A GW cyclist and friend, Matt Kap, recently asked me how to ride with new cyclists and prospective racers that just do not keep up. He thought I was a good guy to ask because I stay heavily involved with the GW Cycling team to help teach new folks the ropes. This post is mostly a public response to him. Unfortunately, in my honest I realize that I hold the bike racer's attitude: one that may not necessarily address his concerns in the most friendly way.
This isn’t about people that cannot keep up. I am talking about people that clearly have the ability to hang, but because of some mental block they just won’t. How do you ride with – and more importantly train with – the incorrigibly slow cyclist?
It's hard to balance your own goals with riding with and teaching new cyclists. This has been a topic on my mind a lot this past year. My initial thoughts to my friend Matt were two things - be patient, but don't feel guilty doing your own thing.
I have never really "trained" or coached people besides myself; I’m highly under-qualified. I simply try to help teach new cyclists the right way to get into the sport, which is largely a “do as the Romans” approach.
It’s even bold to say I’ve trained myself – I just ride a lot, and I ride with fast/aggressive groups a lot. At its simplest, the rider becomes the rides he does. For each person the athletic background is very different, so the makeup of the person as a cyclist will be as well. My athletic foundation is thick, but I do try to put the stereotypical cyclist’s arrogance aside to help new athletes find their niche.
Granted, I’m an inherently straight-forward and impatient guy. Key words:
I try.I've always had the mentality that to improve, you have to surround yourself with people that are better than you. That means that I want to ride with guys that are faster and/or more experienced than I am. (I say “or” because there are many former racers that know how to roll with very little fitness.)
With as much humility as I can muster, I’ve been trying to fill the role of that faster or more experienced rider for the new GW folks. Along with a few other experienced cyclists, I am trying to concurrently teach and challenge them.
As I said though, I’m impatient. Sometimes, there’s only so much slow you can take. Hearing Matt’s concern makes me feel better about my own. It confirms that I’m not just being a intolerant (at least not all of the time). Some people just don’t pedal with much force. Ever. I see this most with new folks riding with a group of cyclists, but even with time they do not change.
Well Plato's cave is full of freaks,
Demanding refunds for the things they've seen.
I wish they could believe,
In all the things that never made the screen.
And just slow down everyone,
You're moving too fast...This conundrum contradicts my general philosophy of riding with people. That is, when I’m riding with people, I’m actually riding
with them. Ignoring certain hammerfests (re: 10AM, Hains sprints, etc.), too many people forget about that etiquette. It is a group ride, after all.
One of the most annoying things is when someone shows up to a small group ride with different intentions than the majority. I get pretty pissed off when someone takes off unnecessarily. Though I’ve been the culprit myself at times, I am usually pretty vocal when someone is pointlessly ruining the rhythm of a smooth group and will happily drop back to pick up the breadcrumbs of any unintentional screw-turning.
It should be an equal responsibility of the strong cyclists to set the pace as it should be for the slower/weaker/newer cyclists to keep up. The responsibility isn’t only on the faster side of the peloton. Quite often it is the opposite problem from someone attacking. Even with a compact crankset, I just can’t go
that slow some of the time. The culprit is usually the cyclist that constantly sits 10 feet behind the group. You can always guarantee that no matter how fast or slow a group is going, they are the chronic one-man gruppetto. It is hard to ride with a shifty cyclist that is constantly leaving a distance behind the closest rear wheel – especially if it’s yours.
I see two questions arising from the predicament of a cyclist with these mental barriers.
What do you do if someone clearly should be keeping up, but never does?
How do you manage the entire group so that the ride becomes a productive exercise for everyone – or at least the majority? Drop the slowpoke?
And the following is why my best friend said I was the Rude part of
Rude & Smooth.
Yes. At some point or another, I say screw ‘em and just go hard. Hopefully they'll catch on.
As racers, we can’t feel bad doing our own thing most of the time. Everyone has different fitness levels so you will rarely, if ever, find a fair balance.
