Drive Don't Cycle

The cult of the expert with the hegemony of bureaucracy. Father Robert McTeigue

Back in the 1990’s I worked as a registered nurse in a series of Calgary hospitals. My first job was on the gastrointestinal surgical floor at the Holy Cross Hospital which was on the southwest side of the downtown area. In those days downtown was pretty quiet, especially in the early morning, and I loved riding through the centre of the city on my bicycle on the way to work dodging and weaving across traffic lanes as the wind blew through the deep valleys created by high rise buildings. Soon enough the wards and patient treatment areas at the Holy Cross Hospital were moved and the entire series of buildings was given over to the bureaucracy that managed the regional health department. Bureaucracies have two jobs: the first is to maintain the bureaucracy and the second is to grow the bureaucracy.

Cycling to work at the Holy Cross was a continuous juggling game as I worked shifts. Night shifts I drove both directions being too tired to cycle home at the end of the shift and unwilling to ride to work at 10:00 pm at night. Day shifts were easy, I cycled both directions, while afternoon shifts Doug and I had a system worked out whereby he drove to his office job downtown with his bicycle in the back of our wagon. He would park near the Holy Cross Hospital, unload his bicycle and ride across town to his office. After work he would ride home, while I would ride to the Holy Cross for my afternoon shift, throw my bicycle in the back of the wagon, and drive home at midnight when I finished work. So we both carried changes of clothes in panniers on our bicycles as well as massive amounts of food to get us through our respective work days.

From the Holy Cross, I moved to work in the Multiple Sclerosis (MS) Clinic at the old General Hospital which was on the east side of the city down in the Bow River valley. There was no more shift work so I could cycle everyday, which I did, rain, shine, winter storm, minus 30 degree Celsius days, through afternoon thunder and hail storms and along the unplowed and frequently icy streets and paths of Calgary. I could make it to work in about an hour if conditions were reasonable, but I had days when it took me at least 1.5 hours to get to work due to icy and snowy conditions (this was before the pathway along the river valley was plowed in winter and studded bicycle tires had not been invented).

Coming home I almost always had to ride into the Chinook winds which blow through Calgary year round. These warm winds (warm is relative) sweep down over the Rocky Mountains to the west and generally blow at a steady 25 to 30 knots. Getting home to my house, which was uphill from the river valley and to the west was almost universally into a steady head wind. I had days when it took me 1.5 hours to ride home as well, and, as I frequently ran out of food, I often had hypoglycemic attacks while riding that made me vulnerable to falling off the bicycle into the road traffic.

My clearest memory of the craziness of my bicycle commute obsession was falling into the bus trap between Scenic Acres, where Doug and I lived, and Silver Springs, the next suburb to the east. Bus traps are big trenches dug in the ground that can be spanned by the wheels of a full size bus but a car or regular vehicle does not have a wide enough wheel base to span the trench which is about a half a metre deep. They are used to stop cars and private vehicles from zooming around urban neighbourhoods. I was riding to work on my usual route which took me past a bus trap on a road between Scenic Acres and Silver Springs on a snowy day in the early morning. As I rode past the bus trap, my bicycle hit black ice and slipped sideways. I fell into the bus trap and the bicycle landed on top of me. At that moment, the number 37 bus which I took on occasional days when even I wouldn’t cycle, chose that exact moment to come rumbling along the road, and I managed to get both my self and my bicycle out of the bus trap just seconds before the bus drove over the trap. I had given serious thought to trying to lie flat in the bus trap because buses, like trains, are slow to stop, particularly if the driver is not expecting to encounter a human and a bicycle at rest in the bus trap. I can still remember clearly the look of extreme consternation on the drivers face when he realised he had almost run over a cyclist.

There were lots of other crazy days. One day, riding up the penultimate hill on my way home, I hit black ice again and flew off the bicycle out into two lanes of traffic. Another day, after a terrifying ride down icy and snowy roads to gain the bicycle path that ran along the river valley I found the entire pathway covered by a glassy, solid 5 centimetres of ice, as smooth and slippery as the local ice hockey rink. The Chinook winds had melted the snow on the path but the banks on either side of the path had prevented the melted snow (in other words, water) from draining away and, as night fell, the entire pathway for at least five kilometres had frozen solid with 5 centimetres of hard water ice. Crampons would have been more use than a bicycle. I pushed the bike all the way to work. I was a bit late that day.

