BEYOND PRO CYCLING - GRAVEL AWAITS (W/ALEX HOWES) | ROADMAN PODCAST

1.Unlearning Resilience and Choosing Bikes

Uh I mean I you could I think there's an element of it that you're sort of born with but you can definitely unlearn resilience uh um you know you could you can become soft for sure like me for example um you know I I've had I've had to like look in the mirror recently and be like okay am I gonna like Double Down On Bikes here or am I am I out you know and you can't necessarily make that decision based on oh I have you know 20 years experience in this it's like are you happy doing this or you're not uh you like do you want to do this no do you wanna do you see a future here or not um the earth I think that's really what it comes down to It's like a h is is this something that will make you happy in the future you want to knock it out of the park on all of them but that's you know fully unrealistic as a single human being a Sprint or a climb or a TT guy exactly it was a good experience you know it's an impossible task unless you're well but yeah can't all be well uh yeah when Rafa came on and they they were like oh we want to do this EF gun racing stuff um you know we're gonna need a couple athletes from from EF and um they're sort of poking around and I kind of kicked the door down I was like uh Hey guys hey guys uh uh Hey right here I'll be there it's like you've been proud since 2007 or so like what what's the darkest moments what were they like what were they and what were they like Google Alex Hales welcome to the robot cycling podcast thanks for having me on happy to be here congrats on becoming a parent uh thanks thanks uh yeah I don't know how long how long can you wait how long can it be before uh you can no longer say congrats I think you got a couple of years out of it I think you get two years out of that all right we're coming up on the end of that two years out of it yeah I mean like like nobody's like congratulating my parents on becoming a parent yeah there's a point there's a point where but it's interesting because a lot of my friends are having kids at the moment as well and how did becoming a parent affect your priorities like what you thought was important in life uh you know I yeah I mean obviously it does it does change things a bit um but I I think that like for me um personally on a lot of levels it didn't change a ton uh priority wise um but I mean obviously the little ones first and foremost but um like I like I never had an issue like leaving the house with yogurt all over my shirt beforehand having more yogurt on my shirt didn't really change anything um but yeah it's uh you do think twice a little bit uh before bombing down some like Mountain descent or something though um yeah they're both around I just like stoked more than you uh they're pretty pumped um I mean I let like let's be honest I'm pretty stoked but uh my mom is like yeah she's pretty over the moon uh when the when the little one popped out her first first thing she said was I waited 33 years for a girl it's like me and my me and my brother you know and she was in a house full of boys and you know she loved us but uh she would have loved us more if one of us was a girl um and she finally has the has a little one so I was just spoils the heck out of her I don't think we've bought clothes since she was born like I think my mom bought all the clothes do you ever think back about on a ride about how your parents raised you like the set of values that they gave you that allowed you to be so resilient in life that gave you that work ethic to climb the cycling ladder all the way to the top and wonder like you know how do you design that into your kid's life now uh I mean yeah it's definitely something you think about um I think I I think the biggest thing like my parents did was they just allowed me to have Independence early um you know I was able to do a lot of things on my own um and was you know just sort of out and about in the world from a very very young age I mean I like flew to Belgium and raised cycle cross when I was like 15. um like like looking back on it like they didn't like really check it out a whole lot it's like you know they weren't exactly helicopter parenting it I mean we we got the we got to Europe and I remember we were there for like 10 hours trying to like find a ride uh to get out of there and like you know yeah it turned and like navigate like European trains as a kid and uh stuff it was it was interesting but um yeah I mean so just having that freedom and then sort of leading by example I mean my my dad both my parents really um you know work super hard you know my mom went back to school when I was in I don't want to say middle school late Elementary School she went back to school and went back to college and you know we were it was kind of funny because we were doing like the same math at the same time um and she hates math but like you know watching her like kind of overcome that and you know get her degree and um you know watching my dad leave the house every morning 5 30 a.m um you know that's definitely bust a little bit of work ethic India um and yeah I'm a little a little