Panic Stations at Ski Stations: Riding the Great Climbs in the Tour de France

By Conor MacNamara

Conor MacNamara rode more than fifty of the greatest climbs in the Tour de France to try and conquer his fear of heights. In the end, Conor suffered a breakdown and discovered that he suffered from a panic disorder and required treatment. This book documents Conor’s experiences in detail.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Feb 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9781528951678

Conor MacNamara

Conor MacNamara is new to the publishing industry. He is involved in raising the profile of mental health awareness in County Down in Northern Ireland. Conor is currently working on his second book, entitled Classic Albums: Volume One, as well as a follow-up volume to this book.

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About the Author

Conor MacNamara is new to the publishing industry. He is involved in raising the profile of mental health awareness in County Down in Northern Ireland. Conor is currently working on his second book, entitled Classic Albums: Volume One, as well as a follow-up volume to this book.

Dedication

This book reaches out especially to people that struggle with mental health issues. All proceeds raised will be donated to local organisations in Ballynahinch in County Down, Northern Ireland that seek to help people with mental health issues.

Copyright Information ©

Conor MacNamara 2022

The right of Conor MacNamara to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781786129925 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781786127341 (Hardback)

ISBN 9781528951678 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2022

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd®

1 Canada Square

Canary Wharf

London

E14 5AA

Acknowledgement

I’d especially like to thank Anne and my dad for all their amazing support in helping me write this book. I couldn’t have done this without them.

I’d like to thank the following people who all helped in their own way: my grandparents, my mum (rest in peace), Heather, Noah, extended family, friends, and work colleagues.

Alan, Brendan, Cormac, Seán, Ciaran, Darragh, Gerry, Elena, Martin and Flora from Sport Active, Paddy, and Olive that ran the Pyrénées Cycling Lodge in Saint-Savin.

Niamh and Mark, that now run the lodge.

Geoff and Vic, that run The Free Range Chalet in Luchon.

Ian and Kate that run the Pyrénées Bike Hire in Saint-Mamet/Luchon.

Sport 2000 in Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne, Hôtel Saint-Georges in Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne, Hotel des Alpes in Bourg d’Oisans, Cycle et Sports bike shop in Bourg d’Oisans, Hôtel Alliey & Spa in Le Monêtier-les-Bains, Hôtel Domaine des Tilleuls in Malaucène, Hotel Saint-Martin in Colmar, Le Petit Dru hotel in Morzine, Alpine-Sports bike shop in Morzine.

Jerry from Cycling Souvenirs.

My doctor in Dublin.

Jennifer in Sandyford.

Hollingsworths bike shop in Kilmacud.

I’d also like to thank all the lads in the Red High that supported and helped out with our fundraising cause in memory of Quinny, as well as his family. And thanks to my close family and friends for their support when I was very sick.

A massive thanks to Sadhbh O’Shea for her generosity. Sadhbh was born in Ireland and lives in the Isle of Man. Sadhbh’s passion for cycling and writing led her to study sport journalism at university and she has been writing about the sport for ten years, including with Procycling Magazine, Cyclingnews, the BBC, and now VeloNews.

Finally, a special acknowledgement to all those people that were responsible for building the incredible mountain roads and passes in France and to all the mountain road-clearing crews that work hard every year after the winter months to clear the high mountain roads from snow, so that people like me can go there and indulge in our passion and live the dream, and sometimes, live the nightmare, too.

Foreword by Sadhbh O’Shea

When Conor asked me to write the foreword for this book, he urged me to emphasise what the purpose of this book ultimately was. From talking to Conor, he is acutely aware of his own mental health struggles, which he has endured throughout his life. It culminated in a breakdown during the summer of 2018 at the age of 41 that left him housebound. After being diagnosed with a panic disorder, he began the journey along the lengthy road to recovery that involved undergoing psychotherapy and taking a daily dose of medication.

