Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by David Millar
List of Illustrations
Dedication
Title Page
Epigraph
The Racer
Welcome to the Suck
The Racing Calendar
January
I am Light, I am Strong
The Goals
‘Good winter?’
The Suck (2)
Tour Down Under
Tour Mediterranean
Tour of Qatar
Challenge Mallorca
Ryder
The Princess
Loose Ryder
Challenge Mallorca (2)
Stage Racers
Classics Riders
There’s Nothing Quite Like Racing in Flanders
Road Captain
Being Older
Postcards/Killing Me Softly
Film (1)
The Race to the Sun or the Race of the Two Seas?
Big Money C***s
Cav
Film (2)
Team Time Trialling
That Was Then …
La Classicissima di Primavera
Flanders
The Worst Crash Ever
The Theory of Crashes
Tour of Flanders
Scheldeprijs
The Hell of the North
Tyres
Cobbles
Don’t Fuck This Up
Mechanics
Farewell, Roubaix
Not the Ardennes
Not the Giro
Springtime in Catalunya
Bavaria
Early Summer in Catalunya
How to Race a Prologue
The Dauphiné
Fabian
Ryder (2)
Back Home
Tour Preparation
The Nationals (2013)
The Nationals (2014)
The Jersey
Monmouthshire
Charly
Garmin
Not the Tour de France
The Champs-Elysées, 2013
Letting Go
Not the Tour de France (2)
Velo Club Rocacorba
The Style Council
Glasgow
Washed up
The Honey Badger
Nathan
Eneco
Spain, and the National Characteristics of Racing
The Final Grand Tour
Team Time Trial (2)
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 6
Day 7
Day 8
Day 9
Rest Day
Day 10
Day 11
Day 12
Day 13
Day 14
Day 15
Day 16
Rest Day
Day 17
Day 18
Day 19
Day 20
Day 21 – The End of the Road
The Worlds
Circle Completed
Picture Section
Acknowledgements
Copyright
What is it really like to be a racer?
What is it like to be swept along at 60kmh in the middle of the pack? How does it feel to be reeled in from a solo breakaway metres from the line? What happens to the body during a high-speed chute? What tactics must teams employ to win the day, the jersey, the grand tour? How does a domestique keep going to the end of a stage once his job is done and his body exhausted? How does a time-trialist maintain his form when every muscle and sinew is screaming at him to stop? What sacrifices must a cyclist make to reach the highest levels? What is it like on the bus? In the hotels? What camaraderie is built in the confines of a team? What rivalries? How does it feel to be constantly on the road, away from loved ones, tasting one more calorie-counted hotel breakfast?
David Millar offers us a unique insight into the mind of a professional cyclist during his last year before retirement. Over the course of a season on the World Tour, Millar puts us in touch with the sights, smells and sounds of the sport – the barked instructions of a road captain in a sprint chain, the silence of a solo training ride. This is a book about youth and age, fresh-faced excitement and hard-earned experience. It is a love letter to cycling.
David Millar was a professional cyclist for eighteen years, and was the first Briton to wear the leader’s jerseys in the Tour de France, Vuelta a España and Giro d’Italia. He is now part of the ITV cycling commentary team and a key spokesman on anti-doping. His first book Racing Through the Dark was a bestseller and was shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award.
Racing Through the Dark
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Epub ISBN: 9781473521780
Version 1.0
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Yellow Jersey, an imprint of Vintage Publishing,
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,
London SW1V 2SA
Yellow Jersey is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
Copyright © David Millar 2015
David Millar has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published by Yellow Jersey in 2015
www.vintage-books.co.uk
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780224100069
The quotations from T. S. Eliot appear courtesy of the Estate of T. S. Eliot and Faber and Faber
To all my boys – I raced to impress you,
I raced to beat you, I raced for you; that is, until
my two favourite boys came on the scene: Archibald
Ignasi and Harvey Nicolau, you never knew,
this book is for you.
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
‘Ulysses’, Lord Alfred Tennyson
Nobody grows old merely by living a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.
‘Youth’, Samuel Ullman
There’s something very strange about a last race with your friends. I don’t know if there’s an ideal scenario. Vomiting all over yourself and being dropped certainly doesn’t sound like it would be the one, yet maybe it is. It’s fairly representative of what most of it has been like.
Christian Vande Velde, Dave Zabriskie and I had raced together over a period of fourteen years, which, in the grand scheme of things, is not so much, yet for us it has been a lifetime. That day, 22 September 2013, was the last time. We got our heads kicked in, yet we managed to enjoy ourselves, because without saying it I think we all knew we were going to miss each other – that they’d been golden days we were lucky to have lived through.
