Cycling Through the Pain Barrier
As the crashes and scrapes became more frequent, Joe Brolly’s enthusiasm for the bike began to wane
Joe Brolly on the spills that have made his relationship with cycling a love-hate affair
TO be a cyclist, is to be a student of pain. Encouraged by my friend Frazer Duncan, a Commonwealth Games cyclist, I took it up after a transplant in 2012. The transplant hadn’t gone well and I embraced the pain of the road.
A few weeks after I had started, I was hit by a lorry at the Saintfield junction. He turned left as I was going straight through, following Duncan’s wheel, scattering me across the road.
I was lying there as he appeared round the corner of the cab, white as a ghost. “If you’ve wrecked that fucking bike, so help me!” I roared at him.
He started saying it wasn’t his fault, when a bystander walked over and said to him: “Sir, I’m an off-duty police officer. I saw the whole thing. It was your fault. You can accept you were in the wrong or I can contact a colleague and we can continue this at the station.”
The man apologised and I relented. It was only after he drove on I realised I was badly cut all down my left leg and arm. “The bike’s not too bad,” said Duncan. He poked and pulled at the wheel and got it going. And we did what cyclists always do. We cycled on.
Two months or so later we were racing in the Cooley mountains. Well, I was racing. Duncan was tootling along at 24 miles an hour as serenely as an elderly lady cycling to Mass. We crested a hill and came flying down towards a right-hand bend. He shifted his weight and swept round it like a skier. I missed it and went hurtling into a stone wall.
I was saved by the bushes. I ended up impaled among the thorns, the bike dangling from my right foot. A couple of the boys stopped and lifted me down onto the road. Face badly cut, punctured all over with thorns, shin badly gashed.
“You’re grand,” said Duncan. He spun the wheels to make sure they were working. A minute later, we were zooming down through the mountain. When we got to the finish, the paramedics brought me into the jockeys’ room at the Dundalk stadium and spent ten minutes plucking thorns out of me and bandaging the wounds. The other lads enjoyed that.
Something I quickly noticed was that a lot of recovered alcoholics take up cycling with a vengeance. They simply swap one type of self-inflicted pain for another.
In that first year, I was wild. Dangerous. “Boyo,” Duncan would say, “you’re going to kill yourself.”
I got hit by a Ford Fiesta on the Upper Newtownards Road at the end of a fast 190km spin. I had left the group and was only a few miles from home. It was a freezing day and my body was a temple of lactic acid. Going around cones, she pulled in a bit too quickly and swept my front tyre. I bounced across the road, striking my right elbow hard on the tarmac. She drove on.
I lay in front of the traffic in a daze. The helmet was broken down the middle. I could feel the wetness of the road on my lips. Two lads got out of the car behind me. “Are you alright? Can you move?” “I’m grand. Just having a wee minute, boys. Don’t touch me, I think I’ve broken something.”
I got up and took a few steps off the road, then lay down on the footpath and closed my eyes. The lads carried the bike over to me. “Are you sure you’re ok?” “I’m grand. Thanks boys. You go on now.”
The bike was wrecked this time. After a few minutes, I got up and walked it the few yards to Dave Kane’s Cycle Shop. Mark Kane was an Olympic cyclist. When I walked in, he burst out laughing. “Make that man a coffee, Da,” he said.
He hung the bike and began working on it as I drank the hot coffee. I was lucky. Only a broken elbow.
After two years or so, the madness started to lift. I went out less. And less. I have to say I never enjoyed it. It was never fun. Always pain.
A few months ago I was on a leisurely Saturday morning cycle with the North Down club when I bumped into a man with a familiar face.
“Joe,” he said. “That was me who put manners on the lorry driver in Saintfield that day.”
“No way,” I said, “Are you still in the cops?”
“Cops?” he said, “I just made that up. I work in a printers.”