute address. He states,

‘Let others lead small lives, but not you. Let others argue over small things, but not you. Let others cry over small hurts, but not you. Let others leave their future in someone else's hands, but not you. Of course doing this will mean at some point we may have to face our fear of falling short. Fear of looking like a fool. Fear of not being enough.’

Bailey crippled me. Emotions crumbled out as I was swallowed by my girlfriend’s bed. Disgust and distain seeped into my being like never before. Why can a man staring death in the face be a beacon of motivation, encouragement, and positivity; while I am just a wretch?
My girlfriend rushed in and told me I had a problem. The internal monologue of personal, hateful slander had to stop. I made a promise to seek help.

I held the promise, and went to see a therapist to help me with my, mostly abnormal, thoughts. Depression and anxieties had leaked into my mind and distorted my view of life. Things got a lot worse before they get better as I started lifting my sub-conscious barricades and ventured into my darkest thoughts.
But I still rode my bike. The colour-coded TrainingPeaks calendar remained green, as I focussed on making 2016 the best season yet. Coming into the New Year, I was the strongest I’d ever been. When times were tough, I thought, ‘Give it two more years, and see what happens.’ I kept plugging away, hoping the stars would align.

But the stars never would. A sticky web of weaknesses lined my conscience, as the season started. I no longer felt like the young boy at Orlock, whizzing up the Springwell. I was fitter, stronger and leaner than ever, but the feeble inaccuracies I still had, melted my remaining self-esteem away.
Races were no longer about pushing hard, about enjoying the quest to the limit. They became a sobering highlighter of disappointment, of how I still was not good enough. The unknown distance of necessary improvement, crushed my soul every time I pushed down on the pedals.
But I still kept faith. I refused to give up. I refused to be associated with the cyclists who had given up before me. I wanted to be the one who prospered, not the one who failed.

Encroached in emotional turmoil, my flight to Belgium got closer and closer. I desperately pleaded with myself to wise up, and get on the bloody plane. But I just couldn’t. Enslaved by the unanswered questions wickedly dancing in my mind’s eye, I had to give up.

Abhorrent, black weeks followed. I was walking into a wall whilst remaining in cycling; but when leaving it I felt I had turned around to walk into a wall directly opposite. Not a fibre in my body wanted to get on that flight to Belgium, but not a fibre in my body wanted to finally admit defeat to achieving a professional contract in cycling, either.
Demons from another department started to plague my head. They made me avoid seeing anyone I knew from cycling. They made me not want to ride my bike for the potential of being spotted. They made me a slave to my own existence.

But I survived. I received a lot of help and am better for it. Now, a few months on, I feel it was definitely the right choice. I feel better, less stressed and more determined to enjoy life.
An exercise fanatic from no age, I’ve realised that physical exertion was my coping mechanism for depression. When cycling became an occupation, it fuelled my woes rather than extinguish them. This is what led to the downward spiral.
I still love every minute of riding a bike. I am trying to pack my weeks with any sport I can think of, because now I know it gives me peace of mind.

To finish, I send a message out to two sets of readers:
To the full-time cyclists, I commend you. Cycling is in a new light, for me, now. Every cyclist projected on a television screen earns every ounce of airtime. They are hardened, driven individuals, and I will always be in awe of their achievements. To me, cycling is still a magnificent spectacle, and I will always love to see people conquer it.
 To the depression sufferers. You are not alone, and you are the reason I wrote this post. I took no pleasure creating it and I am glad to finish it. If you have started your journey to vitality, I wish you all the best. If you are still on your own, talk to the right people to make things right. You will be alone if you act alone. Seek the right help and you can fight it. It is a horrible illness, but one which is made to be beaten.

I write to live, and I endeavour to live to write. This is my next target. Any advice in any work experience within the writing stratosphere would be greatly welcomed.


Thanks for reading, and see you on the road.