On My Own Two Wheels

'And yes, I was a sixty-year-old man who wanted to be young again, and that’s laughable for there is no turning back the years, but I didn’t think it was funny. I wasn’t going to try and win the Tour de France. But I was going to try to do what I had been able to do at thirty. I was going to cycle whole days, successive days, along Irish coasts in the west, over the drumlins of County Down, and I was going to ride the horrendously steep Torr Road in north Antrim. I was going to be a boy again, and, what the hell, I was going to be a fitter, trimmer and happier old man at the end of it.’

Four years ago Malachi O’Doherty – writer, journalist and broadcaster – shook the cobwebs off the old bicycle parked in his backyard and found that he had grown too fat to ride it comfortably. He got rid of it. But in just a few months, everything changed. Malachi, approaching sixty, found that he had type two diabetes. On medical advice he lost over two stone . . . and rediscovered cycling – the frets, the struggles and, most of all, the joys.

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