by David Millar
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.
I am Light, I am Strong
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.
