Roadman, today I'm gonna give some advice to my younger self
Roadman, today I'm gonna give some advice to my younger self. Let's cure that intro! The big question is this. How do we use cycling as a tool to improve our health, our happiness and our longevity? That is the question on this podcast, we'll give you the answers. My name is Anthony Walsh and welcome to the Roadman Podcast. Roadman! Welcome back, Roadman! To another week, to another Roadman Cycling Podcast. I hope this audio finds you well. You're in good spirits and ready to tackle the week ahead. Recently I was reading a book, you might have read it, it's Tony Robbins, Money Master the Game. The concept of it is Tony Robbins, the, you know, the motivational speaker to go out with with a huge jaw from the Simpsons. That's how I remember him. Anyway, Tony Robbins has built himself such a huge platform of amazing leverage. So he decided to use this leverage and reach back out to the 10 most prominent Wall Street fund managers. And he poses one question to all these Wall Street financial gods. He says, if you couldn't leave any of your financial assets, if you couldn't leave any cash, any property, any stocks, anything like this to your children, all you could leave them with was one piece of advice. What would that piece of advice be? And that's the premise of the book and it teaches you, you know, their secrets to managing wealth. But it got me tinking. I don't have any children, but did I know of? But I got me tinking that if I could only give myself three tips now to my younger self when I was starting out cycling, what would those tips be? So that's what I wanna talk about today. But folks, before I get going, I would ask you to kindly head on over to Patreon, the secret podcast, it's secret podcast time of the month again, that's just about to get dropped for all our patreons. So that's gonna be my members-only podcast that ask me anything where I give access to my very best bits, my tricks, my insight hacks, my tips, it all goes to the Patreon. So if you wanna get that access to it, It's over on patreon.com forward slash Anthony underscore watch and I suppose appealing to your sensitivities is a double bang reason to subscribe this month because there's so much hustle has gone into the summit it's roadman summit.com it's a completely free event that I'm trying for all you guys the listeners and the wider public so I'd ask you to help me spread the awareness of that one so just get that URL roadman summit.com put it into your cycling WhatsApp groups your Facebook groups and let people know I'm bringing together 30 of unbelievable speakers from the world of professional cycling. I'm bringing not together just the front of the house that you normally see like the riders. I'm bringing together the background team. I'm bringing their physios, their dieticians, their strength condition coaches, everything. And over the course of two days, I'm going to tackle the idea of optimising performance from 30 different angles. It's absolutely epic. It's one of the best events, if I do impartially say so myself, it's one of the best events I've seen put together for free for cycling so I'm really excited about that. The link to get your free ticker for that is in the boyo as well down below. Okay get on to these three nuggets of advice that I would give my younger self. The first one I think it's balance and you know what a sexy word Anthony, balance. But cycling in all seriousness it can take over your life and finding the right spot and the right level of commitment where cycling is a tool at the outset or intro we play every single day. It's cycling as a tool for health, happiness and longevity and it's finding the place where cycling complements your life and makes other areas of your life stronger. Example, like your relationship with your husband, their wife or partner, boyfriend, girlfriend, whatever. So if you go out and you ride for six hours, seven days a week, you're going to come home and you're going to become that's obviously an extreme example and I don't suppose many of you are doing that, that but just to highlight my point. If you ride for six hours or seven days a week and you come home, you're going to be spent, you're going to be miserable, you're going to be just in full-on recovery mode for the next day.