All three of us came into the sport at a bad time, when doping was rife and ethics were something that we knew of yet rarely saw put into practice along the shadowy roads of professional cycling. We came, we didn’t quite conquer, we doped, we sort of conquered, we crashed and burned, and some of us got back up and tried to fix the mess we’d made. It was a common narrative although the actions and consequences were different for each of us, and, sadly, there is enough collateral damage to haunt the sport for many years to come.
We know a lot about that time now. I’ve written about it, and so have many others. I want to write something else, a book that years from now my children can read and see what it was like, what their dad actually did all those years ago, the racer he was. But not only that, I want my friends from this generation to have something that will remind us of who we were. There was more to it than doping. We lived on the road because we loved to race.
I fucking hate January. It’s always a bastard of a month because there’s no soft tapping it back into the routine, it’s all systems go from the off. November and December is the time for the pedestrian, steady build-up; but it mustn’t be forgotten that all that controlled plodding along is in preparation for having all cylinders firing ready to go now. And right now, at the beginning of 2014, I feel like shit.
Christmas and New Year and then my birthday on 4 January is the worst trifecta possible for staying in shape. I can count on one hand the amount of times I have traversed those ten days without taking two or more steps back as regards my physical condition, and those few times necessitated me disappearing into a hermit-like, full-lockdown state, hiding myself from the world.
I had hoped this year would be better; it was the last one I had to get through, after all. Alas no: we ended up having the whole family over and then friends for New Year. It was lovely for my normal human beingness, yet not exactly ideal for the weakened pro cyclist within me. I managed to keep riding through the whole period, which I have to admit I was impressed with. Unfortunately I lost any sense of routine in the process. I’d used up so much willpower trying to keep myself in check that, come January, when I really needed it, I was spent. This was not good.
I think this is the same for everybody – it doesn’t matter if you’re a professional athlete or a New Year’s resolution gym bunny – the moment the routine is broken it’s a bit of a battle to get it going again. In many ways I feel I bear a striking resemblance to all the people who decide to quit their bad habits and go on a fitness binge then find themselves a month in, letting themselves slip. They wake up one day and realise the fitness binge is over … except I have to keep it going.
The irony of ironies is that this year the team have actually done what I’d been begging them to do for years: that is to postpone the de rigueur January training camp until February. So whereas normally I’d have been all over the opportunity to control my training at home, this year I was left thinking, ‘NO, NO, NO. Why NOW? I can’t do this on my own any more.’
We always set ourselves goals. After so many years we take this for granted – it becomes a routine or, more precisely, a pattern.
The first and most important is the date we begin our winter training. In ‘the old days’ (i.e. pre-1990) it was sometime in January, before gradually becoming 1 January. In the early 1990s it became sometime in December, then before long, 1 December. By the end of the 1990s it was November; into the new millennium, 1 November. Nowadays some guys don’t even stop.
The date we choose to start this process is dependent on our racing programme. If we’re in a privileged position this results from a discussion with the team management rather than an order. I have fallen in the discussion group for many years, although being the person I am – eager to please and duty bound – I tend to be persuaded to do things I wouldn’t have considered before the ‘discussion’.
This year, being my last, has allowed me to be more steadfast in my desires for the upcoming season. I have five principal goals: Paris–Roubaix, Tour de France, Commonwealth Games, Vuelta a España and the World Championships. That means April, July, August and September at my peak. In the past I have tended to phase my start up: 1 November – Phase One – I stop spoiling myself with food, drink, socialising and travelling, and begin riding again, start doing some weight training, get back into the routine – the basics, really. The second part of this winter programme, Phase Two, begins on 1 December; this is when a precise training schedule is put into place. Hopefully by that point I will have achieved a level of fitness that enables me to start training properly, rather than mincing around the Catalan roads stopping at cafés complaining about how much my legs hurt from the weight training that, almost without fail, I will have started far too ambitiously. January is Phase Three: no margin for error, excuses forbidden, action only. Train. Eat. Sleep. Eat, train, sleep. Sleep train eat, train eat sleep. That’s how I always expect Phase Three to be anyway; it gives me comfort during Phase One and Phase Two knowing that Phase Three exists. Perhaps too much comfort.
As soon as we get back on our bikes after our end-of-season break we already consider ourselves to be in the next year; as professional cyclists we have our own calendar. Our summer holiday is October. Our back-to-work-January-feeling is November and December. The only time we sync up with normal civilisation is Christmas, and even then we’re riddled with neuroses about what we eat and drink – or go the other way and overindulge through a lack of self-control and desire to fit in, which leads to deep self-hating guilt – being neurotic is a picnic in comparison. We’re all over the place.
