Skip to main content

Going for gold

I am ill. I have been overcome. Yeah, kidney failure, whatever...I'm not talking about that. I have Olympic fever and I fear it might be terminal.

I cried when we won the bid seven years ago and I have been looking forward to London 2012 ever since. An evening spent at the O2 - sorry, North Greenwich Arena - last Saturday has enabled me to say I Was There, watching men do un-natural things on gymnastic equipment, and this week I have been mostly watching rowing, swimming and triathalon-ing on my sofa instead of re-writing my book. I have been inspired by the story of Helen Glover, the gold-medal winning rower who only stepped into a boat 4 years ago. By my calculations, if I were to start training now, I would be on course for topping the podium in Rio 2016.

I just need to decide which discipline to take up. My height - or rather, lack of it - rules me out of rowing (plus don't fancy the early mornings) and swimming, but I don't want broad shoulders either. Shooting and archery are dashed by my poor eye sight and weightlifting...I think we can safely put that in the maybe pile. So that leaves equestrian (the last time I rode a horse I was eight, and I fell off), heptahalon (too much like hard work) and diving. Diving, according to the body match app on the BBC Olympic website, is the event to which I am best suited but the only way you will get me off that 10m board is to push me and I'm pretty sure they don't award points for falling with style. So after careful consideration, I have decided my best bet is handball. Not that many people play handball so I figure I have a good chance of making the Olympic team, and it seems to be a bit like netball - I don't know, I've only watched 5 minutes of one match, and that was men. Will my parents be proud if I win a gold medal in handball? Middle distance running sounds better. Hell, JUDO sounds better...but I need to be realistic, and handball is my best shot.

If Oscar Pistorius can bring it in the Olympics on bionic legs I see no reason why me and my no kidneys can't also make the A standard. Besides, I am a week into the summer holidays and I need a project. Just watching the athletics makes me want to get up and run around, so Heidi and I have decided to go to a gymnastics class and I have started running again, with Brendan Foster commentating in my head. I have some experience in endurance sports: kidney failure is definitely a marathon. Recently I have dearly wanted to pull up by the barriers, so I need to "dig deep and run a gutsy race". I'll find my local handball team, keep running and keep my eyes on the prize, be it a kidney or Olympic glory.
My Super Olympic Salad

My Patriotic Pavlova

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Postscript

You wouldn't believe where I am. You could guess, if you've seen the gratuitous images of my self-satisfied gurning face in front of an infinity pool on Facebook...otherwise you might find it hard to imagine the paradise in which I currently find myself. I am in Dubai. Bar Abby Clancey and the cast of TOWIE, is is not everyone's idea of paradise - it actually wasn't mine. It is exciting, exotic and fucking hot, but the skyscrapers and traffic, the desert and cultural  deficiency (not to mention the chavs that clutter up the Ritz Carlton these days, I mean honestly...) suggest you'd be hard-pushed to call it paradise. It is vaulted to utopian heights simply because, four-months after the transplant, I am here. My nearest and dearest suffered for seven years as I dreamily aired my wanderlust. Yet the reward of a post-transplant holiday seemed too extravagant a prize for which to yearn - wasn't a life free from dialysis enough? Wasn't having a drink when t...

The phone rings: Part II

Anaesthetic can do weird things to you. It makes you sleepy (clearly) but in the past I have arrived back from surgery giddy as a chipmunk in spring. When I was wheeled back onto the ward after the transplant, I was not so much giddy as...suffering from delusions of psychosis. This was how I announced myself to Mum and Sam anyway, scaring the shit out of them in the process. I spent a wide-eyed half-hour protesting against the poison in my body before declaring, "I don't feel a shred of hope and I shall never be happy again".  I remember only:  1) being told the kidney was not producing urine, and consequently thinking the transplant had failed  2) that I had to stop myself asking the doctors to take the kidney out and  3) despising myself for my ingratitude. It was the first in a range of unexpected emotions I would feel over the coming week.  After half an hour of drug-induced ranting I finally - mercifully - passed out. Tuesday When I w...

The phone rings: Part I

When I open my eyes, I'm not sure where I am and I can't move. The last thing I remember is having an oxygen mask clamped over my mouth and being told to inhale; it was quick and traumatic and now I feel as if I have awoken in that very scene. I am freaking out. "Where am I? What's happened? What have you done to me?" "You've had a kidney a transplant," says a genial Irish voice, as though this sort of thing happens every day. Sunday, 6:10pm It is 6pm and I am on my sofa, writing on my laptop with one eye on  Dinner Date . I feel peckish, so I decide to make myself some bulgar wheat and peas (don't ask) and watch the Strictly results - it's about time Dave goes, the joke has worn thin. The phone rings. A man with heavily accented English asks to speak to "Rosa....Rosymend....Edwards?" and I am about to tell him I am not interested in whatever he is hawking, the words are about to roll off my tongue, when he introduces himself...