I am forever envious of people who write easily and naturaly. Writing is a hallowed art, it has the ability to inform, entertain, anger, be beautiful, disgust, shock, change opinion, make or destroy men.

For me writing is a painful, drawn-out experience involving much pacing, angry inner tirades complaining of my own inability to form coherent sentences or thoughts. I’m left with pages of paragraphs that meander about with no direction or purpose, peppered with spelling and grammar mistakes. It could not be more opposite to how easily and freely I enjoy reading.

During the summer of 2003, inspired by the battling of Armstrong, Ulrich and Mayo in the Tour de France, I decided that bike racing couldn’t be that hard. I was going to race bikes. Seven measly miles down the road, hot, wracked with pain, thirsty and sitting on a rock by the side of the road, I was still unfazed I just needed to get better. Four years later almost to the day I found myself hot, wracked with pain, thirsty and trying to keep up with the newly crowned Junior champion of France as he rode to victory in his homecoming race. The crowds were four or five deep, here for the spectacle of the bike race. I was racing my bike full time in one of the heartlands of French cycling. I was living the dream. Belligerence, obsession and a lot of painful hours in the saddle enabled me to spend a summer at the mercy of the Norman cycling scene, those were tough days and hard races.

Cycling has left a scar burnt deep into my psyche, that through sheer persistent, continual practice and hard work you can become more than mediocre. On Sunday 24th of July 2011, I was sat on my sofa huddled over my iPad watching the Tour de France make it’s way into Paris, amongst their number a previous Junior Champion of France. After attempting to compete against such talent I happily accepted my future career was not as a professional cyclist, content to have been able to test my mettle against such stars.

My writing falls so short of my expectations, so far removed from the writing I am used to reading that I’m embarrassed by it. At university the whole process of getting words on paper took so long there wasn’t even enough time to proof read the first draft before I was racing across campus to get my paper in on time. My inner writer for some time has been sat on a rock, seven miles in, overweight, unfit and untrained.

If I ever want to improve, to get better there is no choice but to go through that painful process of change, the transformation from incompetent to mediocre, a never ending quest to remain sharp and trained, to always improve. So I’m going to apply the only method I know of self improvement, an almost unsustainable workload that becomes a burden and a pain until one day you look back and see the vast improvement. Editing, once my previous nemesis is something I’ll have to learn to embrace. Proof-reading will have to become second nature, and writing with purpose and clarity an obsession.