The only thing that gives our life some sense of order is the racing calendar; this is what we consider our constant. It’s a bit like a world map. If you look at one in London then the UK is the middle point; if you look at one in New York then the United States is the middle point. The map is always the same, it is simply altered to fit the eye of the beholder. That’s what a calendar is like for a professional cyclist. We know it’s the same calendar that everybody else sees, only ours has been moved slightly to the left. The centre of our universe is 1 November, it’s where we can reset everything and begin anew. If it’s been a good year you have the responsibility to repeat or improve; if it’s been a bad year then it’s a chance to be better. Everything seems possible on 1 November.
All my life is affected by this phenomenon. If, in conversation, my family or friends refer to a year in the past I have first to think of what that season was like. I’ll have a vague initial emotionally-based reaction of it having been a good or bad season, then I’ll try to remember why that was, the races and results from that year, then the reasons and the feelings. Then I try to figure out what moments I shared with family and friends – that’s always hardest to remember.
1999 – A mixed year.
Initial reaction – Good then bad.
Races – Étoile de Bessèges 4th, Vuelta Valenciana 4th, Chiasso 3rd in snow, bad Tirreno (as usual), Critérium International 2nd by two hundredths of a second to Jens Voigt … No other clear memories of races.
Reasons – Great winter training, regretfully grew a goatee, pinging for the start of the season, believe that maybe the doping has relented after ’98 Festina affair, then realise my teammates are doping and nobody cares, get depressed. Training camp in mountains during Tour de France, where I get drunk and jump off a roof and break my heel. Rest of the year: no racing.
Family and friends – Hanging out with Stuart O’Grady in Biarritz in August getting drunk.
During the whole of my career the start of a new year has meant only one thing: training camp. My first was in Amélie-les-Bains in the Pyrenees with Cofidis. That was in another century, millennium even, definitely feels like a lifetime ago: 1997. I arrived there underprepared, having been in Hong Kong in December visiting for the first time since leaving school eighteen months previously. Needless to say this had not been conducive to my rapidly approaching baptism of fire into professional cycling, and was the principal reason I spent the first part of 1997 getting my head kicked in from every angle.
I spent those first few years as a professional always seeming to be travelling to northern France on my birthday, 4 January. As buzzkills go this ranks among the biggest – apart from one year when I got the French actress Laetitia Casta’s autograph in Charles de Gaulle Airport; that ranks up there as one of the uncoolest things I’ve ever done. I justified it as being my birthday present to myself. Those were the days when pre-season fitness tests were obligatory and done in labs with guys in white coats. Our Cofidis testing was always done at the Amiens university hospital. It still makes me shiver to think about it.
When I was younger, the season didn’t really begin properly till March with Paris–Nice and Tirreno–Adriatico (the two most important stage races of the early season), and so being out of shape in January wasn’t such a big deal. There was still plenty of time to get it together and, being young, I didn’t even require plenty of time to get it together – it would only take me a few weeks to gain respectable condition. It also helped that I was confident as hell back then and didn’t see the point in rushing. I refused to race at the training camps, contrary to many of my teammates, who would test themselves and each other. I didn’t really get that. I mean, it wasn’t a race, so what was the point?
It’s not like that any more. The first important race is the Australian Tour Down Under, held in January. It’s a World Tour event which means there are important ranking points up for grabs. This race has been around for most of my career, but only recently has it become a serious affair – when it first came on the calendar it was legendary for being a fun week of racing and partying. Now it’s just racing, and even that doesn’t look like much fun to me. Temperatures in the 40s, and a super-motivated, no-holds-barred peloton means crashes galore and no hiding from the suffering. To me it was unfathomable to imagine taking part in it back when it was for shits and giggles; now that it’s serious it seems downright alien. January is not made for that sort of thing in my book: total bloody madness.
My feelings for January, now more than ever, show how old I am. I’m in a minority to have this attitude towards it. My teammate Dan Martin is a member of this exclusive club, but that’s thanks to my brainwashing more than anything else. It works for Dan – nobody would say he’s having a bummer of a career from building up slowly – but there is one big difference between Dan and me: he’s in his prime; I, on the other hand, am not.
I used to count on the fact that I could get fit quickly. I relied on my body’s ability to rapidly adapt to almost any workload I put upon it. Of course, I’d get this wrong as much as I’d get it right, but even in extremis it wouldn’t take me long to climb out of whatever overtraining hole I’d got myself into. Now everything takes longer.
With the training camp in February this year, I spend January in Girona – north of Barcelona, it’s the place I’ve called home for quite a few years now – mainly biking with Dan and Tao Geoghegan Hart, a young London lad. Tao was in the same position I had been in nineteen years before, in 1996. An eighteen-year-old kid, a first-year senior straight out of juniors with dreams that still matched ambition. Anything is possible for Tao: it’s that lovely point in a career where everything is in front of you and, although the mountain ahead looks colossal, there is no reason why the top can’t be reached. He was refreshing to ride with. His enthusiasm was the perfect antithesis to my weariness: it reminded me of what I used to be like, it was a reminder I needed at this point in my career. Because we forget we were once young and full of dreams.
