TEDx Liege - What is Success, Really?

Below is the narrative of my TEDx Talk in Liege on 21 May 2015. 

Imagine if you worked for half of your life to be become a success, to really become someone.

You have this bold ambition to reach the moon.

But then when you become that person, you realize that it’s not who you want to be at all.

What would you do then?

I was born in a small country town called Shepparton about 200kms north of Melbourne in the South East of Australia. I was the 2^nd youngest of seven children.

It was not always easy to make ends meet, and all of my older brothers and sisters left school to go to work by the time they were 15. It was a necessity, not a choice.

But as a kid, and despite the hardships, I had a big dream.

I dreamed of racing in Europe as a professional cyclist.

I started racing a bike on the BMX track when I was just nine years old, and by the time I was 16 I had progressed to the velodrome and racing on the road.

In 1987, the year that this photo was in the local newspaper I was one of the top riders in the State and on my way to the national championships with my friend and training partner Stuart McKenzie. That’s me on the left.

Cycling was my life, and I worked incredibly hard to reach my European dream. But at the same time, something had started to happen.

I was not just good at cycling; I was also doing very well at school.

I had dreamed of being a professional road cyclist since I was nine years old, but despite having enough talent to make it to the national level I had increasing doubts.

It was not that any one person told me that I should abandon my ambitions, and my parents were incredibly supportive.

But the influence of my environment – school career advisors, teachers and friends slowly but surely created anxiety and fear.

I was told that cycling was a nice hobby, but that I would struggle to make a living from it. That the chances of really making it to the top as a professional athlete were small.

I don’t think that people offered this ‘wisdom’ because they wanted to hurt me or to stop me being happy. Quite the opposite – they wanted me to follow a life that lead to stability and prosperity, and with that prosperity they thought would come happiness.

The message was that a cycling career was a dream, and that I should be more realistic especially since I was clever academically.  Dreams are risky, and dreams might not pay the bills.

These pressures were only compounded when I did very well in my end of School exams, and was offered a grant to study at the University of Melbourne.

You see, where I come from only a handful of kids had gone on to tertiary education. And now I had this incredible opportunity – this chance to get an education.

But I knew that studying a degree full-time, as well as doing the part-time work I would have to do to make it through, would never allow me the time to compete at a high level.

In the end, the choice to pursue an academic path was my own but it was not my most desired path.

I am not sure if you can understand what I am saying – I felt that it was almost inevitable that I should stop cycling, even though it was a heart-breaking choice.

A few weeks before my 18^th birthday I moved to Melbourne, and I let go of my European dream.

What I did do for the next 20 years was work incredibly hard. I brought that spirit of discipline and hard work to my studies, and I was very competitive.

I really wanted to make my family proud. But there was also something else – as a kid from a working class background I really resented many of the people around me at university.

The ones who had been born into privilege. The ones who I thought had it easy. I wanted to be better than them.

I didn’t really have career role models when I was growing up, so I looked around. And the wealthiest, most respected and well travelled professors that I saw were the Business School Professors.

So I decided I would become a Business School Professor, and not just any Business School Professor but one of the world’s best.

After my undergraduate degree, I went on to another graduate scholarship and by the time I was 29 years old I was working in London at one of the world’s leading graduate management schools.

And I kept working hard and getting promoted. At the age of 39 I was a professor, I had published in some of the world’s top management journals, and in addition I had started my own consulting business. I was earning more money than I ever imagined could be possible, and I was travelling the world.

But something was missing. You see, when I left Shepparton back in 1988 I had this belief that if I worked hard, and if I had success, then I would be happy. But I was far from happy.

And this is what I looked like. Yes, I was “successful” in a professional sense, and I know that many people envied what I had achieved. But I was tired, I was arrogant, I was unhealthy and I had this inner unhappiness.

I was now a husband and a father, and yet my obsession with work meant that I was not particularly good at being either.

I was working long hours, I was travelling constantly and I was obsessed with being the best.

I remember reading bed time stories to my three children at this time, and skipping parts of the story so I could get back to work. And of course, the kids had heard those stories countless times, so they knew!

The only problem was that I really didn’t’ know who I wanted to be.

And of course, I also realized it was no longer about me. It was about us. What did we want to become as a family?

There is a quote from the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu “If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.”

In 2009 my wife Anne-Mie and I spent many hours talking together, and these discussion culminated in a drawing exercise. We sat together with a large sheet of paper and co-created a hand drawn picture of what success really meant to us.

