I announce my plans for an "alternative" race calendar next season. Gravel cycling will be the big new addition for me. I'm excited to experience a new side of our beautiful sport.
I announce my plans for an "alternative" race calendar next season. Gravel cycling will be the big new addition for me. I'm excited to experience a new side of our beautiful sport.
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Hello welcome back to another A1 show podcast we're getting our cadence back post new year and Yeah back to there are once a week schedule broadcast For the second week in a row gonna set my timer make sure I don't ramble on too long before I start this timer It I did I have my hand. It's like a traditional looking egg timer, but the whole idea of it is it's 15 minutes and and accept the timer to remind me to just spend 15 minutes on the important things. All too often we're too busy in life and we say we haven't got time to do it. So just remind you to say 15 minutes to spend time with a loved one, to read, to reflect, to journal, whatever it is. It's 15 minutes. If you don't have 15 minutes in your life, you got a question, what the hell you're doing? Okay, so let's get cracking into today's show. So, I'm gonna start off with a little bit of a roundup of what's been going on. I'm gonna talk to you about a pretty adventurous diet I'm on for the next three days. You're catching me at the beginning stages of it. So yeah, that's why my mood is so good and so peppy. Fast forward three days later, it won't be so peppy. I'm gonna tell you all about that. And I'm gonna tell you a new type of bike riding that I'm doing quite a lot of and some big plans to do more of it in 2020 and it's not tandem writing. So let's start off. Daily vlog has been gone down a storm. I'm less interested in, I know when people start in YouTube careers and YouTubers or influencers or whatever terms like that actually mean, they get obsessed on the metrics how many video, how many video views that I get how many likes that I get. I'm trying to avoid all that stuff. The main reason it's not why I started doing the daily vlog on YouTube. The daily vlog on YouTube it's primarily for me. It's an exercise in discipline for me. I had a new year goal of wanting to get better at storytelling and videography and the daily vlog is the method I'm choosing to do that. I'm not gonna lie. You definitely at points when you're wavering, draw motivation from the good comments and stuff that you get from the community and as the new year resolution evolves and adapts and grows what I'm seeing I'm starting to get a bit more of a buzz about is the idea of building a unique community on YouTube. A community of like-minded people. A community of guys and girls who are all into the same thing. So yeah I'm looking forward to that community growing so if you're watching on YouTube make sure you take a moment and just comment down below, subscribe to the channel, like the video because all that makes a difference. If you're on podcast, jump on over and check out the YouTube channel because it's a kind of behind the scenes, fly on the wall, look into my life, you're gonna see it's a no-hulled part, look into my life and I put my dogs up there, my girlfriends on us, yeah it's a pretty no-hulled Barnard look. The latest video I recorded was yesterday and it's about caffeine and why we have this unique link between cycling and coffee and yeah it's a great coffee stop. It's a great way to break up a roid but I went a little deeper into it. I sort of traced the origins of why caffeine was banned in cycling when it was banned in 1984 to 2004 so it was banned for a good chunk time and it was banned for its performance enhancing benefits so I dig into that and I show you how you can it's now back legal again so I show you how you can use caffeine as a performance enhancing aid and how much you should use I'm gonna pop a link to that video in the description down below it's well worth checking out and the day before that I was in infrared sauna if anyone hasn't used infrared saunas yet they are pretty cool they're a great way to produce something called heat shock proteins which help build mitochondria which in turn help increase our endurance. They're a great way to lose weight, to cleanse the skin, to detoxify. There's a host of benefits so I brought you inside my local infrared sauna and I'll also link that in the description down below so you can check both those sort of vlog is enjoyable so far and it looks like it's here to stay. So you guys with your pretty stretch New Year goals gave me the motivation to do that. I know we've guys who are trying to ride dirty cans that have never ridden the gravel race before. Guys are doing a tap tutorial. They've never done a sporty before. So your stretch targets gave me the power to do that. So speaking of stretch targets, I'm off the back of the world championships last week for anyone who doesn't follow the daily vlog and is wondering how it went.