Tao is part of the new generation. He was born and bred in Hackney in east London, an area not known for developing cyclists, yet cycling is in his blood. He has grown up knowing only British success in the sport – he didn’t have to rebel against the system as I had done at his age; the system has nurtured him and given him opportunities. For him it is normal that Team GB are one of the most powerful cycling nations in the world. That would have been a laughable thought just fifteen years ago.
Tao’s knowledge of the sport is encyclopaedic. He studied English literature at school (and liked it!) and has a voracious reading habit which is easily satisfied by the ever-growing oeuvre of cycling literature. While we were training, every few days he’d be on to a new cycling book. I got the impression he wasn’t just doing it out of curiosity or for amusement, but also because he wanted to learn as much as possible. Because, although GB is now a cycling powerhouse, it doesn’t actually have any cultural history when it comes to road racing. I was the first pro that Tao had ever really spent any time with beyond his books. I was part of the continental culture – I could tell him first-person stories and share the lessons I had learnt. It was good for both of us.
By the end of the month even Dan and I were at our wits’ end: the two guys who always complain about winter training camps were wishing we’d never opened our mouths. We were beginning to go slightly insane, we had made a terrible mistake thinking we could manage January on our own. We were counting down the days till we would leave for Mallorca for the first races, followed by the training camp. It was pitiful.
Fortunately, we both began to feel good on the bike. It’s strange when this happens, and it generally comes like a bolt from the blue. It happened to me on 20 January, and it was wonderful and made everything seem OK again. Our form on the bike always dictates our mood. When we feel good physically we float along on a cloud off the bike – albeit a very slow cloud, as the faster we are on the bike the slower we are off it. This is all part of the energy conservation game that becomes built into us over time. As the old adage goes: ‘Don’t stand if you can sit, don’t sit if you can lie down.’
Dan was the same. All of a sudden the two of us were back on top of it. Meanwhile, Tao’s puppyish eagerness had not once diminished: he was into his third straight sickening month of it.
Bastard.
The relief of realising the training is actually starting to have an effect makes everything so much easier – for starters, I stop caring so much about the weather. This is a given when we’re struggling in training. Weather becomes the number one preoccupation.
During a bad patch a few years previously my wife bought me what looked like a scientific meteorological measuring station, the type normally found deep in the Arctic. I had to anchor it down with lines and ground hooks, it stood taller than me and had a little windmill – it was a beauty. I managed to delay going out on my bike for another two hours that particular day, setting it up. It was the ultimate pro cyclist procrastination. But from then on I felt like I was in control of the weather. I felt like a god. Briefly, anyway; then I realised my wife had tricked me: no longer could I stand at the kitchen window and lie to myself about what was going on outside.
Towards the end of January everybody starts returning from their off-season visits home. Before long the seasonal group-rides start again. Once this routine begins it’s easy enough to spot the guys who are having their own bad patches by their no-shows.
We all live within a fairly small radius of each other. I’m the furthest away, at fifteen kilometres from town, yet, depending on our mental state, we all see different conditions outside our windows. When things are good a quick glance outside is enough to know what clothes you’ll need to wear. You won’t even worry about what direction you’re going to take once you leave the house, as no weather is going to affect what training has to be done. On the other hand, if you’re in a bad mental state your morning could go something like this:
Struggle to get out of bed. Finally get out of bed. Skulk to the coffee machine and make an espresso, then stare out of the kitchen window only to see clouds. If you look long and hard enough you manage to spot at least one cloud that might produce rain. Go and sit down at the computer and google ‘weather, Girona’ then spend ten minutes going over different weather sites checking hour-by-hour reports looking for the one that is bad enough to justify giving the day’s training some serious thought. Not once does it enter your mind to pick up the phone and send the ‘Going biking?’ message to anyone, because the worst-case scenario is that one of your potential training partners is in a sparky mood and super-excited about getting out. You don’t need that right now.
Time to think about breakfast, but you’re not committed, so don’t really want to have a proper breakfast, as then you’ll have to go training … so that gets put on hold for the time being. Another coffee and an even more searching look out of the window. This time evidence of wind can be spotted on a distant tree. Things are getting worse out there.
Next move is to start thinking of a potential training partner who you can trust to share this procrastination. In the old days Christian Vande Velde was a star candidate for this – NEVER Michael Barry, he’d always be up for anything; even if he was on a rest day he’d probably bin it and come out if he thought there was the chance of a good ride. Christian, on the other hand, is easily talked down. So I’d send a message saying: ‘Seen the weather? Doesn’t look so good.’