Multiple days were marked by thunder, lightening and hail during the summer months. Sometimes I just kept riding, other times the hail was big enough that I would have to seek out shelter until the storm passed over. Strangely, I never really worried about being hit by lightning perhaps because I had been hit by lightning on a climb of Mount Athabasca already.

Winter riding required multiple layers of clothing such that moving was difficult. I had lined lycra tights which had a goretex layer stitched to the front (a unique item made by Mountain Equipment Coop which were absolutely brilliant but of course disappeared from their inventory when the bureaucracy took over and the only thing MEC reliably sold was yoga clothing). On very cold days, I wore another pair of full goretex pants over the top of these, and put shoe covers on my leather hiking boots (sneakers were too cold) which MEC also made at the time. The shoe covers also were a genius item but they too disappeared once MEC became a store that sold almost exclusively barbeque clothing (a term coined by my mate Robin Tivy). On top, I wore a long underwear (prolypropolene at the time) long sleeved top, a lightweight fleece, then another jacket (home-made) that had a thicker fleece layer with a windbreak layer stitched on as an outer. A muff for the face (otherwise you would get frostbite), a homemade beanie (called a toque in Canada), my bicycling helmet, a headlamp (plus lights on the bicycle), and two pairs of mitts, an inner fleece layer and outer wind break layer. It took me about half an hour to dress and undress at either end of the commute. Ski goggles were sometimes useful to prevent your eyelashes from freezing.

The most batshit crazy thing I remember about this time was an online survey tool that MEC developed and published on their website. This was, of course, the early days of the internet, so it was a pretty rudimentary questionnaire which purported to measure your environmental impact. Mine, disturbingly, was rated high. You might wonder, how it could be high considering I never drove a single kilometre during the week and prepared all my own food. I even did my weekly shopping on foot, carrying a large backpack up to the local store and bringing it home loaded with the weeks groceries. It was big backpack (80 litres – I still have it).

I don’t remember the exact wording of the quiz or the summary response but the gist of it was I was an environmental disaster because I was using up too many calories riding my bicycle to work and walking to the shop, and the recommendation was, unbelievable as it might sound, that I should drive to work! Such is the madness of bureaucracy and the environmental movement. Interestingly enough, within a year of my starting work at the old General Hospital, that group of building also became the home to more bureaucracy and our entire clinic moved to the Foothills Hospital. This had the inadvertent effect of lowering my environmental impact because I could cycle to work in a mere half hour.

Keep Climbing

You should never, ever be understood completely. That's like the kiss of death, isn't it? It's a full stop. I don't ever think you should put full stops on thoughts. They change. John Lydon (Johny Rotten, The Sex Pistols).

2026 was the year I wondered, fleetingly, if I would give up rock climbing. Each passing year, it just seemed to get harder and harder to drag myself back into climbing shape after taking the summer season off. But I put a stop on that thought, and started climbing again, and I’m so glad I did. The movement, the challenge, the effort to keep trying substantiated by small improvements is still so satisfying even on a crag that is barely 20 metres high.

It may be the year I have to recognise I’m not going up in the grades anymore, and that’s hard, but I think it is harder still not to climb at all. That would be dying a small death before the final death and in no way a measure of the joy of a life. Fred Beckey kept climbing (or at least trying to climb) for decades after his prime. I’ll never be a Fred Beckey, but perhaps there is some kind of crazy dignity in continuing the struggle for improvement long after the physical ability to improve is gone.

Beckey used to roll into Nelson occasionally when I lived there and my mate Hamish would hook up with him to go climbing. Sometimes at the local crags, sometimes the local gym, but often on some hare-brained scheme to carry a ball busting pack deep into the remote BC wilderness to climb some obscure peak. Often, the walk in (trackless) was enough to render Beckey incapable of completing the climb and the youth who had accompanied him would climb the route instead. Beckey was the prototypical eternal optimist, busting his arse getting way into the remotest wildest mountains long after his ability to string long hard climbing days together was gone.

