Tizzie Robinson-Gordon journal: the villa, the moon boot, and a gravel bike
We are really pleased to introduce Tizzie Robinson-Gordon as the latest of The British Continental’s 2026 journal contributors. In her opening entry, she takes us from a broken ankle in a Calpe villa garden to a return to the Scottish scene six weeks later — via a meditation on a gravel bike she does not need.
We are really pleased to introduce Tizzie Robinson-Gordon as the latest of The British Continental’s 2026 journal contributors. Tizzie, 25 and based in Edinburgh, juggles three concurrent lives: a full-time consultancy job, a soigneur role with Edinburgh Bike Fitting Race Team and her own racing on the Scottish scene. Few of our contributors see the domestic calendar from quite that many vantage points, and we are looking forward to a year of her writing.
I’m Tizzie, short for Isobelle, 25, based in Edinburgh, and currently living three lives at once: full-time consultant, part-time soigneur, and bike racer on the Scottish scene. That’s not the start of a bad ‘walks into a pub’ joke my father would pull at the family dinner table, but it is an accurate description of the concurrent themes in my life.
I had watched my close friend Cammy Mason do them approximately four thousand times and decided, with the kind of confidence usually reserved for people who are about to break an ankle, that they looked pretty doable
It’s April, the season has started and I have finally lost my dreaded moon boot. The moon boot was the result of attempting cyclocross mounts and dismounts, in February, in a villa garden in Calpe. I had watched my close friend Cammy Mason do them approximately four thousand times and decided, with the kind of confidence usually reserved for people who are about to break an ankle, that they looked pretty doable. I was wrong about that in a specific, audible way, and spent the rest of the evening being driven backwards and forwards from Calpe to Denia hospital with a half-cast, a pair of crutches and an extortionate medical bill because, as always, I had forgotten to organise travel and health insurance.
The bill was just shy of €1,000. I speak enough Spanish to order a coffee from Café Seamos, and approximately enough for ChatGPT to conjugate ‘avulsion fracture’, ‘suspected ligament damage’ and ‘eight weeks’. Over the course of 48 hours, I spoke to three different doctors, each of whom had a slightly different opinion about the severity of the damage on the X-ray. For my parents, this was unsettling; personally, I found it somewhat liberating. The fourth doctor, a close friend’s father and conveniently an NHS foot and ankle surgeon, sent me a WhatsApp telling me riding a bike ‘should’ be fine.
Should.
I flew home early from camp, which immediately created two problems that, in my head at the time, felt approximately equivalent in scale: a broken ankle, and the fact I had already signed off a week of annual leave I was no longer using. The ankle, at least, had a treatment plan. Claiming back the annual leave required negotiation.
Image: supplied
I work in central Edinburgh for a global consultancy, which, in practice, means I make PowerPoints and build optimisation models for a living. It is a job I genuinely quite like: I have an outstanding work-life balance, colleagues who also cycle, and an ability to do my pre-race openers on my occasional bike commutes. I have, however, been politely banned from every internal step-count and active-minutes challenge the firm runs, on the grounds that racking up 50 hours of bike activity during a two-week training camp in Spain is not really in the ‘spirit of corporate wellbeing’. No more John Lewis gift cards under the guise of training for me.
The bike was the one place in my entire day in which I was allowed to pretend, briefly, that February had not happened. But don’t ask me to describe the pain of unclipping
Here is what I worked out over the course of the first week back in Edinburgh. The moon boot was an immobilising device, and an immobilising device was, functionally, indistinguishable from what my road shoes do to my ankle on the bike. A pedal stroke is not a load-bearing movement. A pedal stroke is, in fact, considerably less load-bearing than walking from my front door to the office. And so — and this is the part I would like anyone with medical training to skip — the bike became the one activity for which I was permitted to remove the boot. 15 minutes on the turbo. An hour. A café ride, on flat roads; the bike was a loophole. The bike was a privilege! The bike was the one place in my entire day in which I was allowed to pretend, briefly, that February had not happened. But don’t ask me to describe the pain of unclipping.
