Surviving Purely Out Of Spite

Four years ago I went up Snowdon in a wheelchair. Last Saturday I walked it, and I have the chest-strap data to prove the wheelchair was easier.

So next June I’m going back with a mountain bike, to ride down the exact rock I had to haul myself up by hand. On a shoulder that’s been torn three times. In flat shoes.

This week: two knees with no cartilage, walking down the Snowdon Mountain Railway because it had better grip, a summit stop that turned me into a statue, and a watch that scored the worst four and a half hours of my life as cheap and recorded seven hours of standing still. Plus my first ever DOMS at nearly sixty, seven hours on cold trains, and not being able to stand up at Peterborough station.

No lesson. No redemption arc. A taxi home.

Survival without the motivational poster.

Contains frank discussion of chronic illness, disability, joint injury, incontinence, and past opiate use and mortality risk.

• The Tenacious Cyclist

My family has a tradition. First heart attack in your twenties, second in your thirties, lovely funeral, very young crowd. My cardiologist says it's when, not if. I'm fifty-nine. Nobody can explain why.

This week: being adopted and discovering that the diagnostic pathway for Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome is "go and find your relatives". Familial hypercholesterolaemia, Klinefelter Syndrome and the genetic firewall. A heart attack that has had more previews than anything in the West End, and an ECG that keeps coming back "unremarkable". Why the official medical plan is to have it and see. A generation raised on Protect and Survive, a door and some tins.

And a confession. The host of a podcast against the motivational poster has, it turns out, written several. The evidence is read into the record.

No lessons. No redemption arc. Just the next appointment.

Surviving Purely Out Of Spite. Survival without the motivational poster.

The NHS wants 150 minutes of exercise a week. David did it on Monday. Then Tuesday. Then Wednesday. Then Thursday. On Friday he let himself go.

By three o'clock on Friday, David had done 750. That's five weeks' worth, with no event, no training plan and nobody sponsoring him. Four days in a row, a single day beat the weekly target. Friday only managed seventy percent. Friday is under review.

He did it on the following, according to blood tests taken on 23 September 2026:

• Testosterone: 0.7 nmol/L. The reference range is 6.7 to 25.7.
• LH: 20.0 u/L, against a range of 1.7 to 8.6.
• FSH: 39.9 u/L, against a range of 1.5 to 12.4.
• Haematocrit: 0.389 L/L, below range.
• Haemoglobin: 132 g/L, at the bottom of the range.
• Lipids: triglycerides 2.4 mmol/L, LDL 4.2 mmol/L, non-HDL 5.2 mmol/L.

The pituitary is shouting at the testes at three times the normal volume, and nobody is answering. There are fewer red cells carrying oxygen, which is the one thing endurance cheats pay good money to have more of. And the engine is running on bad oil. The strap still gave him a badge.

The episode reads the government's exercise guidelines line by line against a week of chest strap data. Along the way it finds a clinical test based on karaoke, stairs officially classed as vigorous exercise, and twenty years of pushing a wheelchair that counted as strength training all along.

Then comes the awkward part. The strap can't tell a hill from a kettle, and the only witness to the whole dataset is the least reliable one in the building.

The numbers are accurate. They're just not a complete account.

Three weeks after a hospital bed, I rode RideLondon at threshold heart rate, then wrote an essay about it that ended: "sometimes, it's enough."

I host a podcast that exists to set fire to motivational posters. I wrote a motivational poster.

So this week I read that essay back and cross-examine the man who wrote it, one line at a time. On trial: a promise to my doctors and my wife with a loophole big enough to ride through, an HRV of eleven milliseconds reported next to my average speed, and ninety grams of carbohydrate an hour pushed into a gut that once ignored thirty-two sachets of Picolax. There's also the claim that the mind can override physiology, from a man whose physiology has dislocated something three hundred and sixty thousand times.

No lesson. No redemption. Just the numbers, and a man who should have read them.

Survival without the motivational poster.

I Always Say Seven

I have been asked to rate my pain out of ten for fifty-six years. I have lied every single time.

This episode runs the one to ten pain scale through a life it was never built to measure. Growing pains at three. Codeine at seven. Dislocations from ten. Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, diagnosed in five minutes, thirty-six years late. Complex Regional Pain Syndrome. A prescription list that ended with a palliative care referral at forty, and two hundred and fifty-six days of withdrawal. Then a wheelchair up Snowdon, a bicycle I could not yet ride, a bramble hedge at the bottom of Truleigh Hill, and a spreadsheet nobody asked for.

