Hard To Avoid Success

Sunday afternoon, pretty much anybody who has ever sat on two wheels was glued to a television somewhere while the titans of cycling took each other apart on the last stage of the Tour. Mathieu van der Poel went clear with Pogačar on the third climb of Montmartre, held it all the way down to the Champs-Élysées with the entire peloton bearing down on him, and beat his own teammate by half a bike length. Then he collapsed against a barrier and lay there in the foetal position for a while, breathing like he depended on every single molecule of oxygen. I guess I’m not alone in having this as one of the fondest memories in Tour history.

So last November I had the privilege of going for a ride with him. And these days I take an interest in how athletes actually prepare, not what we like to think they must be doing or what social media says. So here’s what I learned:

He goes long. He chases Strava segments, despite having no profile that carries his name and he’ll race on Zwift to sharpen up. He stops for coffee, and when I say stops for coffee I don’t mean the version where you inhale an espresso standing up next to your bike - I mean sitting down, an hour, cappuccino possibly a second cake. Any coach could be forgive for seeing pre and post coffee stop as separate sessions.

His reasoning, roughly, is that if he trained like a robot he’d break. Not physically. He’d get bored, stop caring, and the whole thing would come apart from the inside. So he’s built a version of the work he actually wants to do, and then he does an enormous amount of it.

I have to be honest here. For years I’ve used “lifestyle athlete” as an insult. You know the type - all the kit, the ride is to the café and back, the training week has the structure of a long weekend. I was quite pleased with myself about this. Turns out the distinction I was drawing wasn’t between serious and unserious at all. It was just between his way and mine.

Mine was structure. Everything measured, everything scheduled, and genuine satisfaction in the discipline of it. That’s not wrong either. What’s wrong is assuming it’s the only door in.

Felix Gottwald - Nordic combined, the most decorated Winter Olympian Austria has produced, so not a man short of evidence - used to say that if you’re having fun, it’s hard to avoid success. That one landed the moment I heard it, mostly because I’d never considered it from that direction. And it lines up with something guests keep telling me on the podcast: the fight for second and third is brutal, all teeth and anxiety, and winning is the easiest thing in the world once you’re doing it. That’s the point where you start letting yourself enjoy it.

Which raises the awkward possibility that the enjoyment isn’t the reward for winning. It might be part of the every day, if you just let it.

Jan.