The pencil and ink sketches that we created revealed a much wider definition of success – we aspired to have a loving relationship and to live in a semi-urban environment in which our three children could play and be free.

We desired more family leisure time, and the opportunity to actively participate in the children’s social, artistic and sporting activities.

We both wanted to work, but to engage in professional activities that we enjoyed and which still provided the opportunity for occasional international travel.

And of course, in the bottom right of our picture was a hand drawn bicycle. I dreamed of returning to elite-level competitive cycling because that fire, that love for cycling had never left me.

I set a big and ambitious goal – to race at the next World masters Games in Torino in 2013. The World Masters Games organization is an amazing thing – its basically an Olympics for old people, and just like the real thing is held every four years.

The only problem of course was that this picture did not fit with my career, and a few days later I resigned my job at that prestigious business school to become a husband, father, writer, speaker and, of course, a cyclist.

Taking that leap involved confronting a lot of fears – but Anne-Mie and I decided to try and find our way.

On the 8^th of August 2013, I stood on that start line of the mens road race at the World Masters Games in Torino with 160 of the world’s best Masters cyclists.

I had been preparing for this moment for four years, and in the process I had become a different person.

But of course it was not about who I had become. It was about what we had become.

With me in Torino were my three beautiful children and my wonderful wife Anne-Mie. Just before being marshaled onto the start line my little girl Hannah came up to me and said something I will never forget. She said “Pappa, its okay if you don’t win.”

And it was true, because I realized at that moment that being in Torino was about something much more than winning a bike race. It was about the journey.

It was about having the courage to create a new life and to define success in our own way.

It had not been easy, and their had been heartache and setbacks along the way. I had crashed in races and broken bones, there had been the two years when my income had been almost nothing as I learned new skills and connected to new people towards become a writer and a speaker.

But by 2013 almost everything that Anne-Mie and I had drawn in that picture four years before had fallen into place.

And the race was nine laps of an eight km circuit through Park Valentino and the streets of Turin, It was nine laps of pain as we averaged more than 40km per hour, and every single lap I was cheered on by Anne-Mie and the kids.

And I can’t tell you how this felt, to be living this childhood dream. A dream that I thought I had left behind.

Every lap we went over Mt Cappucini.. That little mountain had a 1km climb with up to 18% gradient. And each and every lap there were twenty fewer guys, until there were only about fifteen of us left. Fifteen of the best Masters cyclists in the world.

And at that moment, something crazy started to go through my mind – I could win!

But in the end I didn’t win, That was an incredible Czech cyclist. And an Italian came 2^nd. But I did come home with a bronze medal.

So my message for you is this. It’s great to strive for success, to shoot for the moon. But there are many moons out there in the Universe, so please make sure that the moon you are shooting for is your own.

Thank you!

Commitment, Cramps and Crashes: On Becoming a Cyclist Again

I started training again in 2009, almost 20 years since I last raced my bike at an elite level. We were still living in Berlin, and I would ride my bike from where we lived in Prenzlauerberg on the East side of the city and out into the countryside. The outer suburbs of the east side of Berlin are a mix of turn of the century apartment buildings that survived the war, and housing and factories built during the GDR times. I would pass through Weissensee and Bernau, and then do a loop through the fields and a small forest near to Melchow and Biesenthal. On longer rides I might go as far as Eberswalde.

I tried not to get lost, as these were the days before I had a bike GPS and my German was non-existent. If you did ask someone for directions, the usual response was for the person to ask (in German) what kind of an idiot would ride with a map they could not read, and then point you in the wrong direction. The people out this way were Prussian, and they did not like the 'outsiders' like me who were coming to Berlin, forcing up prices and gentrifying many of the formerly working-class inner city suburbs.

The small rural villages in this part of Brandenburg were tidy and well kept, but far from affluent. Young people were notable by their absence, and you were more likely to see Dacia Logan sedans than BMWs. I would occasionally come across Confederate flags from the American civil war fluttering over small isolated houses out in the countryside, and my German friends later told me that these belonged to far-right supporters or neo-Nazis. I’m glad I didn’t stop at those places and ask for directions – the angry looking Rottweiler dogs in the front gardens would have deterred me anyway.