I like to think that Beckey carried an unquenchable flame for climbing that age and wisdom never dimmed. A dreamer spirit that found solace and quietude on high mountains after extreme effort. These days, he would be diagnosed with autism or ADHD. He would be drugged up and/or convinced that his extreme focus was the product of a “neurodivergent” brain that needed assistance and accommodation. That never happened, because it was a different, and in many ways, more tolerant time. Beckey didn’t want accommodations, and neither should we. The beauty of life is in the struggle to improve not in the dismal acceptance of fading ability.

No Hands Climbing

Johnny Dawes is a year younger than me, but climbs far harder. These days, not many people have heard of Johnny Dawes because he is old (62) and unfashionable among the rainbow lanyard, inclusive (but really exclusive), feminist kill-joy, everything is a trauma, words are violence climbing crowd. Plus, of course, he’s a white male and therefore the symbol of all that is wrong in the “grape-culture” of climbing. As an old white female.  I miss the days when we could just go climbing without needing to make a statement about colonisation or climate action or gender-wangery. If you were a climber, you were judged by how hard you climbed, and it was more common to down-grade your achievements than over-hype them. We all had a finally tuned bull-shit metre and the climbers gratuitously talking up their big sends were greeted with apathetic disdain.

Johnny Dawes is known as both a master of movement and an enigmatic thinker. He started “no hands” climbing after injuring a hand and became known for both hard and bold traditional ascents along with no hands climbs. These days, he runs a coaching business, unlike any other climbing coaching business, where in his own unique and eccentric style he teaches “declumsification.”

I’ve noticed myself becoming increasingly clumsy when climbing. Struggling with precise footwork and also those ultra-common moves where you have to step up onto a small hold with – what feels like – no good grips for the hands. Strength training was not improving these issues, so, I thought why not try Dawes’ declumsification. My home wall is overhanging so way too steep for no hands climbing – even for maestro Dawes – but I do have any number of easy featured slabs sitting on the rock platforms at my local beach.

No hands climbing is – at least for me – surprisingly hard, even on terrain where it shouldn’t be. I’ve got a good two metre high boulder just 7 minutes walk from home which I was using. It has holds, much bigger than Dawes uses, so good for someone who needs to start at the beginning of declumsification. You can watch Dawes no hands climbing here, here, and here but not me, because I didn’t shoot any video. Declumsification is not something you can do one time and assume you will have improved. Dawes mastered the art of using any and all surfaces to declumsify including urban surfaces, much like the OG of parkour before parkour was a thing.

Sharks and Rocks

Today was the first day that it actually felt like winter paddling. It was supposed to rain a bit which isn’t conducive to rock climbing but is appropriate for paddling. In the end, it didn’t rain at all, though I was pretty well wet through by the end of my requisite 20 kilometres as, because I had got tired of fighting with my dry spray deck, I had reverted, on the coldest day of the year so far, to my worn out and leaky Electric Water spray deck. Electric Water custom makes their spray decks to fit both your waist and your cockpit whereas of the shelf spray decks can be a bit of a bitch to get on.

As I was passing Circuit Beach on my way to Lilli Pilli Bay, I noticed the Joonga shark boat speeding towards one of the drum lines. It’s always interesting to see what they have pulled aboard – no sharks are injured, they are photographed, measured, tagged and released – this time it was a bronze whaler that the men on the boat thought was about 2.5 metres long. It had a very thick square head and it took a bit more wrangling than I’ve seen the lads engaged in before.

The ocean has been hopping with activity this winter. The water is clear a lot of the time as we have had a long periods of calm winds with few or no big storms coming through. In our home bay, I’ve paddled out multiple times into massive schools of fish. So many fish that as they swim near the surface they create a wave. The dolphins are always there, sometimes just swimming, other times feeding, and a few seals have moved in as well. The only shark I’ve seen, however, is the bronze whaler today although the buoys are reporting great whites and other big sharks around.

My Big Day Out: The 2026 Winter Solstice Edition

In 2022, I organised a Tollgate Islands paddle out at sunset followed by dinner and pictures at our house. Nine people paddled out and we had 13 for dinner. I would be lucky to get two mosquitoes and a blowfly now! I had an ignominious failure in 2024 as my plan to walk from sunrise to sunset ended in an emergency pick up when some incipient connective tissue injuries blew up. Last year, was a roaring success as I led an overnight trip for NSW Sea Kayak Club along the Murramarang Coast and culminating in a paddle into the Blue Cave at the Tollgate Islands.