From talking to Conor, I know he doesn’t have any regrets and he tries to live life in the present, but I also know that he feels life would have been far easier had he reached out for help earlier. Conor is very driven about helping young people who have mental health problems, so that they can avoid the same trauma he went through. His openness about what he has been through has been eye-opening and amazing to see.

Awareness and support for mental health is an issue close to my own heart. While perhaps not as severe as what Conor went through, I have had my own struggles with anxiety. It can be exhausting and has left me unwilling to leave my own house at times. It was part of the reason I left my job in the UK to move back to the Isle of Man to be with my family. I have got better at switching off from outside stresses, which was a particular challenge when it became my job to report on the coronavirus pandemic, and finding the small things that make me happy. Whether it be a walk outside, a chat on the phone with a friend or family member or treating myself to a meal of my favourite foods, I’ve found that making time to be good to myself has helped me.

My younger sister has also endured problems with anxiety that built up over a long period of time and left my parents despairing. She would hardly leave the house, stopped eating properly, and stayed up all night playing video games and sleeping during the day. Despite their best efforts, it wasn’t until an awful workplace interaction that my sister realised that she needed help. She finally contacted a doctor herself, was placed on medication and started working towards regaining her physical and mental health. She has since stopped taking medication, moved into her own flat, and started building a career for herself, but she needed to take that first step.

Poor mental health is a problem that will affect nearly all of us at some point in our lives and it is important to address it. Healing is not as straight forward as mending a broken bone and what works for one person may not work for another, but I do hope that Conor’s books and his own experiences can help in some way.

Part I

Panic Stations at Ski Stations

I was seven years old when I first became aware that I might be mentally impaired in some way. I’d see the older lads arriving home from school at the Red High and feel that I’d never get the chance to join them in four years. Even at that early age, fear ruled my life and death always felt like it was just around the corner. I was an extremely anxious kid. I never talked to anyone about it until I was housebound at the age of 41.

For years, I tried to convince myself that other than suffering from an acute fear of heights, I just felt nervous in certain social situations. This fear of heights thing, which is commonly known as acrophobia could be very debilitating in certain situations. It didn’t prevent me from trying to conquer it many times though. Writing this book was initially another attempt at that.

For obvious reasons, doing a bungee jump was never a realistic goal of mine. It just wouldn’t be possible for someone like me to jump off a high bridge for the ‘craic’. It bothered me when I met a Japanese lady in Australia in 2003, who had just jumped off a high bridge. She was 82 years of age.

Six weeks later, I hopped on a bus in Wanaka in New Zealand and headed for Queenstown, i.e., the self-styled adventure capital of the world. I was a nervous wreck and hadn’t slept in several nights. I parked myself in the back seat of the bus beside another lad from Ireland. The two of us sat in silence as the bus made its way towards a suspension bridge which was the world’s first commercial bungee jumping site. The bus was full with tourists, but we were the only two passengers that had signed up to jump off the bridge. When the bus pulled up at the jumping site, Damien bolted for the toilet and puked his guts up. I was in the next cubicle doing the same.

Fifteen minutes later, as two men strapped my legs to an elastic cord high above the river, Damien screamed as he threw himself off the bridge. It was my turn next, but when I overheard one of the men mutter that chap there has lost his mind, I decided to walk back to the bus. The whole thing was just too much for me to deal with. Then, I had a brainwave… "If I could just shut my eyes when I jump and count to four, it will be all over and I will be cured of this horrible affliction forever."

A few minutes later I closed my eyes, jumped and counted to four. I felt a stillness. Ha! I’ve done it!!! I fucking did it!!! I roared out. I opened my eyes expecting to see the river just a few feet below me but instead, I was back up nearly level again with the bridge. I looked down and screamed in terror. I’d been in such a state that I forgot I would oscillate back up to the bridge after hitting the bottom. I shut my eyes again and only opened them when I was sure that all the kinetic energy in the rope had been released. I was safe. Damien and myself jumped on each other like two lovers that hadn’t seen one another in years. The euphoria was so intense, it lasted for weeks. I had stared down the phobia and won and the demon would be banished forever. Now, I just needed to find some proof.