For the first several months that I rode my bike I didn't have any special training plan or goals. I just wanted to ride, and I loved my time alone. I started riding in the early Spring of 2009, and the temperatures were frequently hovering around zero. I would leave home with layers of clothing, thick winter gloves and a thermal hat under my helmet. My cheeks would sometimes start to burn on the really cold days, so I also got myself a balaclava. Looking back now, I’m not surprised the local village folk sometimes got a shock when I asked for directions.

My first goal was just to build-up my aerobic fitness and lose weight. This is what cyclists call base training, and at first I was doing just four or five hours per week. Trying to fit in some riding around my young family and intensive work schedule was not easy, so I often headed out very early in the morning. I also got myself an indoor trainer, and would try to ride on it once or twice a week in the evenings.

The best thing that I discovered about being back on my bike was the thinking time. I had become so busy in trying to juggle the three balls of family, career and self, that the third one had been the first to drop. This meant that I was occupied all of the time, with very little time for mental down-time. On those rides through Brandenburg I started to reflect upon my life, and this eventually led to the worklife decisions that I have discussed in my previous blog posts. In mid 2009 I resigned from my job as a professor in Berlin, and moved with my family to Belgium.

Once in Belgium my new life as a cyclist really began. I had set myself the goal of competing at the next World Masters Games in Torino in 2013, and started to completely rethink how I could keep the three balls of family, career and self in the air. I have explained in my previous posts about how I started to focus my professional activities on becoming a keynote speaker, and at the same time was able to invest more and more time into my family.

When we moved to Belgium we rented a small house in Tervuren, a leafy suburb on the outskirts of Brussels. The choice of area was a very conscious one – we wanted somewhere that offered direct access to the countryside for the kids, that was well connected for transport (I would still have to travel from time to time for my speaking engagements) and which offered a good base for my cycle training.

Once settled, I joined a local cycling club and started to seek-out other cyclists who could also train on weekdays. My local club organized rides every Sunday from the famous ‘Café Congo’ in Vossem, with groups divided by ability – A,B, C and D. In the summer months it was not unusual for each group to contain thirty riders or more. The A group would average around 32 to 34kmh for a 100km ride, and the D group quite a bit slower than that, with each group followed by a support car. Of course, I immediately jumped in with the A group and found myself unceremoniously left-behind at around the 60km mark of my first group training. The rules of Belgian A-group club rides are pretty simple – if you can’t keep-up, then you find your own way home.

So for the next few months I dropped back with the Sunday B-Group, while at the same time increasing my week-day training to around 6 to 8 hours. The area of Belgium where we were living was called Vlaams Brabant, a beautiful part of the country with rolling hills and open countryside, dotted by small villages. It was just a short ride across the ‘border’ into French-speaking Brabant Walloon.

My first race in Belgium in the late Spring of 2010 was a shock. I had been back in training for more than a year and I thought I was in good condition. I was now able to join my club’s A-Group every Sunday, and was down to around 70kgs. So I thought I was ready to compete, and took a license with the Vlaamse Wieler Federatie (Flemish Cycling Federation).

What I was about to discover was that the level of amateur Masters cycling in Belgium is without a doubt the toughest in the world. Not only is the country cycle racing obsessed, but the sheer number of people participating in amateur competitive events is unrivalled. Many of the guys who race have been competing since they were nine years old and some have spent years as a professional. According to the Belgian press, doping is still prevalent in the amateur ranks and especially amongst the over 40s who are struggling to remain competitive into middle-age.

There are no fewer than seven provincial racing associations in Belgium, as well as the Flemish and Wallone ‘national’ amateur Federations. In the spring and summer months there might be upwards of 20 separate racing events per week, all in a country which is about a third of the size of the little island we Aussies call Tasmania.

The Flemish north of Belgium where I first chose to compete has a very special style of amateur road racing called the Kermiskoers. Belgium is a small country, so access to open roads can be difficult. The typical race format is therefore a short circuit, anywhere between 4 and 8 kilometers, that starts in a village centre and then loops out into the countryside. Total distance at the amateur level is 70 to 90 kilometers, and the circuit often involves sections of narrow farm roads, with a cobbled section thrown in for good measure. Flanders is very flat, so there are rarely any hills to speak off.

Re-entering the village can involve navigating sharp corners, speed bumps and traffic islands. Each and every corner involves deceleration and then rapid acceleration, and there are constant attacks. This would all be fine, if it were not for the 120 or so other guys who are all trying to stay at the front at speeds averaging 42 to 44 kilometers per hour! A professional cyclist once described the Kermiskoers as being as mentally stressful as the final kilometers of a sprint lead-out, but for the entire race. Crashes are common, and an ambulance crew is always standing by.

