Good days, bad days

For every day you spend off the front, feeling untouchable and dishing out the hurt, you spend 10 days hanging on for grim death, barely keeping touch with the back of the bunch.

For every mile you spend off the front, basking in the glory of a lone breakaway, you spend 100 miles out the back, dodging the blows of well-intentioned but ultimately humiliating applause.

"Well done! Keep going!"

I can't, I'm empty.

For every instance you feel you've ridden to your potential, there will be 1000 occasions where you don't, where you go home disappointed, angry, and questioning your decision to devote so much of your life to this stupid, pointless sport.

And yet the good days, rare though they are, feel so good that the misery of the bad days and the even worse miles fades into insignificance, and you persevere, pushed on by the memory of better times. The more you ride, you theorise, the sooner those good times will return.

Today was a bad day.
Tomorrow could - will - be different.