Ah, but no.
Mirage, mirage, an elaborate mirage.
It turned out that I hadn’t conquered it. Apparently, I hadn’t even arrived on the battlefield.
When I was about halfway up, with no warning at all, my legs crumbled beneath me. My muscles had spasmed in both legs simultaneously, sending shooting pains from my thighs down to my calves. I felt like someone had shot me in both knees. At exactly the same time, my lungs gave way. I ran out of energy.
Around me green grass merged into blue sky and everything started to spin. I saw lights flash across my eyes, and I thought, I’m going to black out. I slumped to the ground with an agonized, animalistic howl.
While the cramp worked its way through my system, I tried to breathe to keep my consciousness. I curled up into a ball, head down, mouth open, trying to force the air into my lungs. But I couldn’t even do that properly. I was fighting and losing. My lungs were on fire. It felt like being pulled off the ventilator. Like my life support was being cut off. I had been here before, in this place with no air. It terrified me then. It terrified me now.
After a few minutes, the cramps passed, my breathing stabilized. But those few minutes felt like I had been there all night, such was the intensity of my anguish.
I looked around me. The first light of dawn was appearing over the horizon. The birds had just started to chirp. Soon, the strings of horses would come into sight as the vast expanse of Newmarket Heath came to life.
Everything was as it should be.
Except for me.
I was broken.
I never spoke to anyone about this incident.
Never, ever. Not even to Joanna.
It never happened.
Nor the next one, a couple of months later.
That never happened either.
I was out on the heath running, again. It was so early, there was hardly any light; Warren Hill lay swathed in fog. I liked to run in the dark, in the quiet, when no one could see me. I was running well, I thought, my breathing was deep and controlled, and I felt good. Despite the mist, it was unseasonably warm, with just that slight early morning bite to the air. I could feel the dew kick up above my socks as I ran, and I was glad I could feel that familiar wetness. I was just glad I could feel.
All of a sudden, I betrayed myself. I stalled. I doubled over, hands on my thighs, wheezing and gasping for air. Just like that, without warning. One minute, I was running well; the next minute I was immobilized. As if a plug had been pulled, the machine sputtered and then fizzled out of life. I couldn’t take one more step forward. The lights were flashing red and frantic. It burned to breathe.
Then, out of nowhere, Sir Henry Cecil rode up alongside me on his big white hack. He pretended that watching a former athlete fight for air at 7 a.m. on Newmarket Heath as the tears rolled down his face was the most normal thing in the world. ‘Declan, come and have some breakfast,’ was all he said. Gratefully, I did.
It taunts you. Life taunts you. It pulls the carpet from under your feet and when you fall down, it laughs. I could hear it all around me, that shrill, derisive cackle. I plugged my ears. I blocked it out. I had to.
Indeed, when I think about momentum-breakers – incidents such as the ones I had, that stop you in your tracks and slap you in the face with a razor-edged dose of reality – I had so many of them, I have lost count. But I would get back up and I would beat the resolve. I would believe.
It was the only way forward. I was a jump jockey. Obstacles didn’t stop me; I cleared them. You have to clear them. You have to leave them behind. They didn’t happen.
But subtly, something else did.
People said I changed after my accident. My friends, my brothers, Joanna – they all said that I wasn’t the same person. That I became self-involved, impatient, selfish. As if the whole thing took over and took me over. I became a man consumed by myself, by my recovery, by trying to get back what had been taken from me. So they all shook their heads and said I’d changed.
And now I want to respond.
See, it’s like this:
Miracles don’t exist.
But you fool yourself into believing they do.
You fool yourself because you have to fool yourself.
You start to believe in miracles.
You start to be your own fool.
So had I changed?
Yes. I had changed.
I want to scream this from the rooftops.
I had changed. Because I had to change.
The Christmas after Haydock Park, Joanna took me to Barbados. She took me there to relax, but it was difficult to sit still. I had to keep going. The surroundings were different but the goal hadn’t changed. And neither had my resolve.
I started doing pistol squats on the beach every morning to build muscle in my legs, to get my balance, to get stronger. And for the first time since the accident, I started to feel pain in my muscles. REAL pain.
Strange as it might seem, before this point, I never had the luxury of reaching the stage where I had muscle pain, because I would always run out of energy first. Now that I had built up a minimal threshold of fuel inside me, I could focus on building my strength. The more I built up my energy, the more I could challenge the muscles in my body. And I welcomed the pain. The searing pain.
My thighs – which you desperately need for riding – were so weak, I didn’t know where to begin. The funny thing is I had never consciously thought about my thighs before. I had ridden ever since I was four years old; it was second nature to me. I suppose the very act of riding strengthened my thighs over the years, so the more I rode, the more powerful they became. I had never needed to do things to make them stronger. It felt odd to think about them like this for the first time, about strategies and techniques to build these muscles that I had always taken for granted.
So I did pistol squats. When I started, I had no strength in my core. The first few times, I fell flat on my face, on the sand. I picked myself back up. I brushed the sand off my face. And I replaced it with salt. Then I poured it, the salt, over my cut, wounded pride; crystal by crystal, grain by grain. And I tried again.