A few minutes later the phone would buzz, I’d get a reply: ‘Yeah. I think it might rain, and the wind’s picking up. We should wait.’
So we wait. Once we get past 10 a.m. we know we’ve missed any group-rides leaving Girona, so at least that means we won’t get roped into a big ride we don’t want to do. We are now masters of our fate. ‘Masters’ is a strong word; ‘passive witnesses’ would be a more accurate description.
Once we’ve passed the 10 a.m. watershed we only have two hours to get our shit together, because once past midday it becomes exponentially harder to get out of the house. In fact, if we’re not out by midday then our whole outlook changes. Simply getting kitted up is an achievement; to make it outside and actually sit on our bike and start pedalling is a win of sorts. A post-midday two-hour ride is worth four or five hours of normal training regarding the self-satisfaction it generates. It doesn’t actually have any training effect but it reboots us to start all over again the next day. The older we get the more regularly these days occur, and, although Tao might not believe it now, sometime in the distant future even he will have days like this.
I fucking hate January.
In the meantime I have, of course, been doing weights – albeit not many of them, and they could barely be described as heavy. The fact I’ve had to take it easy – I banged my head on a wooden beam back in the autumn (long story) – has probably made for the most productive weight-training programme I’ve ever done. To date, every year, I’ve gone too deep in the first week of doing weights. I go in fresh, which I confuse with being strong, and lift too much too many times and leave myself barely able to walk the next few days and, worse than that, find myself saying out loud, ‘Argh, my legs’ every time I get up from a seated position, much to my wife’s amusement.
I’m like a stupid rat that doesn’t learn when electrocuted. Every year when I come back from the break I do the same, if not in the first session then the second, or third, or fourth, etc. There’s always one day when I feel stronger than I actually am, and in the process rip my muscles to pieces. There are a few rules to adhere to when weight training. The one I recommend the most is: if it starts to feel like you’re doing damage, you are doing damage. Stop immediately, or reduce the weight.
People always ask if I cross-train. The answer is no. There’s not really anything else out there that works better for making a cyclist than simply riding a bike. The only thing we sometimes use are the weights. It’s all high rep, leg specific: e.g. thirty squats – break for a minute – do that three times. Then jump on the home trainer for ten minutes to spin the legs out. Then back to the squat rack and repeat the 3 x 30 squats with a one-minute break between each set. Then back on the home trainer for ten minutes. Then the last 3 x 30 reps – so, in total, 270 squats. When we get stronger we add, with a similar workload, the leg press to this routine.
The idea of this is that it builds up more muscle strength than it does muscle weight. The neural pathways are made stronger. This is important, as weight is our greatest nemesis: we constantly walk a tightrope between wanting to be stronger yet needing to be lighter. The magic mantra is: I am light, I am strong.
The other benefit of this type of weight training is that, when done properly, it takes a little while to train the muscles to cope with the load and learn the technique to support it, so we’re able to use it as a type of lactic-acid tolerance training. By doing such high reps we engage the only energy system that can support such high power output: the anaerobic system. This is just like doing a sprint: the anaerobic system is very powerful but can only be used in extremis as it burns bright and dies young; instead of smoke there is lactic acid, and lactic acid hurts. It hurts a lot.
The point of all the training we do is to force the body to adapt and tolerate higher workloads. We do this by constantly pushing our body to a level that is beyond what is comfortable, beyond what it is accustomed to. By doing this we stress the body, often by damaging it. When muscles hurt, post-exercise, the pain is caused by microscopic tears in the fibres. This is from damage incurred during the effort due to them not being strong enough to hold the contraction and therefore causing them to rip apart. That’s one of the reasons our muscles shake when we hold something that we’re not strong enough to manage; the shaking is a result of the muscle fibres releasing their grip against each other, or, on occasions, actually ripping.
It’s then by resting and recuperating properly that the body recovers – the clever bit is that it will repair the fibre in a manner that makes it stronger and more likely to handle a similar workload next time. This is also where the term ‘muscle memory’ comes from, although it’s not the actual muscle, it’s the neural pathways between the brain and the muscles that do the remembering.
When we learn a new sport we’re pretty crap to begin with – our technique is terrible because we haven’t yet learnt what the precise movements are and what muscles to engage, or when to fire them, or how to co-ordinate them. The more training we do, the better the technique becomes, which obviously leads to a more efficient use of muscles, because only the ones necessary are being fired and in co-ordination. Once those neural pathways have been learnt it’s hard to lose them fully – hence why, even after a long break from a sport that you were once very good at, it’s possible to start up again quite quickly. The body only has to strengthen the necessary muscles rather than hardwire neural pathways and waste time repairing the wrong muscles.
