Knowing Where We Stand

[Flying_Monkey]

Sometimes we like to imagine that had things been different, had we taken cycling more seriously as a youngster, had we trained harder, then perhaps, just perhaps, we could have have been riding for Team X in the Tour de France. It could have been me! It's a nice thought.

I was just perusing the results of the Tour of Brittany, a 2.2 ranked event, and I noticed a name I recognised - possibly the best cyclist I have known personally - a guy called James Moss, who is from the north-east of England. He's now riding for a respectable British team which is aiming at higher things, Endura, and he's 28 minutes behind on GC, amongst the also-rans (he's not last). I'm guessing I would be at least an hour behind him every day if I was in peak condition. And he's probably a similar time behind the equivalent position in the Grand Tours.

So, no, I never could have been a contender. But it's nice to dream.

 

[raindog]

LOL - I never have dreamed that because although riding racing bikes for pleasure all my life has given me a decent level of fitness, I know I simply don't have the physique to be a top competitor. But I'm happy with that. I rode the Ventoux for my 60th birthday and I know blokes half my age here who can barely walk into the village for a loaf of bread.

Nice to see Endura are still racing over here. Saw them at the spring stage races last year and followed their progress on their website throughout the season.

 

[monnet]

I've raced against and trained with some pretty high quality riders - alot of them Elites, some former professionals (though none that are household names). What always amazes me is that I can ride with them, even when they seem to be putting the hammer down. Which makes me think 'If I had devoted my 20s to racing a bike, instead of touring the globe and living a low budget rock and roll lifestyle, could I have been a contender?'

Two responses inevitably come to mind - why would I have sacrificed living the high life in Buenos Aires for a monastic life of training and racing in the rain in Yorkshire? and not long after that,

these riders I speak of really do put the hammer down. At which point I'm grovelling in the gutter, trying to work out where the gears have gone on my bike and why they are all 50m up the road. And even if I can keep up, I'm on the limit when they decide to open out a sprint.

I'm happy with my decision. I'd not have made it and I had an amazing time instead.

 

[Dayvo]

I beat all the boys in my road when we had a marathon round-the-block race when I was about 9.

I heard a neighbour say that 'he looks like the next Eddy Merckx'. I believed him and was sure I was going to be a great cyclist.

But I was too fat so I played rugby instead!

 

[ColinJ]

I had a great pair of lungs when I was a teenager. We once did an experiment in the physics lab using a large vertical u-tube water manometer to measure how hard we could blow. I blew the water clean out of it!

I often went swimming with my mates in Coventry's 50 metre pool. We used to chuck a coin across the width of the pool, dive in, swim underwater to get it and swim back with it, still underwater. My friends were struggling to do the two widths underwater. I bet them that I could drop a coin in at one end of the pool, swim to the far length of the pool and back underwater and pick the coin up before surfacing. I did manage it but almost blacked out from the effort ...

A few years of smoking soon took the edge off my lung power though.

My dad was very fit as a young man. He had a bet with someone once that he could walk from Kenilworth to Banbury to buy an ice cream and walk back again within 12 hours. It was a 50 mile round trip and he did it with time to spare.

Boxing was his sport and he was pretty good at it. In fact, he won a silver medal in the British Schoolboy Boxing Championships before the war.

I take after my dad physically, only I am about 4 inches taller than he was. I often used to wonder if I could have been any good at sport if I'd really tried but I'd settle now for being able to keep up with other CycleChat members on my forum rides instead of grovelling at the back on every climb.

 

[PaulB]

Not about the cycling but I ran a marathon time in the past that would, now make me a contender. At the time, I was a way off getting a start in the Olympic trials but things have gone backwards now as people get softer. I would have done ANYthing at the time to get a representative vest. It was the time of the Irish football team choosing people who were about as Irish as Benito Mussolini and playing them in the World Cup so I looked into my distant past to see if I could have represented ANY nation ANYWHERE in the world. No chance. My families on both sides go back to about the time of Noah, living in Britain. All of them, on both sides, as if it's possible to win a bigger lottery prize, in Liverpool.

