'Today is the day!

Confounding doctors’ expectations, Chris Riley is back on his bike and savouring every moment, more than a year on from a devastating diagnosis

- David Bradford

The last time I’d spoken to Chris Riley it was January 2020. We chatted about how his fitness had progressed since he took part in CW’s Training Makeover series the previous spring. The changes to the 28-year-old’s schedule were proving beneficial, he told me; he was feeling much fitter and even more motivated. It came as a sickening gutpunch, therefore, when just seven months later I received an email from Riley’s sister-in-law informing me that he had been diagnosed with inoperable stomach cancer and given only months to live.

The fact I am video-chatting with him now, more than a year after that diagnosis, tells you that Riley has defied the prognosis – but it’s even better than that: he’s back on his bike and the cancer is in retreat. Struggling to comprehend his rollercoaster journey since we last spoke, I ask him to start at the beginning. “After the Training Makeover in May through to November [2019] I felt fine and was enjoying my cycling,” he recalls, “but then I started feeling just not right, really anxious from out of nowhere.” Riley had no history of anxiety; even now, telling me about the darkest chapter of his life, the Yorkshireman exudes an easy, happygo-lucky manner befitting of his job as a barber. Yet the psychological symptoms grew so severe that he started having panic attacks and was signed off work. “The doctor gave me antidepressants, which levelled off my anxiety but still I didn’t feel right, like an alien in my own body.”