Almost all professional cyclists have a fluid pedalling style – even the worst of us has something different in their movement from a non-pro. That’s simply thousands of kilometres and hours in the saddle training and racing; we have trained ourselves to be efficient, which resembles fluidity. It’s the same with all sports. Often the greatest athletes have something effortless in their movements, which is as much about genetics as it is about training, because as much as I believe hard work is a common denominator when it comes to success I’m also aware, from experience, that each one of the elite athletes I’ve ever known was born with a genetic advantage they’ve subsequently maximised through hard work. I think most elite international athletes will tell a similar story of simply being better at their sport than their peers when young – it’s that natural ability that is then trained, and the ability to work hard that separates the initial genetic advantage, because on a global stage genetic freaks are competing against other genetic freaks. In a way the playing field is levelled once the pinnacle of any sport is reached. Marginal gains and losses are the only things that separate the best.
This goes beyond actual muscles but also to energy systems. The more we use each energy system the more efficient it becomes – from fat-burning, to aerobic, and finally to anaerobic, which is where lactic acid is produced.
The anaerobic system is the one we use the least in cycling, although probably still as much if not more so than any other sport out there. In one day of racing it’s possible we do the equivalent of taking part in every single athletics track event, while also doing two marathons, back to back. Occasionally we do that for twenty days in a row. It’s quite hard to train for that. We try though, hence starting the weight-training lactic tolerance stuff back in November – or, in the words of my old friend, Matt White, aka Whitey: ‘Gotta keep ya body guessing, Dave.’ Otherwise we spend three months never going into that zone, meaning it takes longer for the body to adapt to it once we do start racing again.
The weight training begins back in November. The great thing about starting so early is that it feels like you’re actually doing something productive because, to begin with, going out for a bike ride isn’t much fun. In the time we’ve had off between our last race of the season and getting back on the bike we will have gone from hero to zero. It doesn’t take long for this to happen to a professional cyclist. I think a common misconception people have about us is that we’re always killing it; that jumping on a bike is always effortless. This is not true. We lose our condition so quickly. We can go from being world beaters to seriously average creepers (relatively speaking, of course) in a matter of weeks. It’s soul-destroying.
I was mentored briefly by Tony Rominger when I was a young professional. Tony had been one of the greatest cyclists of his generation, a multiple Grand Tour winner, no less. I went to stay with him in Monaco not long after his retirement. He picked me up from Nice airport and on the drive to Monaco I asked him how retirement was going.
‘Ah, David, you know, it’s OK. Ha! I can eat what I want!’ He laughed a lot at this. Then he paused and thought. ‘There are other things that are not so good. I see my friends in Monaco, they are retired tennis players, racing drivers, golfers. You know, that type of thing, normal here, it’s Monaco, yes?!’ Lots more laughter. ‘I see something different with them to me. They never lose completely what they had. They always have a bit of “Za Magic”, ya know?! For an exhibition match or something. Me? I’m fucked! Never again will I be good on a bike.’ He sort of laughed and finished with, ‘This is life, David. In professional cycling there are no gifts.’
That conversation always haunted me, because it is so true. Our magic is in our physical condition, the ability to be super-trained. When we stop training the magic goes; very quickly we are indistinguishable from any other person – we’re not about to dazzle with a football that mistakenly got hit in our direction. Nor go and play an exhibition game of golf or tennis and show flashes of genius. Nor get behind the wheel of a car and show why once we were the best in the world. With us it’s gone the moment we hang it up, and the sooner we realise that the better.
When we’re professional we get glimpses of this ultimate fate. Only two or three weeks off can set us back enormously. Granted, we can get it back reasonably quickly. I’ve learnt a simple rule: it will take the same amount of time I’ve had off to recover the level I was at before I stopped. Two weeks off means two weeks to get it back. Of course, this recovery time must be uninterrupted quality training time – hard, often monotonous work to get back to our best. No matter what genetic gifts we’re born with it always comes down to the training. After all, professional cycling is effectively an ultra-endurance sport – it doesn’t matter what we’ve been blessed with at birth, it has to be trained a shitload to be maximised.
So, back in November, say, the thought of doing a Grand Tour is to us as foreign as it is to a London commuter. I’ve had times when I’ve got back on the bike in November forgetting that I’m not the same person I was in September and found myself blown to pieces forty kilometres from my house, sitting on a curb outside a petrol station looking like a lost and starving garden gnome, stuffing my face with chocolate doughnuts and Coke, wondering how I’m going to get home. That has happened more than once.
