 Brought to you by Penguin Worms to Catch by Guy Martin Read by Dean Williamson Chapter 1 All I could blame it on was the motorcycles. This time last year, August 2015, I was in a Belfast hospital, and all I could think was, it's going to be a few weeks of lying about before I get back to normal. I wasn't bothered about the pain, but I couldn't stand the thought of being forced to lie about. I'd crashed my BMW S1000RR leading a race at the Ulster Grand Prix, and broken my back and my hand. It was the second time I'd broken my spine crashing a motorbike in just over five years, and I'd got away without too much lasting damage. I had a big scar up my back where they'd cut me open to bolt my spine together and some more new metal work in my hand. Bloody lucky really, but all I could blame it on was the motorcycles. I'd been thinking and talking about the Tour Divide, a 2,750 mile mountain bike race in Canada and America for ages, and it became something to focus on instead of motorbikes, for a while at least. I would compete in that the following June. I also decided I wouldn't commit to any road races until after the Tour Divide, mainly because even a small injury would knacker up my training. I thought that all those hours on my own, cycling from the top to the bottom of America, would be the perfect time to think about me and motorbikes. Racing had been a way of life for fifteen years more or less, and if I did pack them in, it wasn't going to be because of a snap decision. The wall of death record attempt had to be cancelled because of the back injury too. The date hadn't been decided 100%, but it was going to be in October. It would have been a hell of a job to get the Rob North triumph finished for then. I'd have done it, I reckon, but it wouldn't have been as good as I'd hoped. My diary was clear all of a sudden, there's only so much you can do with a broken back, but I was determined that it wasn't going to slow me up for long, and plenty of folk did a good job of filling it back up, but not straight away. For a week after the crash I was laid up in the hospital, then I got home and had another week of not being able to do much. I was hardly sleeping. I'd already finished when you dead, you dead, and it was on its way to the printers, but the end needed a bit of a rewrite to include what had happened at the Ulster. It seemed a bit daft to have had this potentially life-changing crash and not mention it in the book if we could squeeze it in. And we did. Then I went back to work. The first day in the truck yard I was useless. I was in so much pain I couldn't do anything. I fitted a door handle on a truck, and that was it. I had to come home. I couldn't lift my arms up. The next day I went in, and that was a bit better. I put a header tank in a Scania 730, and that's a bugger to do because you have to take loads of stuff off to get access to it. It's a five-hour job when I'm fit, and I thought to myself, if I can do that by the end of the week, I'll be all right. I gave myself four full days, but I managed it in a day with time left to do another small job, so I was pleased with that. Moody was glad to see me back, and he was brilliant. He explained what we needed to do at work and asked, what do you reckon? There were some things I couldn't manage at first. I couldn't handle the big windy gun, so Moody would come do that if I got stuck. He was spot on. One day I was putting an air filter in a wagon. I had to lie on my back at the side of the pit, the big hole in the ground that the lorries park over so you can work under the truck, and reach up to push this air filter into place. It's not heavy, but it's awkward, and that movement, laying on my back, pushing something away from my chest hurt so much I squealed like a girl. Moody could hear me in his office, one hundred yards away, across the yard, and came to see what was up. Are you all right? he asked. I told him I was a bit sore, but I would be. I think it was so painful because the muscles weren't attached, they'd been cut off when the metalwork was bolted to my spine, and I was asking them to do something they weren't ready for. But I fitted the filter in the end. It probably took me ten times longer than normal, but I did do it. I started thinking about getting back on my pushbike as early as the first few days back at work, so not even three weeks after. Sample complete. Ready to continue?