My first race was a 72km Kermiskoers in a small village near to Dendermonde in East Flanders, involving nine laps of an eight kilometer circuit with a cobbled section of about 400 meters. After four laps I was spat out the back of the peloton, with legs cramping and severe pain in my lower back. I pulled to the side of the road and proceeded to throw-up. I remember that it was not just any kind of vomit – it was that brown-green colored stuff that comes from someplace way down. I glanced at my computer - my average heart rate for the four laps that I had completed had been 174 beats per minute!

Bent over at the side of the road, I thought that I would never be able to compete with these guys. Then I told myself that this was just the first step on a long journey. Torino was three years away, and I had a lot of work to do.

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Guilt, Lies and Cycling

I stopped cycling at an elite level when I was eighteen years old. After accepting a scholarship to study at the University of Melbourne, I moved to the city, 200kms south of the small country town where I grew up. I moved in with my older brother and sister, and within a few weeks started classes. I also found some work to make ends meet - the first was an evening job as a kitchen-hand in the restaurant of a local pub, and the other was the 6am-8am morning shift at a nearby gas station.

I arrived in Melbourne with some boxes of belongings and my racing bike. But I think I had already accepted that racing at a top level was behind me.  The previous year had been really tough emotionally and financially due to my Dad’s illness, and as I looked forward I found it hard to see any way that high-level sporting competition could fit with what would be required to get through university. Everyone at home had such high hopes for my academic future, and I felt a responsibility not to let them down.

After a couple of months in Melbourne I sold my beautiful Italian Chesini road racer and used some of the money to buy a clunky mountain bike for commuting to classes and work. In the second year at University I got a part-time job as a bicycle courier, and spent my free hours racing parcels and documents to and from offices across Melbourne. I was the fastest non-powered delivery guy that the company had ever seen, and it was fun to experience the courier culture of the inner city.  I continued to follow professional cycling of course, and even mountain biked a bit, but my days as a competitive road cyclist were over. 

As I have discussed in my previous blog posts, I spent the next twenty years chasing “success” before I had the chance to stand back and reflect upon what that concept really meant to me.  I have described how my wife and I created a new picture of what we wanted for our future, and how part of that picture included my dream to return to elite-level road cycling. In 2009 I set myself a goal – that within four years I would compete at in the Men’s Road Race at he next World Masters Games in Torino, Italy.

When I embarked on my cycling dream I was 39 years old, and weighed about 15 kilograms more than I did when I hung up my wheels two decades before. My aerobic fitness was pretty lousy, as besides commuting to work I had done no real endurance training for a very, very long time.

But the weird thing about getting into training again was not how my body felt – it was the way my head worked. As I started to train again, I would find myself out on the road with a sense of guilt hanging over me. What I was guilty about was the fact that I was not working, that I was not being productive in a professional sense. There was this strange feeling that what I was doing was bad, and that I shouldn’t be spending time in such a self-centred way.

Hard work had been such a part of my life for such a long time, that I had relegated my personal passions and hobbies to the domain of the frivolous. It was not just cycling – by my mid thirties I went to the gym infrequently, rarely read a long book and only occasionally relaxed in front of the TV with my wife. I was infected with the ‘busyness’ disease so typical of high-achievers.

So I would be out on the road, and instead of enjoying the riding my mind would be in overdrive – I should be working, I should be achieving stuff. Sometimes, especially in the first few months, I would be so overwhelmed that I would cut my training session short and head home.

I think the guilt also stemmed from the fact that I did not know anyone else my age who was doing what I was doing. I felt a bit ashamed that while others were working and being responsible, I was cycling in the middle of the day. I would drop off my kids at School in the morning in my cycling gear, and I could see the strange glances from the other parents, most of whom were on their way to work. More than a few mothers asked my wife Anne-Mie if I had become unemployed - they were genuinely concerned.

At first, I also felt the need to tell white lies. A client would ask to schedule a conference call or meeting, and I would say that I was not available as I had another work commitment. Of course, there was no work commitment at all – I was following a pretty disciplined training schedule, and if a call or meeting clashed with my plan then I would try to move it.