For days, I couldn’t do more than one or two in each leg. Soon, I was doing ten in each leg. And soon after that, I was doing fifty. I have never felt such burn in my thighs in my life. But I was delirious with joy. The burn meant it was working. I was getting there. Slowly but surely, I was getting there.
There were other things I did – bizarre exercises that nobody had showed me how to do. Crazy stuff, the kind of movements that test the limits of human capability. I simply made them up in my head and then put them to the test – the more difficult, the better. I would go until I was near collapse. Till the sweat was dripping off me. Till I was positively nauseous.
When most people cross the lactate threshold, they know it – it’s your body’s way of telling you to stop what you’re doing. I was so weak. So weak. So completely weak. But, I had no threshold. I wanted to stimulate pain, discomfort, agony. The more, the better; bring it on. I welcomed it even as I battled it.
But God, the pain of it; the sheer, agonizing pain of it.
When I returned from Barbados, I went back to being a regular fixture at the gym. Within weeks of my return – ten months post-op – I was routinely breaking my own personal record on the rowing machine; my best time was 5:40.1 for a 2,000m sprint.
How my heart and lungs didn’t give up, I don’t know.
Desperation – because it was that – had burned a hole into my psyche. It was immune to giving in to the impulses of normal people. Fatigue? Exhaustion? I didn’t feel it. Instead, I was driven by some sort of unstoppable functional pragmatism – if I kept going, I would get there, I would somehow reverse time. I was convinced of this. So I kept going.
A sane person would have stopped. Something inside them, a safety mechanism, would have stopped them. You know when you need to stop.
I didn’t have one. A safety mechanism. I had crossed that Rubico
n a long time ago.
So, had I changed? Had I become a different person?
It’s not a difficult question to answer.
There is a thin line between sanity and insanity. In the eighteen months following my accident, I travelled along, walked along, ran along this line many, many times.
You don’t do the kinds of things I did in your normal outfit, in your day-to-day existence. To do them, you have to step out of yourself and take your mind to a different place. You have to cross the pain threshold many times over. You have to laugh at despair. You have to battle demons. You have to lie to yourself and you have to believe your own lies. You have to become someone else.
There is no shame in saying it. Yes, I changed. Yes, I became someone else. I became mad. I became insane. I became whoever I needed to become. I did whatever I needed to do – to survive.
There comes a time in everyone’s life where one has to choose between the world and oneself, take sides. I chose myself. If that is a crime, I accept it. Guilty as charged.
As I write this book, I often wonder what I would do if this happened to me now, having gone through it before. If I had to do it over, if I had to go back and start from zero, would I be able to? Would I be capable?
This isn’t a hard question to answer either.
My answer is unequivocal: I would fail.
I believe something. Something that is as beautiful as it is melancholic. I believe that a horse gives its absolute, all-out best only once in its lifetime.
Only once. The next time around, and the times after that, it can come close, very close, but it cannot repeat that singular, stratospheric performance of a lifetime ever again. I had seen this of many horses in my time as a jockey and it held true, even for the best and biggest names of equine fame.
It is oftentimes the same with people. It was the same with me. Because when you go that far, it tears something inside of you.
I won my battle, eventually. I came out on the other side. But there is, and will always be, a small gaping wound in my heart that can’t ever be filled. I live with this in peace. Not in the hope that my wound will someday be healed, but with the knowledge that it will not cut any deeper. This was the cost of survival, the price I had to pay in exchange for my life. I don’t fight it. I accept it.
But then, at that time, nothing was impossible. Everything was possible. That’s how my mind worked.
The truth is, I was lucky. I had no benefit of perspective. I had no holes in my heart.
I had no idea how difficult it was going to be. I wasn’t tarnished by past experiences; I wasn’t scarred by past wounds. I locked myself up inside my own head. And I built a house. Yes, I built myself a house and I lived inside it for eighteen months. That’s how I did it. I was living in a house of cards.
As soon as I first started walking, I knew more or less how far I could walk without struggling. Every time I did this, my mind would identify a point, a goalpost. And I would convince myself that if I could just get to that point – if I could just get there – tomorrow I would be able to go past it. When tomorrow came, and I did it again, my mind had already gone past where it was the day before.
This is what kept me going. These mind games.
Many times I’d find my body struggling to reach my goal, but somehow my mind would take it there – with the promise of tomorrow. ‘If I can get there today, tomorrow I will get beyond it.’ But the corollary was equally true. And far more menacing. ‘If I don’t get there today, tomorrow will not happen.’
What worked? Reward or threat? Possibility or fear?
I will never know. But you play these games. You trick the mind.
I used the same strategy in the gym with the rowing machine and the cross trainer. A rowing machine has ten resistance levels. Every day, I would convince myself, ‘Today, if I can do ten minutes on level one, tomorrow I will do eleven minutes on level two.’ I kept shifting the goalpost. Of course, the obvious – and very real – danger was that at any point in time I could have failed to reach my goalpost. And then, I would have realized the sad truth about imaginary friends – they don’t exist. Tomorrow may never have come.
