I need CPR please help!

Help, I’m dying, I really am. Is there anyone out there who can perform CPR? I can’t catch my breath, I have a pain in my chest and I am sweating. Help, please…

I have just cycled to work for the first time in over a year Ok way over a year. I can pinpoint my last journey to work on my bike to a week in February after I fell off my bike and broke my collar bone in September 2002…O!... that’s nearly two years isn’t it? No wonder I’m knackered.

As I lived nearly 30 miles away from work I used to stick my bike on the back of my car every day and cycle the last five miles to work which was in the main all down hill and cycle the uphill five miles back to my car. This was good as it resolved two problems. 1. It was faster to cycle than fume in queues of cars creeping into Plymouth 2. I lost weight and got fit. So yes it resolved three problems.

But cycling is always fraught with danger. I am generally not one of those ninja cyclists one sees zipping around the large cities of this world, jumping red lights, cycling on the wrong side of the road and scaring old ladies whilst cursing car drivers. No I generally have a high regard for my personal safety and try to ride defensively. But even so in the course of a year or so of cycling I have been off my bike through no fault of my own at least three times.

The first time I was minding my own business cycling along next to the curb when WHAM I was face down in the gutter. Some female driver had taken me out with her wing mirror. When I got up and dusted my self off and remonstrated with her, she claimed it was my fault. This is always the refuge of the car driver (I am one of these as well). She suggested that I was in the wrong cycling as I was in the gutter and that I should have been in the middle of the road facing the on coming traffic – huh!

Bus drivers seem to have a vendetta against cyclists too. Forget give the cyclist six foot clearance as they overtake, no, its lets see if I can skim his handlebars and then while he’s still wobbling cut him up. Many a time I have had to batter the side of the bus scaring myself and the passengers inside to warn the bus driver that he was cutting me up and was about to smear me across the pavement. One time the bus actually stopped and the driver offered me a fist fight – maybe he had had a bad day, I don’t know.

Another time I was zooming down a hill safely on the cycle path when BOOM some kid just pushed his bike out of a blind entrance straight into my path, the world looks a funny place as you careen upside down before hitting the dirt. I have old bones so it hurts. Although the pharmacist at Tesco’s did a wonderful first aid job as she found me dripping blood looking for plasters.

The final time was simply my fault, I can’t blame anyone, although I have tried and it just doesn’t ring true. I have to live with my embarrassment. I had just put those foot clips on my pedals so give me more power or something; make me look more like a ninja cyclist probably. I had just left work and was just starting to go down hill and couldn’t get me foot in the clip, so I looked down and actually bent down to fiddle with it, looked up and I was two foot away from a kerbstone and going quite quickly – WHAMMO a perfect somersault and pike, a nasty sounding crack from inside my shoulder and there I was laid out on the grass with a broken collarbone. My first trip in an ambulance (no blues though) and some nice attention from some nurses that stopped on the road to see to me – good Samaritans all.

So I haven’t got on my bike properly for getting on for two years, no wonder I am out of shape and a fat unfit bastard. I know I have put on loads of weight and am nothing like as fit as I was, that’s what getting married does for you, complacency sets in whilst those love handles grow and meet in the middle.

So now I have moved to Plymouth and live well within cycling distance from work I resolved to get back on the bike, it’s probably only about 10 minutes although it took me about 20 today. Two rather biggish hills to climb but as it’s a short cycle one needs the hills to get the blood pumping and to burn those calories.

But I’ve done it and as I’m still writing I seem to have survived. We will see how well this new regime works. I will weigh myself when I get home, if I can find the scales and will keep you posted.

That is if I make it home alive tonight!