But I knew someone who had a bona-fide claim on running for Cyprus. I'm still married to her now. Her born name is Antoniades and her father is Cypriot. And she had a time better than one minute faster than the best Cypriot female runner over 5,000 metres that year. This was in 1991 and I was looking at every available way I could possibly increase my chances of running for Britain in the Barcelona Olympics. My wife had a walk-in so naturally, I suggested writing to the Cypriot AAA and claiming her place and her representative Olympic vest. She had less than zero interest. Our kids were young at the time and she reckoned she had no time at all to train to the extent it needed and had no ambition to be knocked out in an early round or be embarrassed in the actual event. 'Yes, but you'll be an Olympian and EVERYONE will remember that for the rest of your life', I said. That would have been my motivation but she had none of it. I had to respect her views on the situ and tried as best as I could to see things from that point of view. It was tricky but that was her decision so I stood by her on it.

People's motivations; they're about as far apart as Saturn is from Sabden, aren't they?

 

[lukesdad]

In the first what is now the CRC series, there were about a dozen of us up front in a group. ( I was probably at my fittest ever) We were about 25ks in I was thinking to myself I can cope with this pace. Wrong ! A young scrote put the hammer down on a rock ridden climb he got about 250 metres clear, then a smart arse said are we going to do anything ? Do anything the rest of us were on the limit couldn t even answer! He looked around, got out of the saddle and caught the scrote before the top of the climb. They finnished 15 mins in front of the 3rd placed rider. I finnished 8 th a further 9 mins down. Sod a young Oli Beckensale and Nick Craig! I couldn t have done that at anytime in my life nope.

I did beat a young Nicole Cooke once, but she was only a junior then !

 

[oldroadman]

Today we have the simple tests - wattage, VO2max, lung capacity, heart rate at rest. Do well in all that then you probably have the engine. But what you can't measure (until race day) is bloody-minded determination, ability to REALLY suffer, will to win, motivation to train, general mental hardness, and important but under rated in UK amateurs, tactical nous. Case in point, not so long ago a young rider didn't make the cut into the GB set up as his numbers were down, and yet, as his coach/mentor noted, "How come he keeps winning races at home and in Belgium?". Said rider is now a pro (a proper one for a proper team, not one of the unregistered outfits here) and doing OK, valued as a class domestique. So whilst the numbers are important, they ain't everything.
Oldroadman still has a 44 pulse at rest, and 5 litre lungs. The rest is bu.....ered!

 

[yello]

I've never thought this way with regard to cycling but I know what is meant. I was more likely to think that way about football... though I didn't.

As a kid, I just rode a bike to and from places. I delivered newspapers. I went out with my friends; down to the beach, into the hills. Like kids you'll still see today, a bike was just a mode of transport, and fun. That continued into adolescence (though to a lesser extent). When I moved to London in my early 20's, it was just the quickest way across town... so still a mode of transport. The thought of racing never entered my tiny mind. It's never been my thing at all.

My most vivid, and personal, experience of 'could never be a contender' came at university when I read a fellow student's essay. Her display of understanding of the subject matter and her ability to almost toy with it in an extremely dextorious and intelligent manner made me realise that I'd never be an academic (as I'd vague inclinations of). Sure, I was bright but this women was comparatively light years ahead. Just to rub it in, she changed disciplines for her masters. She felt her undergraduate studies weren't in line with her real interests!

 

[ColinJ]

My most vivid, and personal, experience of 'could never be a contender' came at university when I read a fellow student's essay. Her display of understanding of the subject matter and her ability to almost toy with it in an extremely dextorious and intelligent manner made me realise that I'd never be an academic (as I'd vague inclinations of). Sure, I was bright but this women was comparatively light years ahead. Just to rub it in, she changed disciplines for her masters. She felt her undergraduate studies weren't in line with her real interests!

