Emma Bilham

It’s not broken, it’s not torn again, but it’s weak and it’s certainly not ready to stand on a start line. Unfortunately, the bottom line is that if I don’t race, I don’t earn any money. But it’s time to lift my foot off the gas before I injure myself seriously again. You’ll probably also see me on a bike race start line.

Luckily it didn’t look like I was going to have to gnaw off a hand or snap a joint back into place. Something about the disinfectant properties of human saliva flitted randomly through my brain and I spat on the wounds, then distributed the stickiness with a swipe of my hand – most probably negating any antiseptic effect in the process and making a Halloween-worthy mess of the whole area. Blood running down leg; it’s going to make a mess of my pink sock. Look what I did to myself Mum! Photos taken, I hopped in the shower, screamed as hot water hit the wounds, screamed again as I poured iodine into them, and decided against covering it up with a bandage I didn’t have anyway.

The Italian on the square serves Tapas and the local Spanish-run bakery is called Damien’s and promises French croissants, but serves “tarte de queso” and bocadillos. Teguise has provided more than adequate riding ground in all the time I’ve been here, usually at the crack of dawn so I have the road to myself, and I have no plans to change that in the last weeks I’m here. I don’t know if the architects thought about PB swim splits when they laid it in a perfect wind-current direction, but I definitely swam a few very fast 50s there; and struggled to beat 40” going all out on the way back up the pool. Reaching them was easy: straight out the back of Costa Teguise on the same paths Pippin occasionally allowed me to walk her down when James wasn’t around.

Because I can’t sit still for more than fifteen minutes at a time (if you’re lucky). I won’t be able to keep things under control, and the little hill out of town will quickly become an opportunity to test the legs; I’ll just go to the next roundabout, just add on another ten minutes, just push a little more to bridge up to the group ahead of me… Hence why I am forcing myself to sit on a sofa and write a boring blog about rest days and the internal struggle I face every single time I’m subjected to one… Or should it be the silly devil whispering “just give in… you know you want to, you know you need to, and what harm is it going to do?