Chapter 8: Cycling Saved My Marriage

My wife is, and has always been, brilliant to me! She has always allowed me to do as much sport as I’ve wanted to, which to be honest has pretty much been playing football, and then to let me come home and talk about it endlessly to her.

It may be because I managed to bag a big football supporter, and one in a consistently good mood, she supports Arsenal! So when I come home and go into intense detail about how the goal I scored wasn’t off-side and how I got kicked on my ankle by a big centre half who looked like Tony Adams and even moaning about how my boots are too muddy and my shin-pads broken, she has always been the most knowledgeable and sympathetic I could ever wish for.

But this year I pushed it too far. I’m 41 and have some time on my hands, so have set myself a number of charity challenges (and not just football), and including cycling from Lands End to John O’Groats.

My wife knows all about David Seamen’s positioning, Charlie George’s bad hair days, Malcolm MacDonald’s bandy legs and she’s certainly more than enough of a sports fan to know who Lance is and to have cheered as Bradley won his third medal – but not even I could actually explain what on earth was going on as he did.

But what she doesn’t know about, and what I’ve found out to the detriment of my marriage, doesn’t ever want to know about, is the size of my chain ring, what a cat 4 licence is, the benefits of dryfit lycra, my heart rate and certainly not the number of calories I burnt this morning.

I became in danger of boring my marriage to death.

So I’ve been in this alone. Not being able to come home and report in the finest details about my cycling, I had to sign-up for a training camp in Mallorca to make some ‘cycling’ friends that would be interested in exchanging this vital information.

This seemed to make matters worse as I would be chatting about cycling to other cyclists, rather than moaning about West Ham United to her. So our marriage become strained. She wanted to go back to listening to me ‘going on’ about how ‘we’ had wasted all the money ‘we’ got for Rio Ferdinand, to seeing me despair over relegation and another point dropped in a town she new no where. She wanted desperately to go back to gloating over an unbeaten 49 game run……

But one day recently it all changed….

I managed to get Helen (for that is the name of my best football pal) and our three young kids to come and watch me in a real race. 20 miles round 20 laps of a tarmaced course. She needed a lot of encouragement and very, very specific directions in-order to persuade her to sacrifice a Saturday morning to watching ‘your Dad running cycling in circles’. But minutes before the start they did all turn up, although shouting loudly for all to hear ‘don’t give up like Paula’ was not quite the support I was looking for.

I wanted to do well. I’d been in a few races previously and had actually managed an 8th in one race but that was against people that my wife never saw. The ‘competition’ I reported to her about, that even without meeting, she considered sadder and duller than me.

So we set off, me keener than ever, without trying to show it, I got into the leading bunch and spent the best part of the race behind the leading few - embarrassingly too close at one point as I caught the back wheel of the bike in front and nearly came a cropper – luckily the kids were looking the other way but the wife saw it – and heard the moans of the other competitors behind – she still laughs now.

But round we came for the last lap and I put everything and I mean everything, into it. I crossed the line in 4th place. The kids didn’t seem to realise the race was even over but as I came round from the warm-down lap I could see a slight smile on my wife’s face. If I wasn’t mistaken she was actually looking slightly proud of me.

Suddenly, the kids also started to show interest, but not in me. I had won a cash prize and as all three of them hung off me wanting to know what was in my brown envelope, stuffed with…£7. Just enough to get them a comic each – the sacrifice they had each made for this journey to support Dad.

I packed up and got in the car to receive the best winning kiss anyone’s ever received for coming 4th! She was proud, the competition weren’t sad idiots but actually good humoured, even attractive, cyclists, with even a few that as well as cycling, liked football. Some of them even looked quite fit - I had earned my 4th place kiss!

That night I received my reward in full.

It still doesn’t mean she cares any more about riding positions and lyrca than moulded or screw-ins but the best thing of all – she pretends she does.