By the time I was cleared to drive and ride my bike again in early April 2017, I was feeling fine in myself with just some slight tension in my chest if I did things like light gardening. In January, before I had a date for my operation, I had cancelled my intended cycling holiday in Mallorca and suggested that Emily went in my place. The other cycling event I had planned this year was the Prestwick Cycle Challenge in early June which was now just nine weeks away. I cleared it with the event organiser that I’d be allowed to attend and just needed to restore my fitness once more. Before the operation, I had been cycling with a heart monitor and had then been advised to keep my heart rate below (I think) 120bpm. I could manage this as long as I kept things steady. But when I began cycling again after the operation, my heart rate had markedly increased and I found that I couldn’t climb certain hills (such as up to the Top Lock in Wheelton) without exceeding that limit. I spoke to the doctor at Blackburn who’d initially fitted the stents and asked about this worrying change. He told me to relax because he’d recently reduced my dosage of Bisoprolol which has an effect of slowing down the heart rate. The fact that my dosage had halved directly accounted for the rise in heart rate that I was experiencing. His solution? Don’t bother with the limit on heart rate: if it feels OK, go with it, he said. This made me feel better, but I still didn’t like pushing my heart rate too high.
Since then I’ve almost stopped using the heart rate monitor since it occasionally reported very high heart rate spikes which I never felt was truly representative of what my heart was actually doing. The reason I didn’t rush to buy a heart rate monitor years ago was because it fell into the ‘so what?’ category. There are many gadgets you can buy nowadays that tell you all manner of statistics about your fitness, but often if you ask the question ‘so what?’ there is no satisfactory answer. I felt that wearing a monitor to make sure that I wasn’t over-exerting my heart before remedial surgery was sensible. Afterwards, when everything is back to normal, how is having knowledge of your heart rate going to help unless you are using it to train for some high energy event? I wasn’t training for anything, just trying to restore my previous level of fitness so I saw no benefit in watching my heart rate minute by minute. The blips that I was occasionally seeing were either false readings or they were telling me something about my heart rate that I genuinely couldn’t feel whilst on the bike. I recalled the consultant’s words “if it feels OK, go with it” and so I ditched the monitor and relied on my feelings from then on.
I gradually built up my cycling mileage through April, covering 500 miles, before I returned to work once more in May. A week before my official start date, I dropped into an apprentice Assessment Centre at Blackpool & the Fylde College. This was where the team were interviewing and assessing candidates for the Project Control Foundation Scheme that I’d been running for several years. Sharon and I had designed the Assessment Centre, and in previous years, we had jointly run it, ensuring that all candidates were assessed fairly and that we ultimately selected the best ones to join the five-year scheme. I had found it difficult to stay removed and not get involved this year, but I resisted until the last day of the four-day event. We needed to select 20 candidates and had previously down-selected 48 students from the hundreds of applications. (I was heavily involved in the down-select process since I could read and assess applications at home and no-one seemed to object to that).
On each half-day of the assessment centre, six candidates were interviewed, took part in a group discussion, produced a written exercise and were required to give a five-minute presentation to the assessors. The timetable was critical and we were pleased to have developed a very efficient process to manage this. I went in to see the team and have a chat about the students that they had decided to recruit in September. I didn’t need to be there, but it felt good to be part of the team once more and to begin to pick up where I’d left off. On the way home, I called into the office to collect my laptop in preparation of starting work the following week. I felt normality and routine gradually seeping back which made me happy.
My first day back at work (on 50% hours) was Tuesday 2nd May 2017. I think in some ways it was good that I was back at work just at that time since both the children were cycling in Mallorca where I should have been, and so it helped me to take my mind off what I was missing. It was the right decision not to go on that holiday, although I felt that I was probably just fit enough. By now I was thinking about longer term things and perhaps beginning to accept that life may not always be as easy and smooth as it had been for the last few years. I didn’t want to slow down and accept that I was getting old, but sometimes life throws obstacles in your path and you just have to work out how to get round or over them.
I felt frustrated that I was still only allowed to work reduced hours but I had an ulterior motive for trying to persuade the nurse to sign me back full time after just one week. I have always enjoyed work trips away, and the apprentices based in Christchurch and Frimley were due a visit in mid-May. You may recall from chapter 3 that as part of the OFSTED requirements, the scheme manager should have a discussion with the apprentices every twelve weeks to check on their progress. It was possible to conduct these meetings on-line, but it was far preferable to meet the apprentices and their managers face-to-face.
The trip to Frimley and Christchurch would usually involve flying to and from Farnborough to save 400 miles of driving, but if I was on reduced hours for medical reasons, I wouldn’t be allowed to fly on a company aircraft. (This was bizarre, since I would have been allowed to drive there and back). Once the nurse had allowed me to return to full time work on 8th May, this wasn’t an issue and so the flights were booked and I went on the trip the following Monday. I thoroughly enjoyed my time away and began to feel that the unsettling events of the previous eight months were finally behind me. The meetings went well and spending a night at the splendid Aviator hotel in Frimley makes anyone feel special.
Because I had so much free time in April, I used it to help plan the Prestwick Cycle Challenge (PCC) which this year went to the Orkneys. I have always worried about where I can get stuff to eat when I’m on these rides, so I did some research and found suitable cafés and restaurants in the more remote areas. I invited others going on the ride if they wanted to join me, and many did, so I ended up being a party planner and began to book tables for about twenty of my mates. One café, as well as providing dozens of evening meals the night before the event, had offered to open exclusively to provide breakfast for the riders on the first day of the ride and they even provided packed lunches for everyone!
Unfortunately, apart from the first day, the weather was pretty grim for the rest of the trip. We camped (as was usual on these trips) and the campsite in Thurso was on some cliffs overlooking the sea. I guess in good weather, this would have been an impressive site, but with overnight temperatures dropping to 8°C and horizontal rain from a 20mph northerly wind, it wasn’t the most pleasant place to wake up. We had packed up and were off the campsite by 7am for a short but very wet ride to the Scrabster ferry terminal where we caught a boat to Stromness on Orkney. The rain eventually let off, but the winds didn’t and it was not a very pleasant ride round the island. I was still very pleased to visit the standing stones of Stenness and the Ring of Brodgar which are Neolithic monuments some 4,500 years old. Stenness is believed to be the oldest henge site in the British Isles.
Just a week later, Geraldine and I were visiting some friends in Southampton and by then the weather had improved. We were enjoying a guided tourist walk round the city walls and we met a North American chap who was on a tour of the UK. He commented on the 25°C temperature and remarked how variable it had been on his trip. In conversation, it emerged that he’d been in Orkney and Thurso a week earlier and he was commenting on the amazing sites he’d seen, including, and I quote, “a group of crazy cyclists who were camping on the sea-cliffs in wind, cold and pouring rain! Can you believe these guys?” I had to admit that not only could I believe it, but that I was actually one of them! There are times in life when you have to admit defeat and realise that you are never going to persuade some people of the joys of cycling. This was one such time.
A wise man once said “a bad day on a bike is better than a good day in the office” and that thought came into my head often as my life began to slide back into my old routine as if I’d never been away. There were some changes, however. My colleagues made sure that I was kept far away from any requirement to work on the dreadful IT system that I had partially blamed for the heart attack in the first instance. A lot of my time was spent developing a new Level 6 apprenticeship which I was enjoying. I wouldn’t say that things were back to where they were a year ago, but with adjustments to the way I worked, and the changes I personally had undergone, in many ways, they were better.