The same went for speaking or teaching opportunities – if a conference or program date conflicted with specific race event or important training block, then I would decline by saying I was already booked. I thought that if I told the truth about my training or racing, then people would think I was not professional and that I was putting my sport ahead of my professional responsibilities. Of course, this was exactly what I was doing, but I was fearful of the consequences of being honest.

The problem of course was that telling these white lies compounded my feelings of guilt as I was worried what would happen if people found out what I was doing. And some of my colleagues and clients did find out through following me on social media – I posted about my cycling, and often uploaded my training data to one of the cycling specific tracker apps. Not very clever, I know.

After about two years there was a turning point during a ride with a CIO friend of mine. We were talking about the feelings of guilt that sometimes accompanied my training rides, and Jean-Pierre said to me: “Jamie, you should not feel any guilt. Do you know how many guys would love to do what you are doing? You should feel guilty if you don’t go out on a training ride - because you can!”

That talk was the catalyst for a change for me and I can honestly say that the feelings of guilt completely disappeared after that. It was also a turning point in another way – from that moment I no longer told lies about my training and racing, Instead I did the opposite – I became completely honest by sharing my Torino dream with others.

Whenever I have the opportunity I talk to clients, colleagues and friends about my cycling passion. I talk about how much I love my sport, about the thrill of racing and of course about the bikes, equipment, nutrition and training. I show them photos of my races, and beautiful places where I have trained.

What astounds me is how many other people have at some point in their lives also been passionate about something that they have left behind, and with a bit of prodding will share their hidden desire to reconnect to what gives them joy. And it does not have to be cycling – I talk to business people who have been aspiring runners, swimmers, triathletes, surfers, musicians, artists, chefs and writers.

But something else happened after I started to talk more openly about my dream to return to competitive cycling – people started to help me on the journey. Colleagues started to ask me about the best time to schedule calls, and if meetings might conflict with important events or training goals. My clients started to offer to do Skype video calls instead of me travelling to their offices, and I even had business contacts introduce me to possible coaches and training partners.

My colleagues at business schools such as Antwerp Management, London Business School and ESMT in Berlin have offered me understanding. The same goes for my amazing colleagues Eithne Jones and Sabine Bulteel who look after my international keynote speaking engagements. Of course, they are never delighted when I turn down an opportunity but they send me the message that my cycling commitments in no way damage our long-term work together.

That’s why it was not just me who won that medal at the World Masters Games in Torino, or who was on the podium at the Giro Sardinia last year, or who accepted the winners trophy in Cape Town earlier this year.

It was a collective effort – I could not have done it without you.

What I think about When I think About Cycling

To understand why returning to elite level cycling was so important to me, I think it is necessary to share a story.

It is funny, but I cannot remember a time when I could not ride a bicycle. I have very few photos of when I was a small kid, as money was scarce growing up and my parents were more focused on getting food on the table than spending money at the photo lab. But I do have a crumply white-bordered picture from when I was maybe 3 years old, sitting on a rusty metal three-wheeler.  I have very red hair, fair skin, loads of freckles and a beaming crooked-tooth smile.

A bike was an essential childhood tool for a kid growing up in a small country town in Australia. There were miles of trails and jumps in the bush that ran along the muddy Goulburn and Broken rivers that meandered past Shepparton. In the summer we would ride our bikes to our favourite swimming spots, or go fresh water crayfish catching in the irrigation channels that criss-crossed the orchards on the outskirts of town.

In the mid 1970s we all had dragsters, and in 1982 I got a second-hand BMX for my 11^th birthday. The arrival of BMX was a life changer for me as I finally discovered a sport that I enjoyed and was reasonably good at. As a scrawny little kid, I was really not cut out for Aussie Rules football, which is a violent cross-between of rugby and judo. And I found cricket, which is basically baseball on valium, unbelievably boring.

So I joined the Shepparton BMX Club which had its track at the back of the Twilight Drive-In Movie Theatre on the outskirts of town, and I would race there every Saturday morning. My training involved doing a newspaper delivery round for an hour every night after School, and bashing around the bush with my mates.

When I was 12 I decided to have a go at track racing. My brother Robbie had messed around on the track, and I was good friends with a kid named Paul O’Brien who’s big brother Shaun was a talented cyclist who raced at the State and National level, and eventually went on to become an Olympic medallist. There was a cycling club in Shepparton, and the club had constructed an Olympic standard concrete velodrome – quite an undertaking in a town of just 14,000 people in which bike racing was considered a bit of an oddity. I remember going along to watch Shaun race, and I was captivated by the speed and excitement of the banked piste. 