I signed up for a skydive over Lake Taupo on the North Island a few weeks later. Sleep was again virtually impossible in the days leading up to it. A few of us went for a few pints the night before, but I felt like I was going to have a nervous breakdown. The following morning, I was sitting in a plane that would take us up to 12,000 feet and in the middle of the worst nightmare of my young life.

Once we were well above the clouds, I asked the instructor if we were nearly at our destination yet. When she showed me the altimeter, the reading was only at 1,000 feet and I nearly shit myself. I reached forward and placed my hand on her leg, like a young child clutching for support. She firmly removed my hand and scowled at me. Once we reached 12,000 feet, the door of the plane was flung open and we threw ourselves into oblivion. The euphoria lasted for days, but I knew that I hadn’t been cured.

Things got worse after that, with numerous episodes on top of skyscrapers in New York and Chicago, where security staff had to help me get back down to the ground because I had lost my mind. I didn’t realise at the time that these episodes were panic attacks.

I struggled on through various episodes on aeroplanes and even driving up some of the mountain roads in Ireland and in France. The worst incident was driving around a hairpin bend on a mountain road in Donegal, panicking, stopping the car, putting the handbrake on and then realising that the hill start would leave no room for error, with a sheer drop directly behind us. I jumped out of the car and stopped an elderly couple in a car that were passing by. The man quite rightly thought he had encountered some crazed lunatic. He kindly agreed to drive my car to the top of the mountain pass. We thanked him at the top for his kindness and then Anne blew a gasket at me.

There was a similar episode in County Kerry and on a mountain pass in France. I’d end up making a 13-point turn in the car and then drive back down to safety, get the map out and then figure out a much longer route to get to whatever destination we were heading to.

My grandparents raised me in Newcastle, in County Down. My mum had a breakdown when I was born, she would spend the rest of her life in hospital care. I never understood what a breakdown was until I had one myself less than six months before my mum died in 2018.

I got involved with sport at an early age – Gaelic football, soccer, running, tennis, golf and cycling. My first memory of sitting on a bicycle is leaning against a wall on a BMX and chatting to the girl that lived across the road. One minute, I was showing off to her and the next minute the bike wobbled and I fell off and partially severed my index finger. The screams could be heard all over the neighbourhood and in my grandpa’s car, on the way to the hospital. I was five years old and was too embarrassed to ever talk to the girl again.

By the time I was a teenager, I’d head to Tollymore Forest Park with my friends Chris and Paul and we’d race each other up the climbs on our mountain bikes. Chris and myself both wanted to be the American rider Greg LeMond, who was the Tour de France champion at the time. The lads would race down the descents too and they’d always have to wait ages for me at the bottom. I hated descents because of my nerves.

The summers would be spent playing Gaelic football. My nerves were bad and an irrational anxiety within would nearly paralyse me, before and during certain games. After one particular close defeat in the county final when I was captain, deep down I knew that it was my anxiety that cost us the match. My mental health deteriorated, my weight ballooned over the winter and I began to lose interest in playing sport.

The Red High in Downpatrick was a great school, but depression was starting to cause my school grades to suffer and my behaviour to become erratic. In no time at all, I went from being the grade A student to the troubled guy in the class.

One of the most popular guys in our year was Quinny. He was a brilliant soccer player and the English club Norwich City were interested in signing him. I was in the middle of a very dark depression when I was 17, and study periods in the library were wasted staring into space. My mood would pick up when I saw Quinny in the library and I always tried to sit at the table next to him. Quinny was one of those people in life that could always cheer you up no matter how bad you were feeling.