This year, I decided on a multi-sport day. I haven’t done one of these days since 2020 when I did the 50 kilometre project which turned out to be 53.5 kilometres and should have been 57 because then I would have done my age. I decided to complete my age in self-propelled kilometres, hoping to complete the effort in the daylight hours. This would mean 21 kilometres each biking, hiking and sea kayaking. Doug suggested I cycle the nearby paved cycleway which is almost flat but I thought that would be cheating.

Here’s how the day unfolded. I got up about 5:15 am and drank two big mugs of coffee. By 6 a.m. (an hour before sunrise) I was on the bike. I used my climbing helmet instead of my bike helmet because climbing helmets are formatted to hold a headlamp. Familiar trails feel strangely unfamiliar when you are riding up with just a circle of light to guide the way. I wanted to get a photo of the sunrise but our bike trails are in the trees and the best I got was a couple of bleary shots over trees. I was able to turn the headlamp off before I got to the top of the first long ascent which I reached about 7 a.m. It was another race weekend and there were people about even two hours before the event was due to start.

The sun cleared the ridge on my first descent. Then it was ascent, descent, ascent, and the final descent to the trail-head and the short cycle back on roads. At home, I changed into kayaking gear and had a large cup of milky tea. I’m pretty much fuelled by tea (I had an egg and turkey sandwich too) and then trolleyed the kayak down to our local beach for the kayaking leg.

Low tide and a very low swell meant it was an easy launch and paddle south for about 10 kilometres to Jimmies Island. Just as we got to Jimmies Island the forecast southerly blew in and we had a light tail wind for the paddle home. I was 750 metres short of 21 kilometres so while Doug retrieved the trolleys which we leave at the house of a friend who lives right beside the beach, I paddled up and down the bay until my watch ticked over the magic number.

Back at the house I ate three chicken meat patties and a handful of sultanas and had another jug of milky tea! At the last minute, I decided to switch packs and throw in a windbreak (jacket) but within half an hour I was off to walk the Munjip Track. The Munjip Track goes up and down, up and down, the entire length as it climbs over a series of headlands to small sandy bays. I had debated walking north which means I could stroll along long flat beaches instead of following the undulating trail but that felt like cheating too, so I went south, up and down, up and down. I felt slow on the hills and I had a couple of incipient tweaks which meant I had to keep my stride short to make sure my gluteal and quadricep muscles were fully engaged but apart from feeling a bit slow, the walk segment went well. This was, as expected, the slowest segment.

Sunset, also was over trees, so there was no sudden splash of colour just a gradual deepening of the dusk and under the trees I needed my headlamp. At the beach near my house I was again 750 metres short of 21 kilometres so I walked the beach until my watch ticked over 21 kilometres.

It was about 5:45 p.m. when I got home so, overall, just shy of 12 hours, although with breaks and switch overs taken out, my moving time was pretty much spot on 10 hours. I wasn’t sure I could do this without my hip blowing up and I certainly wasn’t going to risk tearing further my already jagged femoral labrum so I was pretty happy to finish in a reasonable time with no real bodily aches or pains.

Here’s what I didn’t do:

• Taper. I did my usual training and activities right up until Sunday except for dropping my usual aerobic activity on Saturday. But, I still did all my usual physiotherapy exercises, core and gluteal work and climbed on my home climbing wall on Saturday.

• Eat any special foods or gels. I did the bike ride fasted, and thereafter I ate regular food with a bit of extra carbohydrate, but, mostly I ate animal protein.

• Drink any electrolytes or special energy drinks: Milky tea and water did the job.

• Rest on any of the segments. The key to long endurance efforts is to keep moving. People burn through so much time resting, starting, stopping and generally faffing about. A body in motion stays in motion.

