The Virus That Keeps Coming Back (And What It Gave Me This Time)

The Virus That Keeps Coming Back (And What It Gave Me This Time)

This is the third time Epstein-Barr has taken me down.

Third time. I want you to sit with that for a second, because I had to. The first time felt like a fluke. The second felt like bad luck. The third time feels like the virus has my home address and a standing invitation.

For those who don’t know what EBV is — it’s the virus behind glandular fever, and once it’s in your system, it never really leaves. It sits dormant, biding its time, waiting for you to run yourself into the ground. And then it comes back. Not with a polite knock. More like a door kicked off its hinges.

The Curse

I’m off the bike.

That sentence shouldn’t be devastating, but if you’re reading this, you probably understand why it is. The bike isn’t just the bike. It’s the alarm clock that works. It’s the therapy I can actually afford. It’s the place where I process everything — grief, frustration, ambition, the noise of building something from nothing. Without it, all of that just sits there.

This bout has been the worst I’ve had. I’m not going to dress it up. There have been days where getting from the bedroom to the kitchen felt like a negotiation. Fatigue that doesn’t respond to sleep. A brain that runs at about 40% and keeps forgetting where it put the other 60%. The particular cruelty of EBV is that it looks like nothing from the outside. You don’t look sick. You just look slow. Vague. Like you’re not quite present — and you’re not, because your body is using every available resource just to keep the lights on.

The racing I’d planned? Gone. The long rides I’d been building toward? Gone. The training data, the power numbers, the sense of progression? All of it, paused. And unlike a broken collarbone or a torn muscle, there’s no surgery, no timeline, no clear roadmap back. You just wait. You rest. You try not to catastrophise. You mostly fail at that last one.

I won’t pretend there aren’t dark moments. There are. The kind where you wonder whether your body is simply telling you that you’ve asked too much of it for too long. Whether the life you’ve been building — the early mornings, the late nights, the constant output — was always going to end up here.

The Blessing

Here’s the thing about being forced to stop: you find out what you actually think about.

When I’m on the bike, I process. When I’m off it, I build. And this time around — maybe because the illness has been longer, or maybe because I was already at a crossroads — I found myself going all in on something I’d been circling for a long time.

I gave up almost everything to build it. Commitments, distractions, the comfortable contracts. I cleared the decks. And in the strange, suspended quiet of recovery — lying on the sofa at 2pm on a Tuesday, not because I wanted to be, but because my body left me no other option — I started building something that I genuinely believe can change how endurance athletes think about their nutrition.

I’m not ready to tell you exactly what it is yet.

But I’ll tell you this: it came from years of frustration with my own training. From realising that the one variable most athletes either obsess over with anxiety or completely ignore is fuel — and that neither approach is serving us well. That the relationship between training load and nutrition is more dynamic than most of us treat it. That we deserve better tools.

What I’m building sits right at that intersection. It’s designed for people who take their performance seriously, whether they’re racing or just trying to show up consistently. It adapts. It thinks about your training, not just your calories. And it’s built by someone who’s living the problem — who has, quite literally, had nothing to do for weeks except lie still and think about how to solve it.

There’s something almost funny about that. I got taken down by a virus that forces rest, and I used the rest to build something for people who never rest enough. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe you have to be knocked flat before you can see clearly what you’ve been missing.

What Comes Next

I’ll be back on the bike. I know this, even on the days it doesn’t feel true. EBV doesn’t get to keep the bike. It gets to borrow it for a while, and then I take it back.

But whatever comes next — the return to training, the racing, the long days in the saddle — it’s going to be different. Because I’m coming back with something I didn’t have before: a reason beyond the ride itself. A thing I made, in the dark, when there was nothing else to do but think.

If you’re an endurance athlete — cyclist, triathlete, runner, whatever your discipline — keep an eye out. What I’m building is for you. It’s almost ready. And I think you’re going to find it pretty useful.

More soon.

Julian