My Legs Could Always Rest Between Sports. My Mind Never Got a Turn.
A nervous system rest day looks nothing like an ordinary rest day, and for most of the last two decades as an amateur endurance athlete, I didn’t know there was a difference to look for. Even after I became a cycling trainer myself, I still thought of training...
The Thousand-Year-Old Cooling Trick I’d Already Rebuilt Without Knowing It
Cross ventilation for sleeping sounds technical. It’s really just two open gaps, one high and one low. On a hot night in the van, I don’t seal it up the way instinct says to for bugs or security. I crack the roof vents — mosquito-netted, so bugs stay out —...
The Noise Outside My Camper That Wasn’t a Bear
Trouble sleeping in a new place isn’t really about the place. I’d found an empty parking spot in a limestone canyon in Slovakia, right next to the stream that carves it — a short drive, an easy training day, nothing that should have cost me any sleep. Then...
Everything Bends Except the Clock
Every plan for a solo trip is provisional except one: a consistent wake up time, and the bedtime that goes with it. I check the forecast the night before I leave, aim for somewhere within about a thousand kilometers where the temperature sits near twenty degrees, and...
The Stretches My Son Does When I’m Not There
Most evenings it looks the same. Bath, teeth, supper, and then I go into his room and stretch — nothing dramatic, mobility work mostly, one arm and one leg at a time, deliberately uneven, the kind of asymmetrical loading that forces the body to actually pay attention...
The World Championship Night I Was Sure Was Already Lost
There was no parking near the hotel, so I carried everything I owned for the next three days up a wet street by hand, in rain that hadn’t yet decided whether it was going to be the storm or just the warning for it. Every decent hotel near the start line in...
The Cheap Flight That Cost More Than the Ticket
Two hours late, which for the last flight of the day out of a budget airline isn’t really a delay so much as a scheduling assumption everyone quietly accepts. By the time I cleared the airport I’d missed the bus to where I’d parked the car, so...
The One Thing I No Longer Change on Holiday
Eight years ago we drove into Montenegro on roads narrow enough that a herd of goats around any blind corner was the normal hazard, not the surprising one. We’d flown in and rented a car, and even then it was hours of mountain driving to get anywhere. Deserted...