Thursday, March 29, 2012

Recompense For All My Crimes Of Self-Defence.

I'm pretty sure I've mentioned it once or twice before, but I'm currently off the bike. Well, off the bike for the most part. When I saw the doctor he outlined a training program so restrictive that I may as well be off the bike. This week, for example, I'm allowed three thirty minute rides on non-consecutive days. That's an hour and a half for the whole week - quite the step back from the twenty hour weeks I was doing. So I currently have a bit of spare time.

Some of that, obviously, is spent typing out these missives, which have come out every weekday since mid-January. That's a lot of written content, so I've started to share the load around a bit, but that means that my "too much spare time" problem rears up again. I've started writing for other folks, doing media work, and promoting said work on the internet, but there ain't a whole lot of that I can do either. Certainly not eighteen and a half hours worth.

So I find myself being drawn back to the track. I know that Brunswick is racing track on Tuesday night, so I wander down. DISC is only three blocks from my house, Harrison Street Velodrome only a couple more, so it's not heaps out of my way. I know there'll be a bunch of folks I know there, and also know that the racing is only a small part of being there. Missing the racing, though it sucks, isn't so bad.

But it's never enough for me to just sit there and talk shit. I always, for some reason, feel the need to sit on the desk, take the results, count lap, talk to riders about their skills. Perhaps it's the teacher in me stepping out, perhaps I'm just naturally inclined to put myself in positions of power, but I think it's also that I need to be involved, somehow.

Even when I'm not racing, I want to know more about racing. I want to watch, and learn, and figure stuff out. Seriously, I'm a total fucking nerd on this shit. And not like one of those Hollywood nerds, like on Big Bang Theory. I'm one of those lonely nerds who turns up to watch track races by themselves. A few extra kilos, a few extra pimples and late onset colourblindness and the picture would be complete.

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