Freedom little work ethic uh those two I mean they go they go a long way uh but that all that said kids are going to be who they're gonna be um it's funny like watching my daughter now like she's sort of just like uh yeah she she's on her own little war path like it's I also think like I look at my upbringing hands my parents never really sat me down and had a discussion about the importance of hard work but it was more just watching them that I think I got this bulk for you know might be the most talented I don't think I was the smartest kid in school but I ended up you know staying in seven years of University to finish as a lawyer and that was work and I don't think I was ever the best bike rider you know I paid to ride my bike for a little bit and that was pretty cool and a lot of it was hard work and I was talking about Buddy minor I'd still writes full time at the moment student today I was like if you could have come up with one word for like what she needs to get to the top and cycling he's like resilience I was wondering do you think you could teach resilience are you just born with that uh I mean you could I think there's an element of it that you're sort of born with but you can definitely unlearn resilience uh um you know you could you can become soft for sure um yeah I don't know that's a good question I think I mean to an extent right nurture versus nature um I don't know how you do how you like really I I don't know if there's like a like a five-point bullet bullet point program that you can like put together to teach resilience at least nothing that's like not going to get child Social Services called on you yeah we're squatting logs in the snow yeah yeah just making them sleep outside when they're like four uh yeah where like you expose kids extreme cold at an early age to build resilience uh well well it's funny like my my friend his kid and uh at least two but um his his first one when it when he would like really go off the rails and you know be doing something bad he would just put him outside uh kind of his time out and like that would sometimes mean you just like chucking a kid into like minus 15 degree weather um and kind of like it sounds ridiculous and it sounds like it sounds bad right I mean it sounds bad but I tell you what there's no there's no better way to like sober up a child than just like extreme cold exposure they're like all right four four seconds later like okay I want to come back inside I'll be good I'll never do that again it was like okay fine I guess I shouldn't hit the dog in the face with a you know piece of wood but it's I think so many people quit stuff early and you know that story of the guy who stopped digging two inches from gold so many people quit and to get to the top and cycle I get to the top on anything you need that crazy amount of resilience but some of the best decisions I've made have been decisions to quit like I'm taking our points in my life I thought I was you know Billy big entrepreneur and I was trying to find my way after spending a bit of time trying to climb the cycling ladder and not getting very far and I came back home I didn't want to go back practicing law so I started setting up a bunch of businesses and I became like a prisoner by these two Retreat businesses I'd set up like I get up in the morning I'd have like a cafe to run they had a media company I was involved in and I just want to build an app on the side and it was just all it wasn't authentic to me it was all day Zoom calls and meetings and I was like this is miserable but I still had that kind of cycling Gene of like you know you gotta there's tough times you gotta enjoy you gotta endure and I remember having a conversation with my girlfriends where I was saying to her I was like I'm gonna go full time into the media company and start working like 60 70 hours a week to really drive it and she's just like what are you doing like that's totally not you she's like just quit I was like what she's like just quit it's okay to just quit and start again you're going the wrong direction just start again like when is it okay to quit do you think uh I mean like if you talk to an economist on that like I mean you should you should never make decisions based on sunk cost you know it's like you like you want to make the decision on on what the final outcome will be not necessarily what you've put into it um yeah which is a hard thing to do and like counter-intuitive to human nature right you know like uh I mean like me for example um you know I I've had I've had to like look in the mirror recently and be like okay am I gonna like double down on bikes here or am I am I out you know and you can't necessarily make that decision based on oh I have you know 20 years experience in this it's like are you happy doing this or you're not uh you like do you want to do this no do you wanna do you see a future here or not um I think that's really what it comes down to it's like I uh is is this something that will make you happy in the future you know like you don't want to be like so short-sighted be like oh yeah my I went for a bike ride my hands are cold I guess I should quit cycling forever uh you