Comfort Through Discomfort

Rescued is back with the story of some poor bugger who, after a misplaced step and fall, completely ruptured both quadriceps tendons. There are a few errors in the podcast, the first being that Ross reports camping at Saltwater Creek on the second night of the three day walk (three day is used loosely as the entire walk is only 32 kilometres long) but this is obviously not correct as Saltwater Creek is only a few kilometres south of Mowarry campsite, where they spent their first night. Additionally, Ross mentions continuing past Heggarty Bay campsite which is a few kilometres south of Saltwater Bay on their second day to make their last walking day shorter. Thus, Ross and his group were obviously camped at Bittangabee Bay, the last campsite on that stretch of coast.

Bittangabee Bay from the Light to Light Track

Unrelated to the story, Ross says that Disaster Bay is “full of reefs” which have historically resulted in shipwrecks – hence the name, Disaster Bay. In fact, Disaster Bay is deep (50 metres shallowing to 16 metres) and sandy bottomed. There have been shipwrecks but these have not been in the middle of Disaster Bay. Prior to construction of the lighthouse, ships did founder off the coast, but this was predominantly on the rocky cliffs either side of Green Cape. There are reefs and a couple of rocky islets immediately off Green Cape – home to a colony of seals – and the sea off Green Cape is often a lively place where the swell rises and steepens suddenly and currents give rough seas but Disaster Bay itself is not overly dangerous.

Disaster Bay

The other error in the podcast is Ross’ assertion that they were “about five hours” from Green Cape (the end of the walk) when the accident occurred. This is possible only if you are a really slow walker but unlikely given the distance from Bittangabee Bay to Green Cape is somewhere between 7 and 8 kilometres. Finally, I think the word “isolated” needs to be either removed from the vocabulary of the host or, at a minimum, redefined. The roughly 20 kilometre stretch of coast from Boyd Tower in the north to Green Cape in the south is crisscrossed by dirt roads, has four campsites, and any number of stairs, trails, and viewing platforms. The bush is thick in parts, but it is still virtually impossible to get any more than four kilometres from a good 2WD gravel road at any point along the coast. That’s not isolated unless you live in a high rise tower in the middle of New York City.

Paddling past Green Cape

Personally, I would rather break a bone than rip both my tendons off the bone. Tendon injuries are hard to heal as the blood supply is limited and tendon does not regenerate nearly as well other tissues. The new collagen that is laid down during tendon repair is generally disorganised and chaotic rather than being parallel and aligned to the direction of force. Tendons require loading to heal in healthily aligned parallel bands and this takes a long, long time and much patient and progressive loading.

Paddling past the red cliffs of Beowa National Park

The best thing, of course, is prevention, but how can you prevent tendon injuries? Tendons do become more prone to injury with age but it’s not clear that this is simply the ageing process not a side effect of the poor metabolic health that frequently accompanies ageing. Unfortunately, with sedentary living and high carbohydrate and fat diets (processed food is the real culprit), poor metabolic health is seen in younger and younger individuals. A simple tape measure gives clues to metabolic health. A waist to height ratio over 0.5 is far more diagnostic than a BMI measure. The classic image that should come to mind and which afflicts a large proportion of Australians, young and old, is the skinny arms and legs along with the protuberant belly. Metabolic dysfunction makes tendons fragile, prone to injury, and significantly impairs healing.

Boyd Tower from the Light to Light Track

Beyond metabolic health, stronger muscles protect joints and tendons so strength training with real weight is a must. Agility training which can be as simple as hopping on one leg or engaging in some easy parkour, and the always avoided explosive impact activities like squat jumps help older people maintain the agility and proprioception to recover from off-balance moves that would otherwise result in falls. Dr Howard Luks does a brilliant job of explaining all these things and providing exercise protocols specifically for older adults to promote healthy ageing.

Saltwater Bay

It’s easy to drift into older age with gradually declining function. Everyone around you is doing it and flowing downhill along the tidal drift of age is so much easier than attempting, like Moses, to hold back the waters. It takes time, effort and you have to prioritise your training and nutrition over just about everything else. There are myriad reasons why we allow ourselves to gradually decline and the only reason to dissect and understand these is if they will actually change your behaviour. You could navel gaze endlessly and fruitlessly, or you could just take action today.