I experienced the software writing equivalent of that!

I needed to ask a fellow programmer a question so I walked over to his desk. I saw that he was in the middle of writing what looked like quite a complex module in C and I was just about to walk away when he turned and started talking to me while continuing to touch-type his software, sideways-on.

I watched in stunned fascination as he talked to me about one technical topic, while an unrelated and intricate piece of code rapidly appeared on his screen. Without even glancing back at the source code, he compiled it and ran his program which proceeded to spew out exactly the results he wanted. When he finished talking to me, he swivelled round, scanned the results, muttered "Excellent!" and started work on his next piece of code ...

 

[iAmiAdam]

Being a Junior racer myself, I wouldn't be on a bike if it wasn't for racing. It isn't a mode of transport for me, it's practically my life. However, if I could train effectively without going on the road, or even the bike in some cases, I would. I'm lucky in that I've never been unfit and I'm a shortarse so when I plonked myself on an old road bike I realised I could be quite good at climbing. Nearly a year after taking cycling seriously, I wish that I could of got into cycling sooner. The plan is to advance through BC ranking, but god, if I'd got on a bike 6 years ago, who knows what the plan would be.

But half of what got me into proper training is the romance of cycling. It's a sport of tradition and etiquette. This is something we can all feel and even take part in by just riding. But as with most sports, us mere mortals have to watch in awe as someone attacks up a climb and inevitably, this leads to thinking about the what ifs?

So, I'm out training tomorrow, this thread has meant that I'm definitely going to give it a bit more tomorrow. Cheers guys.

 

[montage]

Pretty sure I could easily make pro if I tried, but just cba

 

[Dave_1]

I took it seriously in my youth and managed around 50th place in final GC of the race you mention..I did the race two years on the trot and definitely don't harbour any delusions about being able to race at world tour level..I raced at 25.2 mph for 7 days, over around 800km and was still 45 minutes down on GC on a certain rider who 2 years later won the Giro!

Sometimes we like to imagine that had things been different, had we taken cycling more seriously as a youngster, had we trained harder, then perhaps, just perhaps, we could have have been riding for Team X in the Tour de France. It could have been me! It's a nice thought.

I was just perusing the results of the Tour of Brittany, a 2.2 ranked event, and I noticed a name I recognised - possibly the best cyclist I have known personally - a guy called James Moss, who is from the north-east of England. He's now riding for a respectable British team which is aiming at higher things, Endura, and he's 28 minutes behind on GC, amongst the also-rans (he's not last). I'm guessing I would be at least an hour behind him every day if I was in peak condition. And he's probably a similar time behind the equivalent position in the Grand Tours.

So, no, I never could have been a contender. But it's nice to dream.

 

[GrumpyGregry]

different sport; early 80's, south west London, the head coach took me to one side and said "you are never going to make it into the 1st XV here, you're not hard enough, you're not big enough, you're not fast enough, you're not bright enough, you're not aggressive enough. It must be costing you a fortune to come and train with us twice a week, for what? To sit on the subs bench, and sometimes start, in the seconds. Don't waste your time, go home, find yourself a small club and be a big fish in a smaller pond."

Best sporting advise I was ever given. Being a contender surely only matters if you had the talent to be a champion; if not then taking part is what counts.

 

[monnet]

On a different sport, I remember watching Michael Owen score his first goal for England. He's a year younger than me (and my mates), which tells you we shouldn't really have been in the pub when we saw the goal. Anyway, at the end of the match one of the lads said, half joking, 'well, that's our England careers over.' I'll never forget the reaction. 10 17year olds laughed nervously and then took a swig of their beer as they contemplated that professional football was consigned to the bin marked 'failed childhood dreams'.

It was funny to see how even though we all knew we would never have even got close to being paid to play football, it took someone to voice it before we all accepted it. Of course, while Mickey Owen was banging them in for fun we were in the pub, which, alongside lack of natural talent, may go some way to explaining our lack of footballing prowess.