Two months after the close of the season we are riddled with self-doubt, wondering how on earth we can even start another Giro d’Italia, Tour de France or Vuelta a España, let alone finish one. And forget about competing. Those are a strange few weeks, and not very enjoyable, so usually it’s good to be in the gym pretending to be an athlete, although it has to be said we barely look like such to the regular gym bunnies, who see the skinny-fatguy standing there doing hundreds of reps with essentially no weight on the bar. It probably looks like we’re on some rehabilitation programme.
Last autumn I realised I should get back in touch with my old coach, Adrie van Deimen, as I needed somebody to help me get back into the right head space. It used to be so easy for me to switch into a focused training period. It would be an extreme change, in that I would essentially isolate myself and go into hiding, which allowed me to switch my persona to what I needed it to be. I can’t do this any more – it requires being fundamentally selfish, as you have to become totally self-obsessed. Everything in life has to fit around the training, diet and rest, and when I say everything I also mean everybody.
Being the father of two boys has changed that for me. I love spending time with them, and I want to help my wife when I’m at home. She’s the one who spends the majority of the year looking after the two of them single-handedly while I’m off pursuing my passion. And although it’s my job and I’m paid very well to do it, it’s also what I love doing. I don’t think it’s fair that I then come home and carry on being totally self-obsessed. But, equally, I’m beginning to see that state of mind as a failing, too – disrespectful to my teammates, irresponsible in terms of my team responsibilities. All this is the primary reason I decided to make this my final season. I can still race – that’s a given for me – it’s the training that kills me now and if I can’t train properly then I’m not getting the best out of myself, which is what I’m paid to do.
This aside, I also know I can do what is expected of me in my final year. I am a road captain now and that holds different responsibilities to a leader who is expected to bring in the big results. There are only a handful of people in the professional peloton who have raced more than me at the top level. I know myself well enough that when the big occasions arise I can be relied upon. I have proved this throughout my career, and trust my team to trust me on that. We’ve been through enough for us to have this mutual understanding.
Fundamentally, I’ve always been a driven, ambitious person. This is the biggest difference between being an old pro and a young pro – my job is now clearly defined and recognised, pragmatism has taken over from ambition. Am I falling into the trap of complacency? Have I become comfortable, dare I say, content? This is not a good place to be as a professional cyclist.
So, racing head on. The goals for this year. Each one of these targets has a reasoning behind it. I’m standing strong on them (rather than opening myself up to the usual mind-bending I am so susceptible to when it comes to my calendar). They all have a personal value to me: in my final season I am determined to close as many doors as I can. Paris–Roubaix has been my nemesis throughout my career. This year I am determined to race it with full commitment and be done with it once and for all. Although this is a personal mission I am fully aware my role in the race will be that of loyal teammate – there are no delusions of grandeur here, simply a desire to remove its proverbial monkey from my back once and for all.
The Tour de France is my race, the one that got me into bike racing. If there was no Tour I’d never have fallen in love with the sport. My relationship with the Tour goes beyond the actual racing. I have become friends with the people who work on it – to the degree I no longer shake the hand of ex-director Jean-Marie Leblanc or current boss Christian Prudhomme but greet them with the very French familial kiss on the cheeks. We are friends, we share a history and mutual respect. I’ve always dreamt of my final time on the Champs-Elysées, my family and friends there to share my farewell to the race I loved so much. It will be one of the most important days of my career. And it seems almost fate that this, my last Tour, also starts in the UK, in Yorkshire no less, where my father has now relocated from the Hong Kong of my youth. It is the perfect scenario.
The Commonwealth Games in Glasgow is a gift like no other. For one of my last ever races to be in the city where most of my family are from, where I will be racing for only the second time in my career in a Scotland jersey, seems too good to be true. The fact it comes straight after the Tour de France, when it’s a given I’ll be at my strongest, makes the possibility of victory realistic – if not, at least there’s always the chance to honour the jersey of my home nation.
And then the Vuelta a España, which is my favourite race, in the purest sense, in that there aren’t the emotional attachments that the Tour de France carries. The Vuelta is simply the race where I can be a bike racer without the stresses and expectations or responsibilities of other Grand Tours. I can race for the sake of racing. It’s always been that way for me; I can’t imagine a better way to end my career with my team than to be allowed to race for fun.
And, finally, there are the Worlds – the completion of everything, finishing where I began among the people I’ve known the longest in the cycling world, the Great Britain national team. The fact the race is in Spain, my adopted home, makes it all the more special. I’ve always taken great pride in racing for Great Britain, and they’ve stood by me through thick and thin. They are the people among whom I feel most at home. It feels right that the last time I race as a professional will be in a GB jersey.
It feels so good to be back in a race. There’s only so much training I can do before I get bored of it. I bought my first road bike as a fifteen-year-old in Hong Kong because I wanted to race it. I’d never thought about doing anything else with it. The reason I rode it outside of races was to train myself to go faster in the races. That’s just the way it was.