A few weeks later around Christmas time, the phone rang in our house late at night. It was obvious that whoever was calling, was delivering bad news. It was one of the girls in the Red High on the phone. It was about Quinny. He was gone. Myself and one of my mates from school went to a local bar and sat in silence as we milled back as much beer and spirits that we could consume in 45 minutes before staggering home in a mess.

The funeral the next day was immensely sad. No one could make any sense of what had happened. Everyone in our year was devastated, especially those that grew up with Quinny in Ballynahinch and those that had played soccer with him. His football club Ballynahinch Olympic retired his number 11 jersey. A service was held in the school oratory and one of his mates Danny bravely sang ‘Be Not Afraid’ as he fought back the tears. Danny also sang ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ at the funeral.

My own depression intensified after the New Year and one of the teachers intervened. We met after school hours to talk about whatever was troubling me, but I didn’t understand what was going wrong and by the end of January, I couldn’t get out of bed to go to school anymore. The family doctor called round to our house and prescribed medication for me, but I threw the tablets in the bin and tried to struggle on. I was too afraid to take them.

I moved to Dublin to go to college and make a fresh start, but the intense anxiety had followed me to Dublin. I struggled being in large groups of people, attending social events etc. I ignored it all and fobbed it off as just being nerves.

After entering the workforce, I crumbled in the face of office politics in a large multi-national firm. Alcohol became my new best friend. There were plenty of ups and downs in the years that followed. The downs normally coincided with feeling helpless in dealing with office behaviours, without support being available.

By 2011, I was fed up with feeling depressed and disappointed in myself. I decided to properly recommit my life to sport. I bought a rowing machine one evening after work and started rowing for an hour every night. The machine was fairly shite and it broke from overuse, so I bought another one, and then another one.

Obsessive behaviour had always been part of my make-up. I continued rowing every day for months on end but I fucking hated it. I needed something bigger than the piece of junk sitting in my living room. Then I had a moment of clarity. It had been staring me right in the face, without me even knowing it.

Mont Ventoux is a monster 22-kilometre climb in the south of France and known to many cyclists as arguably the greatest climb in the sport. My dad had taken on the challenge a few times and his stories about the climb and what an extreme challenge it was fascinated me. He was getting serious about the sport and was determined to break the two-hour mark on the climb, which is somewhat of a holy grail for amateur cyclists that ride it. He would be attempting the Ventoux again the following year in June 2014 and myself and my mate Cormac decided to join him on the adventure.

I loved watching the Tour de France as a kid and especially the summit finishes in the Alps and the Pyrénées. The riders were hard as nails. Ireland had two of the best cyclists in the world at the time. Sean Kelly was ranked world number one six years in a row, won nine monument classics, the Vuelta a España and many, many other major victories. Kelly was tough as fuck and a true legend in the sport. Stephen Roche is one of only two cyclists to win the Tour de France, Giro d’Italia and the World Road Race Championship in the same year, which he did in dramatic circumstances in 1987.

Other riders from Ireland had excelled in the Tour de France too, including Shay Elliott. Elliott’s career was littered with very fine achievements but sadly at the age of 36, Shay apparently took his own life just two weeks after his own father had died. Shay is a legend within the Irish cycling community and his impact was strongly felt in the European cycling scene.

Two moments really stood out for me, watching the Tour on television as a kid. The first was Roche’s legendary comeback on the upper slopes of the climb to La Plagne in the Alps in 1987. Such was his effort, Roche collapsed off his bicycle at the finish and as an oxygen mask was being put to his face, many people watching back at home must have thought he was on the verge of dying. The other memorable moment for me was watching LeMond and Miguel Indurain ride up through the incredible switchbacks high on Luz Ardiden in the Pyrénées in 1990. I was fascinated by the names of the towns in the mountains too – names such as Briançon, Gap and Bourg-d’Oisans.

Mont Ventoux featured in the Tour de France in 2013. Cormac and myself watched the Ventoux stage together on television in my apartment. The mountain looked so striking and the spectacle totally blew us away. We were both hooked. We bought bikes a few days later.