Heggarty Bay

I’ll leave you with a passage from Mark Twight:

Every day I look around me and I’m saddened by examples of people who …. gave up early, or never learned the comfort that derives from self-imposed discomfort, from wanting and working for more.

If there is one lesson I would teach someone half my age it would be that [sic]: work harder than you think you need to, and take care of the mind and body that you are stuck with for the rest of your life. “Take care” doesn’t mean avoid, it means think ahead, weigh the cost of what you want now against what you might want in ten years, or twenty. You will probably live longer than you think. The habits and scars you create now will sink their roots. If you don’t keep enough resilience to combat those roots they will eventually hold you down.

We’re Not That Different, It Just Seems That Way

In 2025, the Institute of Public Affairs contracted an independent research firm to poll Australians on attitudes to climate change and net zero targets. This was the third poll in three years, other polls were conducted in 2022 and 2024. The results were revealing. Only 21% of respondents thought the main focus of the federal government’s energy policy should be reaching net zero emissions by 2050. This was down from 28% in 2022, but essentially the same as 19% in 2024. Slightly more women than men were concerned with energy affordability (58% versus 53%) and slightly less women than men thought reaching the net zero target was important (19% for women, 22% for men).

The revealing statistic, of course, is how much people were personally prepared to pay each year to reach net zero emissions by 2050. Keep in mind that Australia is pursuing a relatively aggressive transition to net zero, particularly within our energy grid, and our publicly funded broadcaster (the ABC) publishes, during an average week in text media alone, between 10 and 25 articles on climate change. Across all ABC media (radio, TV, text) that number can be as high as 100 pieces of content every week! The climate change agenda is inescapable in Australia and it has been pursued by both our major political parties, and virtually all independents for as long as I have been in Australia.

You would think then, that Australians are obsessed with climate change and willing to pay whatever it takes to address our greenhouse gas emissions. The data, however, says otherwise. The overwhelming majority of Australians (93% in 2025) are willing to pay – at most - $2 per week or less to reach net zero by 2050. In fact, $2 a week is high. Almost 50% of people are not willing to pay anything to reach net zero by 2050, and just a quarter would pay a buck a week.

This isn’t a left-right issue, although the media presents it that way. Across the political divide, no-one actually wants to pay to reduce our emissions. Mike Newman, on a recent podcast with Chris Joye, when asked about climate change noted that “the best indicator of people’s individual concerns about climate change are their personal consumption habits.” He continued to note that the demand for global air travel continues to rise, and if “people are truly concerned [about climate] why are they flying?” Why indeed? Why are we across all age groups, the sex binary (sex is binary), and political stripes so unwilling to forego just one cup of coffee a week (about $7 in Australia which equates to $364 per year) to combat climate change?

If we are all either rabid unwashed leftists (as the right wing media would have us believe) or cretinous, selfish, halfwits (as the left wing media posits) there should not be such broad agreement. In fact, there is unlikely a single issue in Australia today where you could find such broad agreement (given we’ve got “feminists” telling us men can become women). Virtually none of us are willing to pay to address climate change.

The truth, I suspect, is murky, confused, and not explainable by a single theory; although humans, the original story tellers, love a single narrative. There is credible research to suggest that the more a person talks about a thing (this is called social proof) and acquires the social trappings of a thing (for example, an electric car) the more they come to believe that they encapsulate the thing. In Australia, we have a large cadre of (very) loud voices who proselytise about climate change, buy electric vehicles (in recent times using taxpayer subsidised programs to get cash rebates, subsidies or other tax benefits), get solar panels and batteries for their houses (also using taxpayer subsidies) and then declare themselves climate warriors. Perhaps these are the 2% of Australians who are willing to pay over $500 a year to reduce our net omissions. If so, the minority of Australians are having an outsize influence on the other 98%.

It could be however, that we are all equally unwilling to pay any amount of money to reach net zero if that money both comes out of our own pockets and does not garner approbation from our peers. If signalling your adherence to net zero zealotry was completely invisible or even a bit demeaning (for example, you rode a bicycle and took public transit rather than driving a flashy new EV), and cost a significant amount of money week after week, year after year, how many of the loud 2% would continue to dominate the discourse? Very few, I suspect, because, despite what the media and the clamorous 2% avow, we are much more alike than we are different.