This is a niche sport heavily dependent on developing new racers. While it is easy to find cyclists, it is difficult to convince some to pin on their first race number.
At heart, the great majority of cyclists are racers – we can’t
not race the UPS truck to the next intersection, outrun loose dogs, and try to drop that old guy that just passed us. We inevitably time ourselves on our favorite route or sprint for the town line, even if we are just racing ghosts. At an individual level – like any endurance sport – cycling is as tough as you make it.
However, cycling is not just any endurance sport with a finish line – the tactics in competitive cycling raise the level of intensity, and thus the difficulty. You cannot just keep pedaling at your own pace until you cross the line if you want to win. You have to meet a standard to survive and then surpass the norm to succeed. Competitive cyclists do not get a medal just for crossing a finish line.
There are few other sports where you are so dependent on the fitness and skills of your opponents for your own success (and safety). While it takes mastering the skill of being a lemming, it takes a brave one-man-against-the-world approach to win. That’s risky.
In this sport, you have to be a pretty good loser to win. You have to have so much hatred for getting your butt kicked that you stubbornly say
please sir, may I have another. That takes some mental toughness – something you cannot teach during one single bike ride or in one lifetime.
Most folks just do not have a “good chin” for punishment. That is, they will not become great fighters by getting the crap kicked out of them. Most people are not outrider thoroughbreds like Seabiscuit that can successfully come-from-behind. Most people simply cannot learn how to win by losing a lot. Most people in bike racing lose, most of the time.
What I mean by these analogies is that new cyclists will too easily burn out and break down mentally if they are always struggling to hold on to faster riders, even in training. And I think that’s okay. While that’s not a good way to grow our sport, I have to come to the unwelcoming conclusion that it is the Darwinism of competitive athletics.
You can coach any cyclist to be fit and to tolerate pain. But you can’t teach relentlessness. At some points each of us will concede. As Daniel Coyle wrote about the Soviet Olympic cycling program in
Lance Armstrong’s War, you have to throw a dozen eggs at the wall to see which ones don’t get smashed.
That being said, I will continue to do everything in my power to teach new cyclists the skills they need to know should they want to race. I like meeting new cyclists and riding with them to grow the sport. I enjoy teaching new cyclists about a sport I have come to love and watching them grow into it, especially when they throw a few punches back - I love when a new cyclist surprises me and challenges me.
I’ll call out one guy that won’t concede - his name is Nick. Nick was a front lineman for Case Western, now a grad student at GW. Nick’s big – probably 240 pounds – and he looks about the size of a lean grizzly on a beige-colored Cannondale with Shimano 105.
Tell me if that sounds like an intimidating cyclist. Probably not.
Schlomo and I are intimidated. We definitely find this guy intimidating, because we saw him in action. Schlomo and I are now both Cat 3s now with above average power-to-weight ratios. As Cat 4s, Dan won 3 races this year and I won a pair myself. I’m not saying this to boast – it’s to establish a bit of our our two-wheeled street cred. Schlomo and I are insidious cyclists when it comes to group rides.
So is Nick.
Nick has only been on a handful of group rides. He is the novice that I immediately want on my team, because I never want to find myself racing against him. With the foundation of having been an elite athlete, he has the necessary mentality of openness to change, adjustment, and execution.
On the GW rides, Schlomo and I are always eager to toss an evil grin at the wind. Quite often, we grin at each other – talking through deep breaths as we half-wheel the heck out of each others’ legs. On more than two occasions on a team ride two weeks ago, Schlomo and I were pushing the pace up the inclines, much to the dismay of the majority of the GW group. We threw the proverbial eggs at the wall, and to our surprise, this shell on this new big guy named Nick did not crack.
Holy crap, Nick’s got a good chin for this sport.
It's tough to balance the needs of a cyclist on the rise with that of a cyclist with a slower improvement curve – whether the barrier is lack of skill or physical development. However, slowing down is not a good way to challenge the cyclists that are making great progress to becoming
racers. For those certain personalities that do not relent, speeding up is the only way to go.