I am convinced that if I had been defeated at any one of the times that I had challenged myself, if I had lost even one of those challenges, if I had allowed myself to, I would have failed to reclaim myself. My mind would have given up. It really was that precariously balanced – my confidence, my belief, my faith. Because I had so little to fall back on.
This is why the incident on Warren Hill broke me the way it did. It wasn’t my mind that had given up on me, it was my body. It was physical. And my mind had no choice but to concede. But your body is a cage that you are held captive in. So, you dust yourself off and you go at it again. It’s the mind. Pure mind. And if your mind is strong enough, you can will yourself to break free.
Then, there was the matter of the clock. And the clock inside me never stopped ticking. Time took on a certain gravitas. Targets became numerical. I became recklessly competitive. Time had slipped through the gaps of my clenched fist. I was going to get it back, and not only was I going to get it back, I was going to get it back with interest. If I had lost Time in four years, I wanted to regain it in two. Or less.
I set myself a wildly aggressive deadline to go back to being the person I was – at least physically. For all practical purposes, my timeframe was totally, completely unrealistic. I admit it openly. It wasn’t surprising therefore that people judged me. Everyone thought I did it too soon, too suddenly; that everything was too quick, just all too much.
It’s true. It really was.
What I did, the whole thing, was nothing short of an act of lunacy. Doctors hadn’t expected me to walk again. I got myself passed fit to ride. People warned me not to go near a gym for a year. In a year and a half, I was ready to race. You have to be crazy to even think you can do it. And then to convince yourself that you can. And then to actually do it eighteen months after you have read your own obituary?
No wonder everyone thought I was on the brink of madness.
The truth is that I would never, never, EVER advise anybody to put their body through what I put mine through, in the time-frame that I did. Nobody with a sane mind would recognize how weak their body was, how compromised, and then proceed to fight it and abuse it the way I did. I admit it may have been reckless. I admit it could have been dangerous. But the bottom line was that it got me to where I needed to get to.
It took discipline. Complete and total discipline. Discipline like I never thought I had. They talk about things like this in the army. Discipline and endurance and mind over matter. But they are still different beasts than the ones I was grappling with. Sure, army drills are gruelling, sheer tests of sufferance and strength – tough, tough stuff. But before you even put yourself out there, you’ve got the resources, the raw material in place. You join the army as an able-bodied person. And if you fail, it’s the mind that has failed you.
With me, at that point, all I had was my mind. My body didn’t exist. And many, many times my mind tried to carry my body, but my body wouldn’t obey. Those were the times when I wondered how long I could carry on. How long I could keep fooling myself. How long before the cookie crumbled. Those were the times I (never) cried.
I know with certainty that there were many who were convinced that I had medical-grade post-traumatic stress, that I wasn’t accepting what had happened to me. So they walked on by. But many feared an unhappy ending: ‘Poor, deluded fellow, he’s pushing himself so hard, thinking it’s possible. When he realizes it is impossible, he will break.’
But they didn’t understand me at all. It wasn’t that I hadn’t accepted what had happened to me. That seemed almost irrelevant somehow. I just wanted to go back to being me. So through this whole ordeal, it was never a case of feeling sorry for myself. Frankly, I didn’t have the time to feel sorry for myself; I was too busy, too desperate trying to become myself. Whoever that was.
And some
how, eventually, I did. Apparently, in a minute.
This chapter in the book was written last. For a reason. It wasn’t going to exist.
When Ami started writing my story, she told me it would hurt. I pretended I hadn’t heard those words, and we moved on. She demanded honesty. I gave her honesty. But I wasn’t ready for this.
I had never told anybody this before.
Not anyone. Not ever.
Let alone other people, I hadn’t even allowed myself access to my thoughts or feelings. Introspection? Self-reflection? No chance.
I just never wanted to go there again, such was the intensity of pain I felt, even from the recall.
I had always been a strong man. A confident man. And I had been brought to my knees. I didn’t want anyone to know this. You never want to be seen as being that weak, as being that vulnerable. Because if you declare that, in the situation I was in, if you show your cards to anyone, even to yourself, you give up hope. And when you have nothing in your camp but hope, it’s not something you can afford to abandon.
It is a long minute that takes you from being incapacitated to functioning to riding in a race. It’s a minute that lasts eighteen gruelling months. And during these eighteen months, you never rest. Not once. You can’t.
There’s a three-way war raging inside of you.
Your body wages war with your mind.
Your mind wages war with your spirit.
Your body is the weakest, first to give up.
Your mind is stronger; it can take your body to places your body didn’t think it could go. But it is also fickle. Once it knows fear, it backs off. It is superstitious. If things go wrong, it cowers.
It is the spirit within you that is unbreakable.
The spirit unshackles fear, it lifts the mind, it empowers it.
The spirit has got to win.
Otherwise, everything is lost.
My spirit was my lifeline. It fuelled my mind. In turn, my mind fuelled my body. Everything was built on sand. Had my spirit broken, had I allowed it to break, my world would have collapsed – it was that brittle. One admission of defeat, one failure, one loss could have been all it took. My house of cards, so painstakingly built, would have come crashing down. With me trapped beneath the rubble.
Centaur Page 21