I spent the following four weeks doing minimal intensity, on the turbo or doing endless Arthur’s Seat laps (the Edinburgh equivalent of Richmond Park) for fear of pain emerging the moment I left the city. I spent a while making up various stories as to how I had broken my ankle, but it quickly became known across various local cycling clubs that I was quite literally the village idiot. By mid-March, I had turned 25, I was back to training properly, and then improbably, I rode the first two rounds of the Scottish Scotia Series and came 11th and then seventh at the second, taking the moon boot off before the neutral roll-out.
Image: supplied
I think it’s worth saying out loud that seventh at a Scottish regional road race is, objectively, the best result I have had in more than a year, and came six weeks after a doctor told me riding ‘should’ be fine. I don’t want to make it bigger than it is. It is not a National Series result. It is not even close to the level the girls I train with most weekdays are operating at. But the Scottish scene is excellent now, the Handsling Alba girls are flying, the depth is deeper than it has been in years, and seventh out of that field, on a foot that was technically meant to be resting, feels like a small, private victory I am going to quietly hold on to.
It is also the exact kind of result that would sound impressive to a boy I am trying to impress, which brings me neatly to the gravel bike. The gravel bike is not, strictly speaking, a bike I need. I have a road bike. A very nice road bike, actually, a Factor that I mentally insure against theft every time I let it out of my sight, and which I would not, under any circumstances, leave outside a pub in Stockbridge.
The gravel bike is not, strictly speaking, a bike I need. I have a road bike… But there is a boy. I will not be more specific than that. And the boy rides gravel
But there is a boy. I will not be more specific than that. And the boy rides gravel. And I have been doing quite a lot of thinking, recently, about how much easier it would be to lock up a gravel bike outside a pub than it would be to lock up the Factor, which currently dictates the geography of my entire social life on the basis of which Edinburgh beer gardens I can actually see it from. A gravel bike is, in this specific sense, a social lubricant. It is also, I am telling myself, with the confidence of someone who has already opened several tabs, very useful for post-ankle base miles on forgiving surfaces, and for the kind of long mixed-terrain adventures that keep you sane over a Scottish winter, and for, look, mainly it’s the pub thing.
I will report back on whether I buy it. I will not be reporting on the boy.
Then there is, of course, the other job. The one that doesn’t pay. I help part time with Elijah Kwon’s Elite Scottish Men’s Edinburgh Bike Fitting Race Team. They opened their domestic campaign with me in the feed zone at Gifford National B, with a spectacular win by Ahron. This weekend they were at Rutland–Melton CiCLE Classic without me, which is the one bit of the calendar I am genuinely happy to miss. I am, for the avoidance of doubt, the most spectacularly car-sick human. I can be sick anywhere. A CiCLE convoy on English B-roads and gravel tracks, on a Sunday morning, would have rendered me genuinely useless as a soigneur and possibly quite a lot worse as a human being.
Image: supplied
Later in the season, I will, almost certainly, find myself in Eastern Europe at a UCI 2.2, often as the only woman on staff because we begged our way onto the start sheet with a half-decent bottle of local Scottish whisky. This is the version of the job that doesn’t make the race reports: checking the organisation-provided hotel beds for bedbugs at 11pm the night before stage one, mixing 60 bottles at 6am on a bathroom floor, negotiating the who-forgot-their-toothbrush group chat, and, on one memorable occasion, writing off the hire team car approximately 20 minutes before the final stage of the race in Lithuania. I would like, on the record, to apologise in advance to whichever car hire desk in Kosovo or Romania or Slovenia ends up dealing with me this summer. I will bring yet more whisky.
The best bit, the bit that makes all of the above add up to something, is lending half the team my bike because we don’t have spare frames for the shorter boys, and then still squeezing in my own intervals before their stage starts because, despite everything, I have got my own season to train for.
There is something wonderfully absurd about holding a development team together with caffeine gels, cable ties and borrowed frames, then rolling back into the convoy pretending this is all completely normal because there aren’t the finances to do it any other way
At this point my extra-small, slightly bashed Factor has done more race miles under other people than under me, which I am choosing to classify as community service. There is something wonderfully absurd about holding a development team together with caffeine gels, cable ties and borrowed frames, then rolling back into the convoy pretending this is all completely normal because there aren’t the finances to do it any other way. Being responsible for a group of young riders who are also my best friends, chasing something bigger than the domestic scene, has shown me the sport from the inside out: the strain, the joy, the doubt, the makeshift family assembled on stolen chairs in car parks between stages. I use my own racing experience to help my friends chase the top, even if I am not chasing it myself.