No climb in Ireland even remotely resembles anything like Mont Ventoux. We started out by climbing Howth Head, which is a small hill on the outskirts of Dublin. Then we stepped it up and started doing the bigger and better climbs in the Dublin and Wicklow mountains.

I had always struggled with self-care and I certainly wasn’t capable of looking after a bicycle. One Saturday in the middle of the Wicklow mountains, I realized that my brakes didn’t seem to be working. When I pulled over and examined them, I could see that the brake pads had completely worn out. It wasn’t much fun having to walk much of the way back to Dublin.

We joined my dad and his pals, Alan and Brendan for their weekly spins every Saturday morning through the mountains. We’d stop and have the craic in the coffee spots in Bray, Enniskerry and best of all in Laragh. A few other lads would sometimes join us too, including Seanie and my cousin Ciaran.

I became obsessed with climbing, although it is fair to say that it really was two obsessions – training and weight. I started smoking to help me eat less and replaced beer with lower-calorie spirits – something that five years later would come back to haunt me. I would get up at 5 am every morning to join my dad spinning in the gym before we went to work. Then, I started spinning after work too. Where the energy came from? I have no idea – the darkness within is my best guess.

As our pilgrimage to the Ventoux approached, my anxiety was intensifying about whether acrophobia would prevent me from reaching the top of the climb. A new obsession developed very quickly. Any time from then on, if I was researching a climb the words ‘sheer drop’ would be entered into the google search engine along with the name of the climb.

After nearly a year of waiting and training, June 2014 eventually arrived. Myself and my dad both broke two hours reasonably comfortably. The obsession with weight and training further intensified and the day after we returned to Dublin, I organized another trip to climb the Ventoux again. Breaking one hour and 30 minutes on the climb became a blind obsession for me for the next year. My training became animalistic and at one stage, I trained 56 days in a row without a single rest day. Most days in work, I could barely walk to the printer.

I turned my diet upside down and my weight started to drop considerably. My life had become a Ventoux obsession 24-7 and Anne would have to listen to my depleted drone every evening. She would be talking about something and I would be growing impatient and she would stop and say, Okay, will we talk about cycling? These days, the Ventoux feels like a dirty word in our apartment.

Within less than a year, I was nearly skin and bone. I took my obsession with weight to the limit and my dinner every evening consisted of just a small portion of raw Japanese fish. The food was tasteless but by June 2015, I touched just under 10 stone on the scales. Everyone I knew told me I looked sick and the whole thing was driving me to madness.

The mood swings could be horrendous. A simple request in Starbucks in the morning for an Americano was met with a polite Would you like anything else with that, sir? which was followed by: Look, if I fucking wanted something else, I would have fucking asked for it!

In June 2015, I climbed Mont Ventoux in one hour and 27 minutes and collapsed off the bike at the summit. I was delighted for a few minutes, hours or days but it still wasn’t enough. I wanted more, more, more.

I signed up for a 100-kilometre event in County Meath, but it was stressful. A near fatal accident with a tractor was bad enough and then later, I overcooked it on a roundabout and crashed heavily somersaulting over the handlebars. Even before the nurse in the ambulance was asking me if I knew what my name was, I promised myself I’d just stick to the climbing from then on.

One lazy hungover Sunday afternoon, I was browsing the internet and started looking up places to stay in the Pyrénées. Lo and behold! an Irish couple were running a cycling lodge in the Pyrénées. The attention to detail on their website was phenomenal and the lodge was located close to many of the major climbs in the range. The telephone call was made the following day and Paddy in the Pyrénées Cycling Lodge had his head wrecked answering questions for half an hour.

That first trip to the Pyrénées with my dad was an amazing experience and the memories stayed with us for a long time – riding the steep climbs, taking in the incredible scenery and observing the relaxed manner in which the people in the mountains in France lived. When we got back home, I would spend most of the next three years researching new climbs