know the same thing with the media company you're like oh I'm gonna have to you know bust my ass for 70 hours this week I guess I should just quit uh but you know like long term it's like oh this is actually something I I don't I don't care about and I don't want to do and I'm doing you know for money or you know some other reason uh Pride um you know in that sense it's like yeah just just quit like I've seen so many people you know on the racing side they're like they they feel like they need to you know like oh I have to do this so I can be successful and it's like dude like you're never gonna make it as a bike racer anyways and you you [ __ ] hate it like what are you doing like it sucks like it's dangerous it's you know it's hard uh the the potential payout is like yeah I mean you're never gonna be a billionaire racing bikes you know like it's you know dump your energy somewhere else um if you don't want to do so many stay too long like I look us the last race of the season and you know you've Valverde and me believe they're called up to the front and they're you know I know they've got a checkered passport they've been very influential in cycling for you know over a decade I think foreground tour wins between the tree from neighborly and they're celebrated but in that same bunch there's also guys return this year like and you get on the Ave Sam bewley and they don't get the Fanfare even though they've been good Pros for a long time and it's like it's a difficult sport to get out of on your terms for a lot of guys it just ends up being like I have no contract in October I guess that's me doing I guess I'm not a Pro bike rider anymore yeah uh yeah yeah it's a funny thing like there's I mean that that transition's scary for sure um and like I think there's a bit of like a bit of like Stockholm syndrome right you're like oh yeah and this is this is my life and then you I think a number of riders you know they they leave cycling and they're you know five years down the line they're like man I should have quit you know 10 years ago like why why did I stay that long like that is very hard uh but I mean the the inverse of that is true it's like it's you know they're without the the Fanfare and the celebration uh uh like there's a lot of things that motivate internally um and so I think on a lot of levels it is you know a rewarding uh rewarding job that you know a lot of guys want to stick around with as long as they can um you know you're still happy as a career riding a bike yeah I have a lot of fun um on the riding side on the racing side um I've also been doing a lot of sort of extracurricular stuff kind of behind the scenes so I mean at this point I have I have my hands in a lot of different things which is good and bad uh I mean makes for some for some long busy days but at the same time it what are you working up um I mean yeah we're was pretty full on with the the coaching stuff through teamf coaching um I'm still pretty full-on but I definitely try to make that a little more manageable on myself more recently making the jump from EF this coming year here that's been a lot of time on the phone a lot of time talking talking to people uh Target companies doing stuff and then I don't know yeah through that trying to like put together a couple of a couple of charitable projects and um yeah I don't know I I feel like I have one of those jobs where you sit down and you know you tell you talk to people and they're like you know that you know don't know anything about bikes Recycling and they say oh what do you do and you try and explain it and then you walk away from the conversation you're like what the hell do I do how do I ride my bike four hours a day you know it's been six hours a day on the phone and then you know also like try and raise a child and then like get to the end of the day and you're like I don't know what I got done today are you are you gonna go to gravel Privateer route uh you know I hesitate to say gravel Privateer but uh yeah private to your route yeah um I've got a bunch of guys on the podcasts like you know I've had like a load of them on Alexi vermola and Lawrence tandem Pete Stanton uh and Nicholas roach I'm sure we can call him a gravel guy but uh yeah yeah I don't know we'll see how long that lasts I it's like the challenge what it is you're going from becoming a bike rider to becoming a bike rider slash marketer you need to be a brilliant self-publisher because the gravel World almost you win the race it seems like a binary outcome like a Podium just doesn't seem as good in a gravel races a podium in liege so it's like you win the race or you're one of the other guys if you're one of the other guys you need to have a story you need to have a cool ability to Market like I look at some of the gravel privateers and you know look at Dylan Johnson the YouTuber you know we respected okay he could probably rip the legs off me but you know he's not going to last long in the world tour a guy like that but he's building a brand within gravel it seems to be a different skill set it's like 50 can you ride your bike 50 can you get a message out to the world and sell these products yeah