Also covered: why the faces chart looks like someone whose train has been cancelled, why paracetamol has tenure, and why spite is the only renewable energy source delivered on NHS letterhead.

There is no lesson. There is a form. I said seven.

Contains frank discussion of chronic pain, opioid dependence and withdrawal, and palliative care. If any of it lands close to home: Samaritans, 116 123 (free, 24 hours). FRANK, for drug information and support, 0300 123 6600.

Medical speak for "It's all in your head

Adopted, returned to the shop, and dislocating since the eighties. Three hundred and sixty thousand dislocations later, the paperwork still says "your tests look fine."

This week: codeine at seven, two knee operations that made it worse, a diagnosis that took thirty-eight years and five minutes, and enough morphine to supply a small town. There's methadone without the heroin, a 256-day detox with The Archers on, and a monthly check-in call while insects lived under my skin.

Then a wheelchair goes up Snowdon, a man who can't ride a bike invents a cycling challenge, and the inventor of the eighty percent rule eats three thousand percent of his carbohydrate limit on the way to Brighton. Sussex's portable toilets are still recovering.

No arc. No lesson. No redemption.

Content note: chronic pain, opioid dependency and withdrawal, hallucinations, medical trauma, and a past moment of wanting to die. Strong language throughout.

Livestock Cannot Testify

I rode 128 miles off-road. Solo. No toilets, no support. And I shat myself. Twice. In three days. Then I got back on the bike, because by now it's procedure.

The British state trusts you to diagnose your own diarrhoea for seven days. Nobody asks you for data. I have data.

This episode covers a gut that doesn't have a condition, it has a portfolio: chronic intestinal pseudo-obstruction, severe gastroparesis, dumping syndrome and borderline Stage 3 intestinal failure. It covers thirty-two sachets of Picolax that did absolutely nothing. And it covers blood pressure that goes from crisis high to crisis low without the courtesy of letting me faint, plus arteries that do a heart attack impression good enough to fool A&E.

Also: a seven-step survival procedure, why Gen X tells no one, and why I'm telling you.

Contains strong language, frank bodily detail, and a cow.

Welcome to the Surviving Purely Out Of Spite Podcast.

This is not an inspirational podcast.

No redemption arc. No motivational music. No tidy resolution.

This is the show where the same guest turns up every episode, tells another chapter of a story the medical establishment stopped knowing how to explain, and does it in the least heroic terms possible.

Survival. Spite. Spreadsheets.

This is Surviving Purely Out Of Spite. New episodes every Wednesday. Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts.

For the full story, head to TheTenaciousCyclist.co.uk

This week's guest shouldn't be here. Medically speaking.

He lives with Baroreflex Failure, Global Dysautonomia, Borderline Stage 3 Intestinal Failure, Classical type Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, Stage 4 bone-on-bone osteoarthritis across eight joints, and a gastrointestinal system so compromised oral medication is structurally unavailable.

His Garmin suggested a rest day.

He accumulated 252 intensity minutes.

In a heatwave.

His record is one thousand, four hundred.

He recovered in 72 hours.

This is the episode where the data stops making sense and the spite starts making everything else make sense.

Content note: chronic illness, severe pain, autonomic dysfunction, PTSD.

This week on Surviving Purely Out Of Spite, Jack explores what happens when chronic pain stops being a medical problem and becomes a full-time administrative career.

Today’s episode follows decades of undiagnosed Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, daily joint dislocations, opioid dependence, medical gaslighting, and the deeply modern experience of remaining professionally functional while your body quietly falls apart behind the scenes.

Because apparently: if you answer emails quickly enough, society will overlook almost anything.

Including catastrophic pain.

This episode is about:

• surviving on twenty percent relief
• performing wellness convincingly enough to stay employable
• shrinking your life around exhaustion without anyone noticing
• and becoming so accustomed to suffering that you start describing medical horror stories in the tone of someone explaining parking regulations

It’s darkly funny, brutally honest, and uncomfortably relatable for anyone who has ever:

• gone to work in severe pain
• minimised their own suffering to avoid becoming inconvenient
• or continued functioning purely because stopping was never a realistic option

This isn’t an episode about triumph.

It’s about endurance.

The exhausted, absurd, darkly hilarious bureaucracy of remaining alive inside a body that keeps raising formal complaints against you.

And if your nervous system is currently being held together by caffeine, pharmaceuticals, customer service voice, and spite…

Congratulations.

You are exactly the target audience.