Alex Howes came on the podcast fresh from announcing he was leaving EF Education after 15 years in the World Tour, and we ended up talking about the thing most pros face but almost none discuss openly — how you decide to walk away, and what you build once you do. He laid out the whole conversation on Beyond Pro Cycling — Gravel Awaits on the Roadman Cycling Podcast.
What struck me wasn't the leaving. It was how clearly he'd thought about why, and how much of that thinking applies whether you're a pro running out of road or an amateur wondering if the event you've chased for years is still the right one.
Key Takeaways
• Decide based on the future you can see, not the years you've already spent — that's the sunk cost trap that keeps people stuck • There's a clear line between short-term discomfort (cold hands, a bad block) and genuine long-term misalignment; only the second is a reason to walk • A gravel privateer is roughly half rider, half marketer — winning is close to binary, so storytelling carries the value • Going all-in on one platform beats a thin, mediocre presence across all of them • The privateer route is closer to running a small business than holding a job — more freedom, more burden of choice • Resilience has a born-with component, but it can be unlearned by avoiding hard things — and rebuilt through controlled exposure to discomfort
When Walking Away Is The Smart Call
"You can't necessarily make that decision based on, oh, I have 20 years experience in this," Alex told me. "It's: are you happy doing this or not? Do you see a future here or not?"
That's the sunk cost fallacy in plain language — staying because you've already paid in, rather than because the road ahead is one you want. The years you've spent are spent regardless of what you choose next. The only question that helps is whether you can see a future worth riding toward.
He's careful about the distinction, though. "You don't want to be so short-sighted, like, oh, my hands are cold, I guess I should quit cycling forever." Cold hands on a winter ride are just bike riding. A bad week is just a bad week. The signal worth acting on is the deeper one — when you genuinely can't see a positive future in the direction you're pointed.
I went through a version of this myself leaving law for coaching. There's a point where someone close to you has to more or less tell you to stop, because you're so deep in the push-through-everything mentality that you can't see the situation clearly anymore. Cyclists are especially prone to it. The entire sport trains you to ignore the part of your brain saying this hurts, this isn't working.
What I respect about Alex's exit is the intent behind it. Most pros don't get a celebration lap. They run out of contracts in October and become civilians overnight — the sport quits on them. He's leaving because he wants to build something different, not because he was forced to. That distinction shapes everything that comes next.
The Privateer Reality: Half Rider, Half Marketer
"It's like 50% can you ride your bike, 50% can you get a message out to the world and sell these products," I said to him, and he didn't argue. That's a fundamental shift from World Tour life, where the job description is narrow: race your bike, show up for sponsors.
The privateer world runs more like a small business. As Alex put it, "you could work as long as you want, you could work as hard as you want, you could build the brand as big as you need to." But that freedom comes with the burden of every choice landing on you.
The marketing reality is blunt. In gravel, winning is close to binary — you win, or you're one of the other riders. A podium at a one-day Classic carries prestige on the road. A gravel podium doesn't generate the same recognition. So privateers have to become storytellers and community builders to create value beyond the result sheet.
Dylan Johnson is the obvious example. He was never a World Tour name, but he built a large following through content and turned that into a sustainable place in gravel. Part athlete, part communicator, part operator.
I learned this the hard way starting my coaching business while racing as an amateur in France. I tried to be everywhere — every platform at once — and achieved mediocrity across all of them. The shift came when I went all-in on one thing. As Alex said, "you wanna knock it out of the park on all of them, but that's fully unrealistic as a single human being." Pick your platform. Build a real voice. Let the racing become part of the story rather than the whole income.
Resilience Is Built, Not Just Born
The part of the conversation I keep coming back to was about resilience — whether it's something you have or something you make.
Alex's view: "There's an element of it that you're sort of born with, but you can definitely unlearn resilience. You can become soft, for sure." That second half matters more than the first. Toughness isn't a fixed trait you either won or lost at birth. It erodes when you stop asking hard things of yourself.
His own came from independence early — flying to Belgium to race cyclocross at 15, working out European transport on his own, figuring things out without anyone smoothing the path. "Just having that freedom, and then sort of leading by example," he said, describing watching his parents work hard and take on their own challenges. There was no five-point programme behind it. It was exposure, the freedom to fail, and models of persistence to copy.
That tracks with what I see in coaching. The riders who last aren't always the most gifted — they're the ones who've built a working relationship with discomfort. They can tell the difference between productive suffering, the kind that builds fitness, and destructive suffering, the kind that breaks you. And they've earned that distinction the only way it's available: by repeatedly choosing the hard thing.
The pre-dawn winter rides. The hill repeats you'd rather skip. The race where you're empty with 50km still to go. Those aren't just fitness sessions. They're the reps that teach your nervous system that discomfort is temporary and survivable — which is exactly the lesson you need when a bigger decision, like walking away from a 15-year career, arrives.
What This Means For Your Riding
You don't need to be quitting a pro contract for any of this to land.
The first lesson is honest self-assessment. Are you chasing an event because it genuinely fits where you want to be in five years, or because you've already sunk so much into it that stopping feels like failure? Plenty of amateurs grind away at criteriums for a decade because that's how they started, when their real strength and enjoyment lie in long endurance days. The hours you've already spent on the wrong goal don't make it the right one.
The second is that resilience responds to training the same way your aerobic system does — through progressive, controlled exposure. Start with shorter intervals and extend them. Ride when conditions aren't perfect. Practise functioning when the plan goes sideways. You're not just building watts; you're building the tolerance that lets you hold a hard decision steady when one arrives.
And the third, quietly the most useful: think in years, not in the next session. The question isn't "what feels good right now," it's "where do I want to be, and what path actually gets me there." That's as true for choosing your A-event as it is for choosing whether to keep racing at all.
If you're stuck — not on a career decision, but on your actual riding, where the work goes in and the progress doesn't come out — the limiter is usually somewhere in how your training, recovery and progression fit together. The Plateau Diagnostic looks at all three and shows you where the real constraint sits. Three minutes. Free.
