Yanto Barker told me he feels like he has a good wolf and a bad wolf inside him: Yanto the entrepreneur, Yanto the cyclist, Yanto the family man, Yanto the stoic. It's a fitting image for a man who became a professional cyclist, then built one of cycling's notable clothing brands, Le Col, and did the early years of the second thing while still doing the first.
That's the detail that stops you. For the first seven years of the business, Barker was a full professional bike rider. He'd split his day in half: pro cyclist in the morning, five or six hours out training, then home for lunch and into the business in the afternoon. He was answering emails and staring at spreadsheets on the team bus on the way back from a race, 180 kilometres with Contador smashing his head in, then trying to focus on a young company. The back of a team bus, as the episode title has it, became the ground zero of a brand. There's a lot in Yanto's story, but the thread I most want to pull out is the one he kept returning to: cyclists have a superpower, and most of them don't even know it. Let me explain.
The goal-setting superpower
We spent a while, as cyclists do, listing the things bike riders are rubbish at. But Yanto flipped it, and the thing he landed on is genuinely worth your attention. Cyclists, he said, are extraordinary at goal-setting — far better than people in normal life — and they do it without thinking.
Consider what you already do. You have a target for the year, maybe two or three. That breaks down into training cycles. Each cycle breaks into weeks with a shape and a purpose. Each week breaks into individual sessions, and every session has a goal — this is a threshold day, this is recovery, this is the long ride. You take an enormous, distant objective and you decompose it, automatically, into the next thing you have to do today. As Barker put it, take that habit into a business context and you're a level up on your peers instantly, because most people have never learned to break a big ambition into its component parts.
That's the lesson, and it's bigger than cycling. The skill you've built chasing fitness — turning a far-off goal into a concrete plan and then into today's specific task — is one of the most valuable skills there is, and it transfers to anything you want to achieve off the bike. The career goal, the house project, the thing you've always meant to do: attack it the way you attack a season. Where do I want to be in twelve months? What does that require in blocks? What's this month's job? What do I do this week? You already know how to do this. Most people don't. Use it.
And, of course, it cuts the other way too. If you're not applying that rigour to your training — if your riding is a vague accumulation of efforts rather than a goal broken into a structured plan — then you're leaving your own superpower on the table. The periodisation framework is exactly this decomposition done properly.
Faster or slower
The second idea is about decision-making, and it's a thing of beauty in its simplicity. Yanto described how, as a pro, he reduced every single decision to one question: is this making me faster, or slower? What he ate, how much he trained, who he spent time with, how much he walked around, what social events he went to, how much he slept — all of it ran through the same prism. Faster or slower. Then he acted on the answer.
He compared it to a story about how one of the most famous entrepreneurs alive makes decisions — by asking whether each one moves him closer to or further from a single overriding goal. Same mechanism. Reduce a complicated choice to one clear question and the complexity falls away.
The honest, slightly bittersweet part is that Barker found this harder after he retired. As a pro, the prism was clean — everything served one measurable goal. In business and ordinary life, where it doesn't matter if you're two kilos over or stood up an hour too long, that clarity is harder to recreate. But for you, still chasing fitness, the prism is right there to use. When you're weighing up the late night, the extra glass, the skipped session, the new gadget — run it through the question. Is this making me faster or slower? You won't always choose faster, and you shouldn't; life isn't only watts. But the clarity of asking is worth having.
Good thing, bad thing, who knows
Yanto and I got onto stoicism, which he's come to fairly recently, and he loves the old parable as much as I do. A farmer's horse runs off; the neighbours say what bad luck; the farmer says, good thing, bad thing, who knows. The horse returns with wild horses; what good luck; good thing, bad thing, who knows. His son breaks his legs taming one; terrible; good thing, bad thing, who knows. The army comes conscripting and passes the son over because of the broken legs. And on it goes.
The point, Barker said, is the time frame. In the moment of a setback it's almost impossible not to think "this is a disaster" or "everyone else has it better than me" — a classic trap, especially in your twenties. But take a broader view and the meaning of events keeps changing. A junior champion who then got stuck in the pro ranks looked, at the time, like bad luck. With hindsight, it set up everything that came after.
For a cyclist, this is a genuinely useful tool, because our sport is a relentless production line of setbacks. The bad race. The injury. The day you get dropped. The result that didn't come. In the moment they feel like proof you're not good enough. Stretch the time frame and most of them are just data — a hard block that made you stronger, a forced rest that fixed something, a humbling that sharpened your focus. Good thing, bad thing, who knows. It won't make the bad day not hurt. It'll stop the bad day from defining you.
There's a life off the bike
The last thing, and it matters most for the masters and amateur riders who are the heart of this audience. Barker talked about the brutal difficulty of retiring — how you can't spend twenty or twenty-five years as a cyclist and then become a new person in a week; it takes years. His whole story is about being more than one thing: rider, entrepreneur, family man.
You're not retiring from a pro career, but the principle holds. The bike is a huge part of who you are, and it should be. But building a life and an identity around it — the work, the family, the other interests, the goals that have nothing to do with watts — isn't a distraction from your cycling. It's what makes you a whole person who happens to ride, rather than someone whose entire sense of self rides on Saturday's result. Ironically, that wholeness usually makes the cycling better and more sustainable, not worse. The riders who last, who are still racing and loving it at fifty, are almost always the ones for whom the bike is a brilliant part of a full life, not the only thing holding it up.
The discipline behind the double life
It's worth pausing on what building Le Col while racing actually demanded, because the discipline in it is the part most people skip past to get to the success. Splitting a day in half — five or six hours of professional training, then a second shift on a young business, day after day, for seven years — is not a story about talent or luck. It's a story about ruthless use of time.
Barker wasn't finding more hours than the rest of us have; he was refusing to waste the ones he had. Emails answered on the team bus instead of scrolling. The afternoon treated as a second job, not a recovery slump. That same discipline is exactly what separates the time-crunched amateurs who improve from the ones who don't. It isn't usually a question of who has more hours. It's a question of who wastes fewer of the hours they've got. You probably can't add training time to your week. You can almost always use the time you already have more deliberately — and that, not a magic extra session, is where most riders' real gains are hiding.
The takeaway
Yanto Barker built a cycling brand from the back of a team bus, and the most valuable thing he gave us wasn't a business lesson. It was a reminder of what you already have. The discipline you've built chasing fitness — the goal-setting, the decision-making, the resilience — is a genuine superpower, and it works far beyond the bike. Break your goals down. Run your choices through a clear question. Take the long view on setbacks. And build a life big enough that the bike is the best part of it, not the whole of it.
You learned all of that turning pedals. Yanto's lesson is to notice it, and use it everywhere.
Hear the full conversation with Yanto Barker on the Roadman podcast. For the mental side of riding, read the mental tools the pros use, and bring your goals to the community on Skool.