Three lives, a possible second bike, and one moon boot in a bin bag in my bedroom. It’s April, the season has started, and for the first time in a long time, I am so excited for the rest of it.
We are really pleased to introduce Tizzie Robinson-Gordon as the latest of The British Continental’s 2026 journal contributors. Tizzie, 25 and based in Edinburgh, juggles three concurrent lives: a full-time consultancy job, a soigneur role with Edinburgh Bike Fitting Race Team and her own racing on the Scottish scene. Few of our contributors see the domestic calendar from quite that many vantage points, and we are looking forward to a year of her writing.
I’m Tizzie, short for Isobelle, 25, based in Edinburgh, and currently living three lives at once: full-time consultant, part-time soigneur, and bike racer on the Scottish scene. That’s not the start of a bad ‘walks into a pub’ joke my father would pull at the family dinner table, but it is an accurate description of the concurrent themes in my life.
It’s April, the season has started and I have finally lost my dreaded moon boot. The moon boot was the result of attempting cyclocross mounts and dismounts, in February, in a villa garden in Calpe. I had watched my close friend Cammy Mason do them approximately four thousand times and decided, with the kind of confidence usually reserved for people who are about to break an ankle, that they looked pretty doable. I was wrong about that in a specific, audible way, and spent the rest of the evening being driven backwards and forwards from Calpe to Denia hospital with a half-cast, a pair of crutches and an extortionate medical bill because, as always, I had forgotten to organise travel and health insurance.
The bill was just shy of €1,000. I speak enough Spanish to order a coffee from Café Seamos, and approximately enough for ChatGPT to conjugate ‘avulsion fracture’, ‘suspected ligament damage’ and ‘eight weeks’. Over the course of 48 hours, I spoke to three different doctors, each of whom had a slightly different opinion about the severity of the damage on the X-ray. For my parents, this was unsettling; personally, I found it somewhat liberating. The fourth doctor, a close friend’s father and conveniently an NHS foot and ankle surgeon, sent me a WhatsApp telling me riding a bike ‘should’ be fine.
Should.
I flew home early from camp, which immediately created two problems that, in my head at the time, felt approximately equivalent in scale: a broken ankle, and the fact I had already signed off a week of annual leave I was no longer using. The ankle, at least, had a treatment plan. Claiming back the annual leave required negotiation.
I work in central Edinburgh for a global consultancy, which, in practice, means I make PowerPoints and build optimisation models for a living. It is a job I genuinely quite like: I have an outstanding work-life balance, colleagues who also cycle, and an ability to do my pre-race openers on my occasional bike commutes. I have, however, been politely banned from every internal step-count and active-minutes challenge the firm runs, on the grounds that racking up 50 hours of bike activity during a two-week training camp in Spain is not really in the ‘spirit of corporate wellbeing’. No more John Lewis gift cards under the guise of training for me.
Here is what I worked out over the course of the first week back in Edinburgh. The moon boot was an immobilising device, and an immobilising device was, functionally, indistinguishable from what my road shoes do to my ankle on the bike. A pedal stroke is not a load-bearing movement. A pedal stroke is, in fact, considerably less load-bearing than walking from my front door to the office. And so — and this is the part I would like anyone with medical training to skip — the bike became the one activity for which I was permitted to remove the boot. 15 minutes on the turbo. An hour. A café ride, on flat roads; the bike was a loophole. The bike was a privilege! The bike was the one place in my entire day in which I was allowed to pretend, briefly, that February had not happened. But don’t ask me to describe the pain of unclipping.
I spent the following four weeks doing minimal intensity, on the turbo or doing endless Arthur’s Seat laps (the Edinburgh equivalent of Richmond Park) for fear of pain emerging the moment I left the city. I spent a while making up various stories as to how I had broken my ankle, but it quickly became known across various local cycling clubs that I was quite literally the village idiot. By mid-March, I had turned 25, I was back to training properly, and then improbably, I rode the first two rounds of the Scottish Scotia Series and came 11th and then seventh at the second, taking the moon boot off before the neutral roll-out.
