Bike Racing

Note: This post has been migrated from my old WanderTech blog. The original post contained various photos from bike races that are unfortunately no longer available.

So this blog is mostly intended to house my projects and engineering related endeavors, but I wanted to do at least one about bike racing. Racing has taught me a lot of mostly decent things, with a few admitted bad influences. Through doing a lot of racing and growing up in the past 5 or 6 years, I managed to accumulate some stories and platitudes.

When I started racing, I was young, thought I was an athlete, and had visions of protour glory. Six years later I was still young, didn’t think I was an athlete, and had visions of protour glory. I accumulated some scars, some passport stamps, and a strange number of tires that have a little life left in them, but that I know I will never use or throw away. (Note from 2025: I’m in my mid 30s and still have most of these). I’ve known some executives that try to hire mostly endurance athletes like cyclists, and feel like I may have an idea why.

Work

Cycling is the hardest sport on the planet. Call me biased, call me wrong, it doesn’t matter, it is. The guys who manage to scrape a living out of it are training 6 hours a day in the rain in Belgium while their kids are growing up in California; bumping elbows with Ukranians in the Northern France spring while their parents watch the crashes on TV. They skipped college to sleep on the floor, get denied breakfast by fat directors, and spend their days trudging through farm roads covered in mud and shit.

To be successful in the sport you need thousands and thousands of hours of training, a bucket full of natural talent, steel resolve, no sense of self preservation, and be bright enough to not ride yourself out of every race. Having nearly none of that, I instead learned how far training a lot will get you. Not really that far. But far enough to have some fun, and learn a few things about work.

The first rule of bike racing, as Anthony Bourdain might say, is to show up on time. The second is to never be fooled into thinking you are any good. Somehow, somewhere, there is a bigger, deeper pond, where everyone is faster, trains harder, and cares less about their safety. Someone wants off the farm more than you, someone picked their parents better.

In a sport as top-heavy as cycling (not just in talent, but in money, fame and respect), there is more than a little incentive to not be bad. With hundreds of top level pros and a handful of races, most riders don’t win a race during any given year. Some never win a race in their pro careers. So you learn to take risks, and exploit opportunities whenever they come up.

Mortality

It doesn’t take many near death experiences to get an idea of how much you don’t want to die. Luckily, bike racing provides those pretty regularly. I managed to get through my time racing without any serious injuries, but there are still a few minutes of my life that I will never remember. That was enough to let me know that I really want to remember the rest of them.

A certain amount of self-inflicted chaos and body damage does wonders for a kid’s understanding of risk/reward. It only took about 6 times getting wrapped around trees in the woods to get the idea that being good is better than being dumb. Still, learning how fragile you are is different than being cautious, you just learn to have a greater respect for the risks you and the people around you are taking. No one wants to get paralyzed racing bikes, but no one wants to lose either; balancing the two desires keeps you alive in both respects.

At the same time, having someone try to kill you, while I don’t recommend it, seems to make you much harder to intimidate. If there is one thing the dark side of cycling does, it’s deaden you to risk or fear.

Wanderlust

Cycling is a transient sport. You are moving while you are racing, moving while training, and moving in between. A lucky few manage to see some things around them while in transit. I managed to see some cool towns, terrible cities, and god-forsaken deserts. For the most part I have found that being somewhere new is enough to make something good.

I’ve seen the world’s largest pistachio, chair, and traffic nightmares while racing. House fires, yard fires, and car fires. I’ve lost host’s cats, cooked host’s meals, and drank host’s beer. The only thing that remained constant was that my legs were tired and eyes open. Racers, as a group, have a few things wrong with them, but we got one thing right, travel.

It’s hard to describe bike racer travel without sounding a little pretentious. We don’t travel like normal people. We stay at locals’ houses, we eat local food. We are too poor for tourist attractions, traps, and areas. We put too many people in hotels. We drink coffee from hotels we aren’t staying at, skip lunch, and don’t stay out late. We stay out in the country, hang out at gas stations. We have friends from other countries, and meet up in strange small towns. We eat too much Mexican food.

At the end of the day, we speak the language. We are always comfortable, always hungry, and have a good time.

I’m old and washed up, but bike racing motivated and continues to motivate a massive portion of my endeavors and projects. If you race as a teenager, and don’t quit immediately, ambition is something you will never run out of, and maybe that’s the most important thing.