absolutely I mean it I think the hardest part with it all is that um you know certainly like for someone like myself coming from the world tour where you have um a very defined set of goals you know at the beginning of the year and you know throughout the season it's like you know what what what's your job it was like a job is to try and win bike races you know and the be approachable to fans but you know end of the day it's like go and go win some bike races um and if you know one of our sponsors needs to get a dinner you know you go to dinner okay cool uh but yeah with the with the Privateer stuff it's sort of um I mean it's like any sort of you know small business um you know you could work as long as you want you know you could work as hard as you want you could build you know the brand as as big as you you know as you need to um but disability directions you can go you could be a podcast or an Instagram YouTube channel it's like whoa what am I gonna do with this so yeah it's it's yeah I I think it comes down to like um one potentially being okay with not like knocking it out of the park every single day uh and you know like oh yeah you don't need to be like they have the most subscribers on YouTube or uh you don't need to be like winning every race um but a lot of it just comes down to like setting up goals for yourself I think coming into it I say this as somebody who is not currently doing it uh you know yeah be behind the scenes from the podcast we have a coaching company that I said are set up when you know I was at France as an amateur uh trying to make it and cycling and getting paid like 50 Euro a week in a shitty little uh house run for apples appreciate super you and I was like okay I'll have a Wi-Fi connection how do I make some cash um I started coaching there was like very few online coaching companies around there and it was the big ones like Carmichael but very few and that's been going like 10 years now which is wild to think and it kind of runs in the background but for a long time with social media itar I need to be everywhere I need a YouTube channel I need an Instagram I need Twitter I need to be putting up this many posts on Facebook a day and it's [ __ ] exhausting and the biggest breakthrough I ever had with any of this was when I said I don't care about any of the social platforms anymore I'll throw some stuff up you know with the odd time but I'm just gonna go all in on one and I went all in on podcasting and at the start it was like you know my mom and her a couple of our friends listen and now it's Royal to me that I can log in and I'm like my God there's hundreds of thousands of people tuning into this every week but if I had to spread myself across all the platforms I would just wouldn't have had penetration on any of them so for what it's worth that's worked for me going all in on just one yeah absolutely I mean it's you know Define the goals you know and uh yeah yeah you you like I say you wanna you wanna knock it out of the park and all of them but that's you know fully unrealistic as a single human being um yeah well so I'm not going to Sprint or a climb or a TT guy exactly experiencing it's an impossible task unless you're well but yeah unless you're away with that can all be well uh when did The Love Affair start with gravel uh you know I've like actually ridden gravel for ever um like before they had gravel bikes kind of thing uh and you know where I live it's all the best roads are dirt um so it it was pretty pretty natural thing um been kind of was kind of bugging the team early early on to do stuff uh like Unbound um and it just wasn't really a good fit um and then yeah when Rafa came on and they they were like oh we want to do this EF gone racing stuff um you know we're gonna need a couple athletes from from EF and um they're sort of poking around and I kind of kicked the door down I was like uh Hey guys hey guys uh uh Hey right here I'll be there so I think for me that seems like the mainstream explosion and gravel was around the EF gun race I remember one of the First videos I watched on I think it was you and Lachlan at onbound I was like this looks like so much fun like it looks very different to you know it's cool to watch the classics and stuff but you don't really get an idea of the personality the story and there's one cool scene I remember in one of them where it's like Lachlan said oh Alex came up to me and he's like hey bro I'm coming apart pretty bad here and he's like oh what are you talking about I'm coming apart hours ago keep it to yourself I don't care we never get to see that on the road and I was like at that moment I was like whoa this like genre for once of a better word has really widespread appeal yeah it's it's it's interesting because like I I I and I think a lot of people like to watch professional road racing um you know it's it's done really well I mean there's there's a few things like cooler to watch than like a big mountain stage at the tour you know um and I I don't know if gravel in terms of like sitting down and watching it on the TV uh start to finish you know 10 hours of Unbound I don't know if that's like yeah I don't know really