A few years ago I realized that the cycling calendar doesn’t follow the yearly calendar. With the end of the World Championships in the middle of September, it pretty much marks the end of the international racing calendar, especially for para-cycling. So with the lack of a job I decided to take a few weeks off and go visit my family for three weeks. I hadn’t been to see them since the end of February when my father passed away so it was time. Time off for me at the end of a season is essential not only to give my body time to rest and recover but also to ensure that my enjoyment and love for the sport doesn’t fade. As much as I love training and cycling, it does take over my life at times and if I don’t take a break my enjoyment and love turns into a negative feeling.
I returned to Stellenbosch in the last week of October and while I still had a week off training I used the week to sit down and do some planning for the year ahead. What did I want out of the 2020 cycling year? What competitions did I want to enter? I had three personal bests in the last twelve months, how do I continue to improve? In the last two months I had contemplating really changing my training, was I ready to really take a chance and make a big move?
As I sat behind my desk with the UCI events calendar and an excel sheet, I put on my coaching hat and started to mark out the races I knew I wanted to take part in and then count the weeks. Once I had the number of weeks to my main competition of for season, World Championships in Belgium, I could start dividing my year into training blocks, the blocks into weeks, and the weeks into training hours! Eventually the training plan got printed out and put on my wall for quick reference. I now had my yearly, monthly, and weekly plan, but how was I going to implement it? The plan was only as good as the next phase: implementation.
I decided I could either do the same things that I had done for the last four of so years or I could take a gamble and see how it would play out. For a number of years, even before I started cycling, each year I had worked with a few third year sports science students as their client for their practicals. They would help me train and in return they would get some practical experience in working with a client with disabilities. While it had many benefits for me such as people helping me train, a free gym membership, and transportation and training on the athletics track, I also found it quite frustrating and limiting. The students were often away on holidays or doing exams, each year I had to start with new students and help them get used to working with me and get them working at my ability level. We were also restricted in respect to what they were allowed to do for their academic program. In recent months I had become increasingly frustrated and had really thought of not signing up in the new year. I actually had to let the department know in November whether or not I was going continue in the new year.
I finally decided to go with what I was feeling and resign from the program. But now I had some problems to sort out. How was I going to cover the costs of my gym membership? How was I going to organize my transportation to gym? And how was I going to continue working on the track without the students?
I decided to advertise on Facebook that I needed lifts to the gym and when that didn’t work I asked if anyone would consider sponsoring some of my uber costs to the gym. One family committed to giving me R200 a month! That amount would cover five uber rides a month and I considered it a good start to solving my problem. Anet and JC volunteered to take me to the track a few times in November so that I could get some start of the session base testing done. I felt this was very important so that I could monitor my progress over the next few months. Black Friday gave me a nice deal on my annual gym membership and I decided to sign up and trust that I would find a sponsor down the line to cover that expense. By the end of November I wasn’t only training consistently but many of my initial fears that I had when I decided to not take students were starting to fade.
November was also an exciting month because something else was brewing. Anet had used some of her winnings from the GSport Awards to buy me some items for my cycling. We had ordered two bags with my name and the South African emblem and the words ‘para-cycling’ on and she had also ordered me some formal wear to wear to functions. One item was a South African sports blazer – something I had dreamt of owning for years! So when the parcel arrived towards the enough of November it was indeed a special moment and an early birthday present.
December the 8th was my actual birthday and I tried to connect my cycling to that. I worked hard to get my Backabuddy Campaign up and running by then and ask people to donate to the campaign for my birthday. I was delighted when I got three big donations for my uber rides to gym and that ensured I had enough money to uber to gym for about five months! I was so grateful! Around the same time I met a friend of a friend who was so keen to help me raise funds that she asked her friends to all donate to my campaign that by middle of December I had enough funds to pay my annual fees and a lot of the money that I needed for South African Championships in February.
Join me next time as I write about my Namibian cycling adventure over the December holidays.
For anyone who wants to donate to my cycling campaign please go to my Backabuddy site. I have a list of expenses that I still need to be covered for this year. Each and every donation, no matter the size is really appreciated. My backabuddy site is: https://www.backabuddy.co.za/champion/project/toni-2020