I think it’s worth saying out loud that seventh at a Scottish regional road race is, objectively, the best result I have had in more than a year, and came six weeks after a doctor told me riding ‘should’ be fine. I don’t want to make it bigger than it is. It is not a National Series result. It is not even close to the level the girls I train with most weekdays are operating at. But the Scottish scene is excellent now, the Handsling Alba girls are flying, the depth is deeper than it has been in years, and seventh out of that field, on a foot that was technically meant to be resting, feels like a small, private victory I am going to quietly hold on to.
It is also the exact kind of result that would sound impressive to a boy I am trying to impress, which brings me neatly to the gravel bike. The gravel bike is not, strictly speaking, a bike I need. I have a road bike. A very nice road bike, actually, a Factor that I mentally insure against theft every time I let it out of my sight, and which I would not, under any circumstances, leave outside a pub in Stockbridge.
But there is a boy. I will not be more specific than that. And the boy rides gravel. And I have been doing quite a lot of thinking, recently, about how much easier it would be to lock up a gravel bike outside a pub than it would be to lock up the Factor, which currently dictates the geography of my entire social life on the basis of which Edinburgh beer gardens I can actually see it from. A gravel bike is, in this specific sense, a social lubricant. It is also, I am telling myself, with the confidence of someone who has already opened several tabs, very useful for post-ankle base miles on forgiving surfaces, and for the kind of long mixed-terrain adventures that keep you sane over a Scottish winter, and for, look, mainly it’s the pub thing.
I will report back on whether I buy it. I will not be reporting on the boy.
Then there is, of course, the other job. The one that doesn’t pay. I help part time with Elijah Kwon’s Elite Scottish Men’s Edinburgh Bike Fitting Race Team. They opened their domestic campaign with me in the feed zone at Gifford National B, with a spectacular win by Ahron. This weekend they were at Rutland–Melton CiCLE Classic without me, which is the one bit of the calendar I am genuinely happy to miss. I am, for the avoidance of doubt, the most spectacularly car-sick human. I can be sick anywhere. A CiCLE convoy on English B-roads and gravel tracks, on a Sunday morning, would have rendered me genuinely useless as a soigneur and possibly quite a lot worse as a human being.
Later in the season, I will, almost certainly, find myself in Eastern Europe at a UCI 2.2, often as the only woman on staff because we begged our way onto the start sheet with a half-decent bottle of local Scottish whisky. This is the version of the job that doesn’t make the race reports: checking the organisation-provided hotel beds for bedbugs at 11pm the night before stage one, mixing 60 bottles at 6am on a bathroom floor, negotiating the who-forgot-their-toothbrush group chat, and, on one memorable occasion, writing off the hire team car approximately 20 minutes before the final stage of the race in Lithuania. I would like, on the record, to apologise in advance to whichever car hire desk in Kosovo or Romania or Slovenia ends up dealing with me this summer. I will bring yet more whisky.
The best bit, the bit that makes all of the above add up to something, is lending half the team my bike because we don’t have spare frames for the shorter boys, and then still squeezing in my own intervals before their stage starts because, despite everything, I have got my own season to train for.
At this point my extra-small, slightly bashed Factor has done more race miles under other people than under me, which I am choosing to classify as community service. There is something wonderfully absurd about holding a development team together with caffeine gels, cable ties and borrowed frames, then rolling back into the convoy pretending this is all completely normal because there aren’t the finances to do it any other way. Being responsible for a group of young riders who are also my best friends, chasing something bigger than the domestic scene, has shown me the sport from the inside out: the strain, the joy, the doubt, the makeshift family assembled on stolen chairs in car parks between stages. I use my own racing experience to help my friends chase the top, even if I am not chasing it myself.
Three lives, a possible second bike, and one moon boot in a bin bag in my bedroom. It’s April, the season has started, and for the first time in a long time, I am so excited for the rest of it.
Featured image: Supplied
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