Some time back, we ran a Paceline interview I did with Julian Wall from Cyclefit in London. Jules does the fits for the EF/Easy Post pro team, and he has worked with an array of other pro cyclists over his 20+ years as an elite bike fitter. If you missed that interview, check it out, he’s an interesting guy.
He’s also pretty discreet and economical with his words, so what was more interesting than our interview was the conversation we had after, as we talked about which pros were good bike riders and which were just VO2 Max anomalies. That’s when he told me about a pro rider that is new to the peloton this year, who was recruited directly from Zwift. This guy can put out massive power and sustain it, but he’s been pedaling indoors, and frankly, he doesn’t know how to ride a bike very well. He’s good on the straights. He can blow a peloton apart, but he can’t descend to save his life.
That’s when we got into a further discussion about what bike riding (outdoors) even is.
There are two core abilities we employ when we ride a bike. One is cardio-vascular. How hard can we pedal? How long can we keep it up for? This is a function of turning oxygen into glycogen. The more you ride, the fitter you get. The other one is proprioceptive, bike handling, the way the bicycle, as a machine, allows you to dance with gravity. Great riders have typically developed both of these abilities, and the greatest even have something the French call souplesse.
I’m not one of those riders.
For some years, I was primarily a roadie, piling up miles on a road bike, alone and with friends. I had some bike handling skills from growing up as a BMX kid, and from riding mountain bikes a little bit, but during those years on the road, I was mostly exploring the cardiovascular side of bike riding. There is a whole ethos to that, where you’re always pushing your limits, and the hard work is very hard, and it’s not a bad thing to do, but ultimately, I realized that I wasn’t talented in that way. There were some pretty strict limits to what I was going to achieve, and frankly to what I wanted to achieve.
And so, I wasn’t a roadie for that long, a little over a decade all in.
Trail riding, on whatever bike made sense at the time, became a lot more compelling to me, and now my main focus is on riding technical single-track. My ideal terrain is undulating and punctuated by difficult to navigate obstacles. I love to stop and session an obstacle that I fail on the first time through. That’s what lights me up. The thing is, even here in my 50s, I find that I can make real progress on this side of the game, in a way that I’m not going to be expanding my limits on the cardiovascular front anymore.
I try to be fit. I’m not neglecting the pedaling side of bike riding, but I’m not focused at all on speed or mileage the way I once was. Right now, I’m just all about that dance with gravity, and trying to find the limits of my bike handling skills in the context of my regular riding. Of course, when you’re so busy “dancing” and “finding the limits,” what that really means is that sometimes you’re falling off. Sometimes you’re dancing with the dirt, and its leading.