All Mark Pollock Blogs
8 years on from intensive care
Yesterday, 8 years ago, I fell from a second storey bedroom window onto the concrete below. I’m not sure how it happened, but I suspect I got up to go to the bathroom and, being blind, using my hand to feel my way, that night, my hand found an open space where the...
read moreYou Can’t Out Train Your Diet
#TeamUnbreakable #SmartBike #FastTrackingACure #Paralysis I was apprehensive as I rolled in my wheelchair onto the scales in the National Rehabilitation Hospital. The screen said 111.3 kilograms for the combined weight of my chair and me. And, as I reversed off the...
read moreRobots, Smart Bikes and Team UnBreakable
My empty wheelchair disappears behind me as I walk across the sports hall in my robotic legs. Dr. Neil Fleming monitors the electrical stimulation unit that is pushing current into my damaged spinal cord. And, Simon O’Donnell shadows me calling out the data from my...
read moreBack in the saddle
#SmartBike #TeamUnbreakable #ArrowElectronics The streets of Belfast were nearly empty, just a handful of buses and the odd car easing through the city. It was the summer of 1994 when the Tour De France had not yet been tarnished by widespread drugs scandals and my...
read moreThe Test Is Just The Evidence Of What You Do In Training
The sweat is running down my face, my arms are burning and the rain is soaking me through. Simon is up front on our tandem bike changing up through the gears and calling “go” at the start of another push during today’s interval session. We’re training for my first...
read moreThe Day I Didn’t Die
I sat in my wheelchair eating a sausage and bacon roll as the wind gusted through the tented café at Henley Royal Regatta. Little has changed about the place since I first raced there as a 19 year old, the café still faces the river, the boat tents are still to my...
read moreWhat the polar explorers teach us about resilience
There is no cure for paralysis and I am paralysed. So my motivation to connect people around the world to create a cure may simply seem like a personal desire to walk, to feel, to be my old self again. The fall that broke my back in 2010 leaving me with no movement or...
read moreYes, You Need More Than Just You
Last Saturday morning I woke up, facing into my seventh and eighth training sessions in four days and I struggled. As my care assistant knocked the door, let himself in and made his way up the stairs in my house, I wanted to tell him to turn around and let me sleep...
read moreMy Beating Heart
I spend almost every day in the gym. I wear sports kit almost all of the time and I’m forever banging on about my diet and training. But I never have to change my kit after training because I never really sweat. The reason that I never really sweat is that my...
read moreInspired To Eat Like Natural Born Heroes
My friend Johnny Johnston recently recommended a book by Christopher McDougall called "Natural Born Heroes - How a Daring Band of Misfits Mastered the Lost Secrets of Strength and Endurance". 20 years ago Johnny and I used to row together at university and since then...
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