My fascination with the track soon turned into a passion for road cycling, and my bedroom became like a shrine to the Tour de France, with posters of my heroes Phil Anderson, Bernard Hinault, Greg Lemond and Miguel Indurain. One of my club mate’s Dad was an ex-professional cyclist, and their family had a VCR. I remember racing to his house whenever a Video of the Tour arrived, and watching my first Belgian classic and Paris-Roubaix. All that I dreamed about was becoming a professional cyclist in Europe, and it was not unusual for me to be training ten to fifteen hours a week.

By the time I was sixteen years old I had qualified to race the Australian National Championships in Launceston, Tasmania. On the way to Launceston I had achieved high-level results at the provincial and State championship level, and had discovered my ability as a punchy climber. At just 168cm tall and around 62kgs, I was built to go fast when gravity kicked-in. It was difficult for me to always do well – most of the junior-level racing in Australia was on flat terrain that favoured bigger kids. But the state selectors saw my potential.

I never forget being woken up by my Dad at 5am the morning that the State junior team for the Australian National Championships was announced. In those days, the team lists were released in the Sun newspaper, and my Dad had waited at the newsagent all night for the papers to make the journey up from the printing presses in Melbourne. 

My father was so proud that I had made the team, and we both knew that this was a huge step towards a possible place at the Australian Institute of Sport, and my dream of racing in Europe.  In the end, the National Championships were an anti-climax - I fell ill with a virus a few days before, and barely made the top ten. But I knew that I had the ability to race with the best in Australia. 

Then, my family’s world began to unravel. My Dad had always been a troubled person, battling alcoholism and a complex personality. But by 1987, the same year that I qualified for the Nationals, he had been suffering from worsening bouts of depression. This manifested itself in full-blown bi-polar disorder, and during 1988 he stopped working and was institutionalized.

My Dad’s mental decline was devastating for my mother, and also hit my 14 year-old brother very hard. Relations between my parents and several of my other siblings were strained, so I felt a huge responsibility on my shoulders – not just to support my mother and little brother emotionally, but also to contribute to the family financially through working part time.

At the same time that my Father’s illness was worsening, I was also entering my final year of High School. I was an intelligent kid, and had always done well at School. Up until that point I had never found it difficult to balance my schoolwork and cycling, but with Dad’s illness and the added burden of needing to increase my part-time working to help Mum financially, something had to give.  

With my Dad in and out of psychiatric hospital there was no money for us to travel, and I had to rely on friends to get to races. It was a struggle to buy racing-quality equipment, and I remember being laughed at on the start line of a race for my cheap balloon-like tubular tyres that should only have been used for training. I became an expert on bike maintenance, wheel truing and puncture repair.

The second half of the 1988 road season was a disaster for me, and I will never forget the moment I was dropped by the breakaway group in the State Championships. Twelve months before I was the one attacking on the climbs, and now I was being left behind. My Mum and little brother embraced me after the race, and said I had done my best. We drove the 150 kms home to Shepparton in silence,

A couple of months after the State Championships I sat my High School finishing exams, and did very well. In fact, my scores were so good that I was offered a place to study an undergraduate degree at the University of Melbourne, as well as a state-funded scholarship for the underprivileged.

Everyone around me was so happy with my academic achievement – my family, our neighbours and friends, my teachers and even the people at the supermarket where I worked. My brother and sister who lived in Melbourne offered for me to live with them for the first year, as the scholarship was not enough to pay for university housing. But even with their support, I knew I would have to continue part-time working if I hoped to get through.

Of all of the hundreds of kids on the housing estate where I had grown up, only a handful had gone on to tertiary education, and now I had the opportunity to join that privileged few. 

But when I received the letter announcing the offer, I don't remember feeling anything but tiredness. I was not just physically tired; I was mentally drained.  If you have ever had that kind of exhaustion, I am sure you can understand how utterly miserable it makes you feel.

For the previous five years – almost a third of my life - all I had dreamed about was racing my bike in Europe. And for me it was not just a dream - I had demonstrated that I had the engine and the legs and the self-discipline to make it at the top level.

Now my aspirations were crashing up against cold reality – my father’s illness, economic hardship and social expectations.

I was less than three months away from my 18^th birthday, and I had to make a choice.