got much appeal but the the cool thing is is like basically anybody can go do these races um and they're they're hard races um and when you put it all together well uh it's it's a message that like really resonates with people um and mostly because it's just a simple uh kind of bare Knuckles former former racing um so I I it works out well here in America it I don't know it's interesting to see what's going on with it over in Europe um it's getting some traction there but I I don't know the stronghold seems to be here here in the states so we'll see how that all develops you know what's just so funny in life like I I love stand-up comedy I'll watch it but there's rarely anything funnier than just watching your mate or you're trying to partner totally coming apart like the wheels you'll slowly going on my roads I was wrote over in Badlands a couple of months ago and then after uh my buddy who's finished riding with a continental team evil Pro last year he just you know hit his head off the salons like I'm done with this and kind of quit cycling and I got him back into it and we went over riding Badlands and afterwards we were sitting in Granada and we had friends in beeritz and he's like why don't we just send the tomorrow up to Bear it he's like We Ride 200 250k a day it'll be good for them and we got to be rich and then right across the Girona so we ended up riding like 2 000 kilometers in like nine days or something and Thursday is when like one of us were just totally come apart like just the wheels come off and it's just nothing funnier and gravel gives us that ability to see that like to watch you just totally coming apart I'm like I would never have the fitness to make Alex house just totally come apart but now I get to watch this and kind of vicariously enjoy that satisfaction yeah it's it's true I mean like yeah with professional road racing there's always a car behind you you know like there's a bit of a limiter into how bad of trouble you can get into um definitely with gravel like when you have to pack your own water and do the math on that and then the Sun Sun beats down a little harder that day and you drop a couple couple snacks you know because the road got bumpy um the wheels can come off uh all the way off yeah like this year at Belgium waffle ride San Diego um yeah I'm like I didn't have water for like over an hour and it was it was super hot um and I was up I went off the front and I was up there with Alexi and things are going great uh and then just yeah just slammed into the wall basically and um yeah I mean I I got to the finish and I like found myself like writhing around in the merchandise tent uh it's like people trying to like buy shirts next to me and I'm just like cough crying on the ground like ah looking like an amateur whatever everyone talks about the spirit of gravel and you know a totally nebulous concept none of us know what it means but definitely one of the things I think it means it's like that ability to endure and overcome like we were on that bike packing trip and like we were in a hotel in Zaragoza and for whatever reason we were leaving the hotel buffet in the morning and we were doing the typical sworn you're a thing like raid in the hotel for as much food as we could and we were going out the door and the hotel managers like you can't take any of that fruit or water which you have to eat it here oh [ __ ] so we put it all back and we rolled out of town with no food and no water and we had breakfast so it wasn't so bad but return basically straight onto these gravel Trails now let's fast forward a couple of hours it's like coming on like 42 43 degrees we're like 90 minutes two hours with no water and remote looking at each other going like we're in a bad spot here this is just getting warmer and we're going deeper into this desert but it's just totally unspoken you spoke look at each other in Boco yeah we're pretty [ __ ] here but let's just not say out and about it and keep going forward oh man yeah it was yeah it was funny talking to Lachlan about Badlands uh a couple years ago and he was like saying he was standing there on the start line with a few guys and they were all you know talking about bikes and oh this bike's good for this and that bike's heavy and blah blah blah and lachlan's like this doesn't matter like none of this matters guys you know he's thinking this in his head you know and he's like looking at these you know fifteen thousand dollar like super bikes and uh he's like the only thing that matters is the fact that I got like 15 liters of water on my bike right now you guys are gonna die out there no you're gonna I don't care how much your spoke weighs you know like you're going to want the 15 liters of water I say Tyler fady at the start this year um he was like wearing a pair of sandals and he like I need one bottle with him or something I was like he's gonna be eating them sandals after like 200 kilometers uh he's he's in it for the Vision Quest though for sure he was yeah it was a deep mushroom trip I think I probably put out for him uh yeah I mean you don't need mushrooms if you don't have water you know you just get thirsty enough thank you