Why I Cycle

Dear Janet,

People sometimes ask me why I cycle, and I usually give them the short answer: it keeps me fit, I enjoy it, I like the people. All of that is true. But you deserve the long answer, because the long answer begins with you.

After you passed, I went to Eldoret for a while. I needed to be somewhere quieter, away from the places and routines that reminded me of everything we had lost. I told people I was taking a break. Honestly, I was trying to work out how a person keeps going after something like that, and I did not have an answer yet.

While I was there, I was diagnosed with PTSD. What happened in India had stayed with me in ways I had not fully admitted, even to myself. The doctor was kind and practical about it. He said there were two broad ways to manage it: medication or exercise. I thought about Nemye. I did not want to become dependent on anything when she needed a father who was present and clear headed. I wanted to take back some control over my own life, even a small amount. So I chose exercise.

I started with running. I was not fast and I was not graceful, but I went out and came back, and on some days that was the whole achievement.

Then one morning, halfway through a jog, I passed a bicycle shop. I cannot fully explain it, but the bikes in the window caught my attention and I went in. I left with a Carrera aluminium bike, and without realising it, I had started something that would stay with me for years.

I have to be honest with you about my early cycling career, because you would have enjoyed it far too much. I was not a natural. My first rides were slow and very nervous. I avoided the road completely and rode on the pavements, because being anywhere near cars made my heart race. Pedestrians were overtaking me with shopping bags. I was averaging about ten kilometres an hour, and I would come home feeling as if I had crossed a mountain range. Simply getting onto a real road felt like a major personal victory.

So you can imagine how strange it is that today I think nothing of riding a hundred kilometres before lunch. I know you would have teased me about this. You would have reminded me of the man on the pavement, gripping the handlebars and apologising to people walking past. I still think about him sometimes, and I am quite fond of him.

The change did not happen all at once. The short nervous rides became slightly longer rides. I found I was looking forward to them. The distances crept up, my confidence grew, and one day I noticed I was out on the road with traffic and not thinking about it. The long endurance rides came later, and with them a kind of calm I had not felt in a long time.

Cycling also brought me people, which I did not expect. I found Mama Cycling Nairobi, and suddenly the bike was not only about exercise. There were group rides, early mornings, conversations at the roadside, people who noticed when you did not show up. I had a routine again. I had somewhere to be.

I will not pretend that a bicycle solved everything, Janet. It did not. But during that period it kept me moving when it would have been easy to stop, and it helped keep me away from the depression that was always close by. It gave me somewhere to go, something to work towards and people to share the effort with. On the hard days, that was enough.

It was only later, once I had healed a little and had some distance from those years, that I looked back and understood how much the sport had given me. And I started asking myself a simple question: what could I give back to it?

That question became Airpocket Cycling.

Airpocket is my way of returning something to the community that carried me. The ambition is to build a professional cycling team that finds and develops talent, especially young riders, so that talented cyclists are not overlooked simply because they lack opportunity, support or visibility. There are riders in this country with extraordinary ability who never get a fair chance to show it. I would like to change that for at least some of them.

When I think about it now, the order of things makes sense. Cycling first helped me heal. Then it gave me a community. That community gave me a sense of belonging, and eventually I wanted to use the same sport to create opportunities for others.

I wish you were here to see it. I wish you could come to a race, stand at the finish and tell me what you really thought of my riding. I like to think you would understand why I am doing this: that something which helped me through the hardest season of my life should be passed on to someone else.

I still carry the plans we made and the values we shared. Some of them now travel on two wheels.

With all my love,

Brian.