My vision started to fail. Black speckles appeared suspended across my field of view. I was at long last offering my first greeting to ‘The Man With The Hammer’. So this is what cyclists mean by ‘bonking’! My legs were shot, my arms were shaking, my head was gone — I’d ‘hit the wall’. Lights out.
Just as I was about to keel over I spotted a bench seat at the side of the road. I dropped my bike on the grass verge and slumped on to the seat. There was an object resembling a little old bearded man at the far end of the bench. Suddenly, I was startled by the object starting to talk to me. It WAS a little old bearded man! I sat with him for a few minutes having a surreal conversation, the detail of which is now completely lost to me. Eventually, it became necessary to move, or die. I chose life.
What followed forever redefined my concept of ‘tired’. There was no question of riding the bike up the hill; even walking was agonising. I had to do it a single pace at a time. I rested a few seconds after each step. I don’t think that there was a single gram of glycogen left in my body, and I sure wasn’t burning my ample stores of fat very quickly. It was deeply, deeply unpleasant. I was no longer out for a Sunday ride. I was toiling in the Gulag, or the wartime jungles of Burma. I was in survival mode, with just one primitively-focussed set of objectives – Get Home, Drink, Eat, Sleep.