Well, since it is storytelling time, here's mine.

I was fairly athletic as a kid, but pretty much dropped out of competitive sports when in my late teens. It was the late sixties, early seventies, and I was too cool for all that stuff. So cool that I could easily have got into a lot of trouble with drink and/or drugs, but fortunately some little voice of self-preservation kept me just this side of the line, and eventually I grew up.

I'd always ridden a bike. I even took an interest in pro racing. But I didn't know anybody who raced bikes, there was no club locally - or at least none I knew of - so cycling stayed purely recreational for me. Until I started work, that is. I was living in London, I wasnt making much money, and it occurred to me that commuting by bike was both free, and faster than taking the tube. So That's what I did through my twenties. I used the bike to go everywhere, including, sometimes, to visit my parents almost 300 miles away; though to be fair, I did take three days for the journey. The bike was just part of my life. I was fit.

But life got in the way, for a while. In my early thirties my career started to take off, I got into some positions that made demands that were incompatible with the bike commuting, I basically put the bike away for fifteen years and, worse, for about 35 lbs. I was pushing fifty when I realised I was fat and unfit, and fortunately met a guy at work who was, is, a fanatical cyclist and an ex track sprinter of some quality. Almost made the English national team back in the day. Anyway, he encouraged me to get back on the bike, so I bought a tourer and started commuting again. Six months later he and I cycled across the north of England, 140 hilly miles in two days. Three months after that he helped me pick out a road bike. Since then I have done a fair few endurance events and a lot of tours, including a two-month 2500-mile monster in Canada and New England last year. And throughout that time my buddy has been telling me I should go racing. I dismissed him. Fifty-something still overweight men don't make themselves look ridiculous by getting the crap kicked out of them by young men on crit courses.

But last autumn I helped him run a training camp in Spain for budding racers. He was coaching, I was just helping out, being a responsible adult, acting as Lanterne Rouge in case some of the kids got dropped on the rides, that sort of thing. But one of the kids asked me " do you race?" and when I said no, asked why not? And I couldn't think of an answer that didn't sound lame. So I came home and took out a licence.

It has been an eye-opener, all my years of watching races, and riding non-competitively, failed utterly to prepare me for the sheer intensity of it. And I find that my bike-handling skills aren't as good as they seemed when under less pressure. But I'm going to get better. It'll take a while, but I have nothing but time.