As I’ve got older I’ve learnt that a bike ride is maybe one of the great ways to spend time with a friend, or friends, yet I treat that as something totally separate to my racer self. There are now two distinctly different cycling personalities that exist within me: the racer and the gentleman. The latter has come with maturity and does not race; the other is still, in essence, the fifteen-year-old boy who bought that first bike in Hong Kong – only with over a thousand professional races under his scarred and sun-damaged skin.
The first race of the season brings with it a new lease of life. We’re back in our natural habitat, on the road with our teams, staying in mostly mediocre hotels, finding comfort in the routine. It’s in total contrast to the last time the peloton was together in the final races of the previous year, when everybody was on their last legs, physically and mentally, wishing it all to stop so we could go home and curl up in a ball, away from the mediocre hotels. Now, the peloton is fresh and ready to go, everybody actually seems happy and motivated to be there. This is unusual behaviour, to say the least.
There are new sponsors, different colours and designs of kits, new riders on old teams, old riders on new teams. Everybody is chatty and curious. The conversation always goes something like this, with slight variations, in roughly a dozen different languages:
‘Good winter?’
‘Great. One of the best I’ve had.’
‘Yeah, me too. You get good weather?’
‘OK. Went on training camp in December, got the Ks in. Took it easy over Christmas, massive January.’
‘Yeah, me too. What’s your race programme?’
‘This, Tirreno, Classics. Usual!’
‘Yeah, me too.’
Two minutes later, bump into another rider you kind of know:
‘Hey, man! How was the winter?’
‘It was awesome, racked up the kilometres!’
‘Yeah, me too. You get good weather?’
And so on …
This line of questioning isn’t confined to the first race. Oh no: it can go on till April. We’ll call it the Pro Cyclist Early Season Ice Breaker. As a rule of thumb the start of the season is over after Liège–Bastogne–Liège, the last of the spring Classics. So from the Tour de Romandie on it’s best to stop asking about the winter and start asking how the start of the season has been. The thing is, this is a two-edged sword, because although you’re showing willing by engaging and driving the conversation, you are also risking alienating the target by revealing your total indifference to their results. Because if you actually cared, even a little bit, you’d know exactly how their early season form had been. Often it’s simply a desperate gamble in order to fill the silence, but, if handled wrongly, it is a silence neither of you will ever need to worry about filling again. For example:
‘Hey, man, how’s it going? You do the Classics?’
If you have to ask this question it means the pro you’re talking to has had a shit start to the year, because if they’d had a good start to the year you’d have noticed their presence somewhere. So if you ask this and they say, ‘Yes, all of them,’ you’ll find yourself a little stumped. This is the worst possible answer you could have expected, only you didn’t expect it, because you never really cared, and so didn’t plan your moves that far ahead.
From my experience the best way to handle this situation (because it arises, there are enough quiet moments: signing on, standing on the start line, the ever-rarer relaxed time in the bunch when chat is possible, when you find yourself next to a fellow racer with whom you cross wheels enough to merit engaging with on human terms) is to be vague. Remove specifics, allow yourself wiggle room, ask more generic questions like, ‘How you doing?’ or ‘This race/weather is amazing/sucks.’ Or, a personal favourite, ‘What’s new?’ That’s the ultimate Open-ended Ice Breaker – you needn’t know anything about what they’ve been up to.
A few to avoid include:
‘Is this your first race this year?’ It could be their fortieth race, in which case you’re reminding them of how invisible their start to the year has been, which sets the wrong tone immediately.
‘What races have you done so far?’ Again, there’s the risk that you’ve raced with them numerous times already and simply haven’t noticed.
Then there’s the ultimate faux pas, never to be used under any circumstances: ‘Have you put on weight?’ Every professional cyclist has a weight obsession – we have to, it’s an integral part of the job. If somebody is looking fat, never, ever, remind them of this. Of course, it will be brought up behind their backs at every opportunity, yet there shouldn’t be the slightest mention of it to their faces: that wouldn’t be cool.
On the other hand if somebody is looking fit, i.e. skinny and ripped and tanned, then it’s totally acceptable to bring this up – in fact, it is encouraged: ‘Wow, you look super-fit. You going for this?’ To which they’ll reply, almost without fail, ‘Thanks! Yeah, training’s been going well. We’ll see how it goes here, I feel good.’ This laid-back attitude is a thinly veiled attempt to hide the fact they’ve been living like a monk for months in preparation for that very race and if they don’t perform well they’ll probably have a mild nervous breakdown before slipping, riddled with neuroses, into a hole of self-doubt which could take them weeks or months to recover from. The honest answer would have been, ‘Ouf, thank you, I’ve been working so hard for months getting ready for this race. I’m going to be devastated if I don’t go well.’