It went okay. It could have went better. To be honest, based off how we were performing and training, we anticipated we go a little bit faster. But having said that results the way they paned out, we ended up in nine to place and got some key Olympic qualifying points. So it wasn't a bad outing for us all and all. I think we would have taken the results but not the performance before we went into the into the championship. So I suppose when the dust settles we'll have to be happy but yeah I would have liked a better performance for us the self analysis on why that performance hasn't been better is still going on the post mortem a couple of things we got wrong. It's the first time riding together in the world championships as well so you can't discount that. But this week I'm on a down week so I'm taking a week off between track and road season and kind of the goal between track and road season is to take time off force myself to be off the bike so it's not so much the physical break as a mental break so I'm dying to get back on the bike. It's beautiful weather here in Dublin so it actually is hurting me not to get outside but I'm going to force myself to stay off the the bike for another few days until I'm dying to get back on the bike and ready to go. So I have a window this week where there's a couple of things I wanted to try for a long time but I've been hard added in training and I couldn't take the foot off the gas for training sessions to experiment with some dietary stuff I wanted to do. So I've taken this opportunity this week to try a juice cleanse. So for the next three days, I'm going straight out veggie juices. So cold pressed veggie juices and water for the next three days. So you're going to see I'll bring out a vlog specifically about that on oil and donut. But the main thing is like a helped bodily function that's linked to improve and energy removes toxins. It's going to reduce my sugar cravings. impacts on skin health and mainly a goat bacterial one. So goat bacteria and sugar dependency after a long period of training like that are two things that are really adversely affected. We just become so dependent on sugar from gels, bar, sugary drinks, during competition and our goat bacteria suffer as a result. So I want to take this time to go through juice cleanse and just resettle that before I head into the road season. Now a tree day juice cleanse, it's pretty horrific. It's difficult. I don't mind intermittent fast in because the finish line is in sight, but right now I'm day one into the tree day juice cleanse and the finish line is nowhere near in sight and I'm already absolutely starving. So yeah, I'm going to keep you posted on how that goes as the week progresses. But I wanted to jump into this substantive topic for today's podcast. And it is gravel roiding. So some of you viewers and listeners, let me know in the comments down below. Actually, if you have raced on ridden sporty train and session, anything gravel related, let us know down below when you got started and what your experience is being so far. But I've limited gravel experience. I've been out on couple of gravel roads with friends, but it's something that I'm planning to do a lot more of this season. So my 2020 calendar will include more gravel roiding, including one very ambitious gravel roiding week, which I'm going to tell you about at the end of this podcast with a very well-known world orroider, which I'm really really looking forward to. So when I started thinking about gravel riding and did I want the border where gravel riding. I started to cast my mind back to why I actually started cycling and I didn't start cycling on a racing bike. I started cycling just on a hackabout. I think it was like a BMX and I started as a kid like many you did and it was just for phone. There was no performance goal. There was just for phone. It was so I could get over to the next village over and hang out with friends so I could open up a new world for myself. It was a sense of adventure, it was a sense of phone, it was a sense of freedom. And when I got reflected on roads, I was a lot of the time now, especially on the longer endurance rides I'll do my best to go and explore. But if I'm two and a half hours to ride, I'm kind of stuck as to the roads I ride. I ride the same road, so now I'm riding the road, not so much for adventure and exploration, I'm writing them out in necessity to get a training effect, to get a session finished. And it's very contrary to why I started writing. So when I started thinking about the essence of what gravel-roiding is, it's exactly what it is.
It's that spirit of adventure, it's the spirit of exploration. It's just not knowing what's around the next corner. The view is that you haven't seen before. and the amount of gravel roads versus traditional roads is insane. Like you can go places that you wouldn't even believe on a gravel road. It's kind of the intersection where road biking and mountain biking meets in the middle and it's something that I am very very eager to explore in 2020. I know I'm lucky enough living in Dublin that I have access into the Dublin mountains, the Wicklow Mountains, where some of the best gravel roid in the country takes place. But the second part of why my mind started wandering to gravel was I obviously taken a material break from competitive cycling back this season and it got me thinking I've had friends retire from cycling in the last year or so guys who've been racing for you 16 years and the cycle doesn't have to end. We don't have to have a definite finish line on it because road cycle, we all put so much into it. You know, the top A1s, they're 20 plus errors a week. It's not compatible with having another lifestyle of high performance. You're not going to have much career advancement, family advancement and balance 20, 25 hours a week. It's normally one or the other. So we all seem to put this timeline on it. I'll do another I'll do another two seasons and then walk away from the sport. Some of my best friends and some great boy crutters have walked away from the sport. Guys, I used to ride every day with and they've walked away and they don't ride anymore. And that makes me sad. It makes me sad because they used to ride the bike for fun and then that fun turned into competition and at some point they lost sight of fun and never returned to it. But gravel riding gives us that opportunity to keep riding for fun. To say, you know, there is no finish line. If you can get out and ride the bike two hours a week, if you can get out and ride the bike five hours a week, 15 hours a week, it doesn't matter. The gravel is not going to discriminate. You're going out, you're riding for yourself. It's not competitive unless you choose it to be competitive, but even the races have more participatory element to them. It's not as harsh as the scene in road, so you're meeting in an industrial estate, knocking seven shades out of each other and then going home just absolutely deflated if you've performed, excuse me, just a segue there actually, that cough