You're not going to be that much fun to be around
You're not going to be that much fun to be around. At the very opposite end of that, if you're a complete couch potato and you don't go out at all, that's not going to be very good for your mental health state. You're going to pile on weight, you're going to get down on yourself, esteem issues. So on that continuum from riding nonstop to not writing at all. We need to find where we sit and where we're happy with and the amount that complements the rest of our life. Work, family, relationships, social, our goals. There's no right answer for this. It's the right answer for you. The right answer for me, you know, if I write a narrow day, I'm probably going to be miserable. If I'm not going, yeah, I'm not going to lie, I would be miserable. I know I need those longer rides, but it's fine in that point in using judgment. And you step across the line sometimes and you get it run and you go look, that's riding too much. We all love the ride, but it's fine that ride amount. And on that idea of balance, it's when you do hit a plateau and I know a lot of you out there, I'm in a different situation because work with the podcast is and the coaching company, Roman, it's more flexible. So I do have time that I can carve out during the day and I can work at night. But a lot of you guys listening, you're in that, have to show up and punch in at nine o'clock, have to be there until five o'clock. So you have a very set routine. So maybe you can only write maximum eight hours a week. And at some point, we can do all this coach and trickery which we do if you're one of our clients and manipulate and stress scores and work on specific zones, load and specific systems for race adaptations. But at some point, with a fixed training intensity, with a fixed training duration, if you can only try in seven hours a week for five years, there's only so much we can do and you are going to plateau at some point. But it's understanding that when you do plateau that the journey doesn't end, that's where it just starts and that's what happened for me. Because I taught for so many years I was riding full time and I was riding 25-30 years a week and then when I came back down to balancing work with it and I could only ride 10 hours a week, I taught it not. It gigs up because I'm going backwards. So it's over because cycling has to be this constant game progression. But it doesn't. The more important and the more enjoyable game is knowing that you have a fixed amount the time to try and and being clever around how can I get the most out of this, how can I get seek adventures out of this, how can I go and do a new gravel race, how can I get my aerodynamic, my CDA, my call-fishing-the-frontal drag, how can I improve that for a race against the clock and this is where it's exciting. So balance is my number one point there, finding that balance and cycling that compliments your life. That's the point one I would give to my younger self and that would have stopped me walking away from the sport which would have super, super powerful. And it would have stopped me getting so down on myself maybe at times when I was full time on the bike. Secondly, I would say holidays will just never be the same again. I remember going to a buddy's wedding. It was about two years ago, I'd say, when I basically quit cycling that period where I wasn't riding the bike very much. And I went to the airport. And it was in the taxi in the morning on the way to the airport, which would be very common for me, very sleepy the way to the airport and you're doing that kind of mental check-in go to have passport or have my bag to have all the bits and I just felt like I'm forgetting something I'm forgetting something and I got to the airport and I realized what it was it was the first time I was at the airport in about seven years without a bike bag and it just struck me that some people will take that as a negative because bike bags are a hassle in the airport but it just struck me as like cycling it adds a new dimension to every holiday you're ever on and if it's you know a holiday gone away for trying and brilliant to get to explore villages and towns and meet people that you never would otherwise but even if it's a holiday gone away which is significant to other hopefully she support for your cycling endeavors or even cycles herself or he cycles himself if you're a female listener and it adds a lot to those type of holidays as well because I've had it on boat and so yeah I would just say it's a realization that airport travel and holidays will never be the same again once I find cycling.
My final point I would say to myself and this was one that I was more…
And my final point I would say to myself and this was one that I was more guilty of in my college days before I was riding the bike full-time. Don't get caught up and spending money on bikes. Don't get caught up in thinking that you need a certain level of bike to progress because you don't. Now there's a caveat here Because if you can have high disposable income and you like spending on bikes more power to you brilliant It's the people I'm targeting this message are like me when I was a student And I was really obsessing and putting myself at a point of financial difficulty I've told the story on the podcast before where I forged a loan application pretending I needed a car for college so I could get my first power meter But it didn't end there I had this constant need to try and get go from Ultegra to Jory Ace to the new Jory Ace to the carbon Jory Ace levers Honestly, that shit doesn't matter at all. It really doesn't Like there is no difference between Jory Ace and one-oh-five now people are gonna come down on them and go there clearly is a difference in these two You are either a good bike rider or you're not a good bike rider one-oh-five to Jory Ace There's some tactile differences and some differences in the speed of shift and then if you go on cycling tips or any of these websites that review stuff they'll tell you it's most have. But there's a lot of vested interests in all this you know inverted commas most have. This stuff is not most have. A good bike rider riding one out five and a cheap aluminium bike will beat a bad bike rider every day of the week on a 15,000 euro pinarelladogma with the latest SRM, carbon wheels and di2. That's just fact. So many of us neglect the engine. We neglect the brain, the mentality, that athlete, the hunger, the killer that you need to be an athlete. They're the two primary drivers. It's brain and body. Tech, it's an afterthought. You know, as I say, you have the cash, spend on it, great. Don't feel like you ever need to. way, way more important is investing in yourself, true coaching to get that body just primed and investing in the mind, investing in creating that killer, not winning mentality because those two couples will make you unstoppable. There we have it, advice, tree tips to my younger self. I hope you're listening to young Anthony, wherever you are out there in multiverse land. Okay, Rob, man, I shall chat to you again tomorrow. Rob, man, before you go, I've got an important announcement to make because over two days and the 8th and 9th of December, I'm going to speak with 30 of the world's leading fitness experts. I want you to join me free of charge from the comfort of your own home. This is the first ever Roadman virtual performance summit for aiming to bring together the best minds and fitness and they're going to share with me their secrets for biohacking your physiology, melting away body fat and smashing your cycling goals. Would you like to learn their secrets? It's easy. All you have to do is register for your free ticket over at www.roadmansummit.com forward slash free. That's www.roadmansummit.com forward slash free. The link is in the bio.