NED BOULTING

Now I don’t know whether Professor Brian Cox is a cyclist or not (though he’d look cool in Rapha), but I do know that he’s onto something. Cycling is a perpetual battle with atrophy. And the problem is, the more one hangs around on planet Earth, living and breathing and searching Twitter for the results of Belgian one-day races, the more one gets caught in atrophy’s tightening jaws.

I have just returned to my velodrome sessions, after a few weeks out of commission. Before I left, I was able to hold my own with the best of the group (just), and within three weeks of relative inactivity, I have dropped down the rankings so hugely, that I might as well sign for Cofidis and be done with it. I have become hopeless, quickly. Atrophy for you, right there. But that, for me, is not where it stops. Atrophy pervades every corner of one’s existence. It is a universal sadness. And it prevents me from maintaining my bikes properly.

What is the point in getting to work with a toothbrush on your derailleur if it’s just going to get filthy again. Why bother buffing the chrome? It fills me with existential fatigue, the knowledge that it is all in vain, a Sisyphean rolling of the Bike Maintenance Boulder up a mountain, just to see it crashed back down again. Atrophy, I tell you.

Atrophy overshadows all of life’s endeavours, all of life’s pleasures. I had a friend who used to travel a lot for work. He had four kids, and sometimes, when those rare occasions came around that they could all sit down for a Sunday lunch together at the table, he’d ruin it all by declaring (after a glass or two of red) that he’d ‘never been happier than right now’; which, of course, only anticipated the immediate and inevitable drop in happiness levels. Atrophy, at the dinner table.

Hell, I can’t even enjoy a perfect summer’s day without thinking about how it can’t last, shivering at the thought of the coming autumn.

So it is that I give in to atrophy. Let my chain turn slowly to rust, as my girth expands. I give up. I am joining the natural current, flowing towards the dissolution of order in the universe. Pass me the remote control. When’s the cycling on?

And then I remember another Brian Cox fact.

There are more years left in the life of the universe, before the final star dies, and time itself stops, than there are atoms in the universe. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a rather long time in which to sit around and wait for the end of the days.

Dammit. Pass me the degreaser. Anyone fancy a ride?