that you're here. I'm not actually sick at the moment. I have what's called, we call Velodrome cough. So Velodrome cough is the change in humidity from the air outside to the air inside the Velodrome. So when you go super deep on an effort with the really dry air, it irritates your bronchial tract and it gives you this sort of irritable cough that can take a couple of weeks to disappear sometimes. So just with the amount of track riding I've been doing in the last couple of months. So, you know, racing in Manchester to the camp in Portugal, camp in New York, and then over to Canada I've been on the track a lot since October. It's been almost a persistent cough. I've had a few days where I've got rid of it and then I've gone and done another, you know, standing four down leper or something that's back again. So it's something I've had to deal with for a while. There you go, me segueing again. That me segueing, anyone who's a repeat listener to the show knows those little segues. I like to think of them like when you're reading, you get some nice punctuation, you get a paragraph ends and I know when I'm reading a page and I get to the end of a paragraph, I have this little sense of accomplishment where you get the end of a page, a tour of next page, it's a sense of accomplishment, It's also mini-break, a place you can just exhale and go, ooh, made it to the end of the page. Now let's let my attention drift for a second, boom. Okay, back focused again. So that's what I find when I go on these weird little segues that it gives you that chance to have that little exhalation, let your attention break for a minute and then work straight back into the topic. Jeez, I do some rambling. So the gravel road and convoy attention for those reasons, sense of exploration and the idea that we can ride regardless of age, regardless of ability, regardless of trying to time, you know, late into our 50s, 60s, 70s. That's what brought my eye to Gravaroid and then I dug a layer deeper. And with some of the problems in our roads at the moment, you know, drivers multitasking on phones, how dangerous the roads are, the number of cyclists, motorists, collisions, the traffic congestion. Road safety is a huge element that needs to be considered. If you're not considering it, it's just negligence.
So gravel removes all that. We don't have a road safety issue. We also have the ability to ride incredibly scenic routes that we don't often get a chance to ride on the road. We can, if anyone's gone hill walking, you'll know what I'm talking about. The views you get hill walking there. They're amazing, but I also think they're made more amazing but the fact that they're not easily accessible. If you could just drive around the corner and experience the same view, I don't think you'd appreciate it as much. It's the fact that you need to hike for four or five hours to get to this viewing point that makes the view that little bit magical. So gravel roiding for meters to touch it out as well, it's making you work for the view. You've got to encounter some pretty gnarly roads on the way to getting to the view and point and makes it all that much more sweeter. And we've been blessed in the last couple of years from some great technological advancements. We've had GPS has been the big one that's opened up gravel and made it more accessible because now we can program in gravel routes into our GPS. It's making routes that we would have never found or we just wouldn't have had, we wouldn't had the nerve to go explore them because we'd just be worried we wouldn't find our way home. Now we can download this onto our wahoo, onto our garment head illness and off we go with a little worry of not finding our way back with little worry of the unknown of not known how far the road is how long it's going to take. We can see on Strava exactly how long it's going to take so those advancements have been absolutely amazing. Additionally the gravel culture really caught my mind, caught my eye and it's a little bit of a rebel culture and for me I love roads and I love the history and I love the tradition but at times it is a little bit sterile and you just need to look out at some of our especially beginner categories and see how serious some of the guys are taking us. I'm all for taking it serious but it's plugging in and being serious at the right times. If you're you know an A4, an A3, an A2 rider, even a category one rider, Cycling shouldn't take over your entire life. It shouldn't be, you know, it can't walk down these stairs. It should be in addition to your life that enhances your life quality, not takes away from your life quality. And gravel culture has definitely got that in abundance. Even the idea of the handing up beers after races, the slightly more relaxed dress sense where we don't have to be all completely uniform, where it's fine to go riding in a set of bib shorts and a tee short where, You don't always have to wear a helmet because we're not drilled into this safety culture. It's so I've got something that should be just enjoyed and not put road marks or not put road blocks on front of it that we have to have safety equipment to enjoy it all the time. It's a beautiful culture that I hope spreads into road cycling and not the other way around. road cycling doesn't start to infringe upon this gravel culture and impose the road culture on gravel. I know EF education have a pretty cool, I think it's beyond racing, beyond the pellet on something like that. If you check out EF Education's YouTube channel, they've a couple of goers, Lacklin' Morgan and Alex Howes, and they're doing what they call the alternate race schedule and the alternate race schedule, it's actually nothing new, they've just branded, there's Reuters been doing it for years and Peter Stethnot and Trek has been doing it but Paco Mansebo has been doing this for probably a decade. I worry with the more high profile road guys coming into it that we're in danger of diluting the gravel culture and bringing the road culture to gravel cycling. So I think it needs to be carefully handled as more of us rode these transition across into the gravel scene. When you do get gravel roiden, I think you'll notice a couple of things straight off the bat. Fortunately gravel roiden is way harder. If you're anticipating that you can ride 200 kilometres on the road, 200 kilometre road day and 200 kilometre gravel day are very, very different days, let me tell you. They're just, we've a roll and resistance element. The tourism, the water, the surface isn't as smooth, so it takes longer to cover the distance. So bear that in mind for sure. Also, you're gonna have to be self-sufficient because most of the time you're not gonna come past shops and coffee shops, so make sure your hydration's bang on point, that your calories in or bang on point, you're bringing enough bars and food with your argon, exploring. And the last thing is obviously gravel is loose. So your normal lines through corners on the scents, you just need to be careful at them because the apex isn't always the perfect line.
