Road Craft - The Skill That Separates Good Cyclists From Great Racers

Anthony Walsh (0:00)

Roadman, welcome back. Today I wanna talk about the lost art of being a bike rider.

We're in an era obsessed by what's per kilogram. We're confusing what matters with what's fashionable at the moment. And I was thinking back about my apprenticeship as a bike rider, trying to get better, and one moment stuck out to me. I know we have a lot of international listeners, but as a domestic Irish rider, up until Ben Healy beat his record in the Olympics, he was the highest placed Irish rider ever in an Olympic Games road race. He was a top pro when I started cycling. His name's Ciaran Power, and he came back and he raced domestically for a few years at the end of his career. And I remember having a director at the time, and he said to me one day, you just follow Ciaran Power today. Watch what he does.

And that's what I did. And that day, it was like a 100 mile PhD on how to be a cyclist.

No talk of watts per kilogram. This was how you interact with the bunch, the road, the terrain, the environment. It was unbelievable. And he didn't waste a movement. Everything was purposeful. When he ate, when he moved up, when he drifted back, how he prepared and rode acrosswind, everything had a reason.

And the more cycling becomes obsessed with watts per kilogram, aero socks and marginal gains, the more I think we're losing the conversation about the thing Ciaran understood better than almost anyone else. The craft of actually being a bike racer. When I went out to France, my director, he had a word that he just bang into my head all day, every day. Le métier, le métier, le métier.

This was the trade, the craft. Everything you learn about being a bike racer, that can't be boiled down to a number on a screen. I actually think we've got a real problem at the moment, because you can be incredibly fit now without ever having to learn the craft. We have amazing access to coaches, we have amazing software platforms. You can do a full winter on Zwift and you can follow the perfect training plan on whatever platform you're on. You can know your FTP to the watt, your weight to the gram, and exactly how to hold five watts per kilogram for a paced effort. Then you can turn up at a road race and a fella whose power file looks a lot worse than you, he can open you up and make you suffer and squeal like you will never suffer or squeal on an indoor virtual platform. Hell, because he spent...

because you as the newbie coming along, you've spent the first hour in the wind, you're following the wrong attacks, you missed the right attack, and when you finally got into the break, you've done so much work that the lads you brought to the finish line, they had much, much fresher legs when it came to the final.

This rider, if it's you, you have the engine, but you just don't know how to use your engine as effectively and efficiently as those riders like Ciaran Power. And I want to be clear here, because it's not one without the other. It's not that fitness doesn't matter. Fitness does matter, it really does matter, especially in this sport, and especially if you're going uphill. But if you don't have the legs, you know, there's no amount the tactical genius is going to carry you over the final climb with the best riders in your area. And these indoor training platforms is with TrainingPeaks Virtual, they're absolutely brilliant tools. It's made structure training and racing accessible to people who might otherwise never have pinned on a number. But virtual racing, it rewards a particular set of skills. On the road, there's a lot more questions being asked of you. Can you move up through a bunch without burning matches? Can you understand what way the wind is coming from and know how to apply that, what it means to you?

Can you tell which brake is actually dangerous and which one you don't need to worry about? Can you actually get into that brake? And when you get there, do you know what to do? Because if you don't know what to do and you get into the brake, you get picked apart by the lads who do know what to do. How to change, how to get back onto the wheel, when to be on the gas, when to ease off the gas. Getting into the brake and knowing how to ride in the brake are two very different things. So let's reverse this and let's start with the bunch. Because a lot of inexperienced riders think that the aim is to stay near the front of the bunch at all times. We have riders in our own club and I look at them week after week pictured wind in their hair on the front of their bunch as if they're domestiques for UAE. I was going to use Brandon McNulty but now he's World Champ, we can't really call him a domestique anymore. So they fight their way up to the front, they hit the wind, then they drift backwards, they panic and they fight their way up into the wind again. They spend the entire race commuting between the front and the back of the bunch. And every time they move up, they're accelerating. Every time they hit the wind, they're spending energy. And every time they get swallowed, now they have to do it all over again because they don't understand that washing machine effect. The experienced riders, they understand the dynamics of the bunch. They understand that it's this living, breeding thing. They understand the ebbs and flows. They understand through a bunch of subtle cues when one side of the bunch is dangerous. Good riders can tell you when a crash is gonna happen before it happens. They can tell you when a break is gonna go before a break goes. There's a million conscious and unconscious signals for a bike racer, and if you're a bike racer, you'll know it.