Generally the line most traveled is the perfect line. So whether it's most traveled by previous cyclists or walkers or even wildlife, that's normally the best line because it's compacted and it makes for a slightly better traction. I've picked out, before I let you know, my alternate gravel plans for the season, I've picked out some of the best races, the five best races that I think if you can get them, I definitely work down. On top of the list, it's the big daddy, Dirty Kanza. If anyone doesn't know what Dirty Kanza is, a quick YouTube around and you're going to find Dirty Kanza. It's a 200-mile race and it's on the tour to get to May. support that you're looking at a minimum of 10 hours. It's been one boy, Hoi Pro for a gravel riders like Ted King the last few years, Lachlan Martin had a gold at last year, I think he was top five. It's an epic 10 plus hour day for the best pros. So bear in mind, that's going to be a long day in very warm weather. So tread cautiously if that's your first gravel event. We dirty river 200. This is a pretty cool one. It's 200 kilometers. Again, it's on the border of England and Scotland. A lot of forest in this one, but it's beautiful and it's scenic. We have Barrie-Roubaix in Michigan County. It's in Barrie County, Michigan, sorry. But this I think is the biggest gravel race in the world. There's three tales, I'm starting to be correct on that. When Council might have more or Leadville might have more. But there's three tales in the 800th Starters, last April for it. It's a mixture of gravel, pavement, mud, sand, and even snow and the ice. Definitely an epic. We're getting slightly closer to home with these ones now. We got the Epic Gravel in Jirona. It's 10 hours again of racing. This one's in September and anyone who hasn't been to Jirona, it's just magical. Jirona is the mecca of Saikland. It's the perfect place to cycle. It's the perfect blend of flat roads, short, short puncher climbs, long climbs. It's got an amazing road culture, amazing gravel culture. It's the epic centroid world so I can if I was picking one I'd be pretty hard pressed to look past the one in Jirona. If you're closer to home in Ireland or if you're a foreign listener and you're looking to explore Ireland with the gravel grinder big dog over here that's in for a manna you're going to look at almost two thousand meters elevation with 87% of that on gravel and then the other 13% the split between sort of b-roads and single track. again it's very much worth doing. I'm really excited about the gravel season ahead and starting to try my hand at some gravel events. I'm in the middle of trying to put together my calendar and what my calendar is going to look like for the season because yeah it's taking the idea of the EF Education alternate calendar and it's bringing that a step forwarder for me because I'm trying to integrate in the gravel off-road stuff, my own road calendar and tandem racing with the R squad. So definitely an alternate calendar. Capital A, I'm going to say, on the alternate calendar for this year. But my gravel season this year is going to kick off on the 30th of March, where I'm heading over for five days with Sven Tuft. So Sven Tuft, pink jersey where Nizure Natalia, he is an epic lad. If anyone doesn't know Sven, you should check him out. He's a weird quirky brilliant alternate sort of guy who's famous for his crazy long rides you know riding across to start a tour of boats and then winning tour of boats and riding home thousands of miles so he's famous for those sort of quirky antics so we're heading into Jirona going exploring for five days of gravel riding the idea is to wreck it for you guys and we're hopefully set up up then in April, May, some gravel roads, gravel tours in the Jirona area. So I'm super excited about that. I'm super excited to hang out with Spain. Obviously I'm gonna be bringing my build up to that and the actual day today of riding with Spain and the gravel on my vlog daily. So definitely make sure you check out that daily vlog, like and subscribe and comment to it. I love the podcast. The podcast as much as I'm enjoying the daily vlogs, the podcast is my favorite format. It's the place where I get to talk waffle to you guys. It's the place where I get to long form freely express what I'm thinking and have these intimate conversations. So don't worry, I will be back weekly with the podcast. Guys, thanks for listening to my ramblings on the juice, doy-ish on my gravel plans for this year and for tuning in and listening to me sort of at a length talking about my experiences on the vlog and those sort of little micro topics I've been bringing you. Thanks for listening and I'm going to be back with this next week.
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