Roadman, I want to talk to you about some strange things you should…
Roadman, I want to talk to you about some strange things you should keep your eyes peeled for during this Vuelta Aspania. Let's cue that intro! The big question is this. How do we use cycling as a tool to improve our health, our happiness and our long changes? That is the question, this podcast will give you the answers. My name is Anthony Welch and welcome to the Roadman Podcast. Roman, welcome back to another roadman cycling podcast. Thanks for joining me again. As I've talked about in yesterday's podcast, I'm invested in this year's Vuelta a España. I love the Vuelta for its chaotic beauty, the crazy amount of hilltop finishes, just the Spanish and their general laissez-faire, all organized attitude. The commentators yesterday didn't even know how long the climbs were. The roadbook says one thing, the website says the other thing, the commentators were giving other information. It's a crazy wild, wild west bike race and I absolutely love it for that. Today I don't want to talk about the specifics of what's going on in the Vuelta. You know what, maybe I'll come back to it tomorrow or the day after because I am infatuated with this year's Vuelta. I think it's such a perfect climax to this year's season. But I want to talk to you, if you're a newbie, about strange tings to watch out for when the race has gone on. Some stuff that too, the cycling fan that's been racing and watching it for years, some of this won't be new, but I'm going to flavour it with some personal stories of times I've tried these strange tings, the word strange tings, which I'll be revealed in a second. Before I dive into this podcast, let me ask you to please head on over to patreon.com. Press pause on the podcast now. You know what, I used to be such a good man for procrastinating and putting things on the long finger and to-do lists. And since I started this do-it-now policy, it just gives me so much headspace. So I'd encourage you to just channel that. Pause this, do it now, head over, make a small donation on Patreon. The price of a beer once a month, what that's going to do, it's going to support the podcast, make sure we keep moving forward. And it's going to be vindication for me that we're going the right direction. In return, I'm going to give you access to the secret podcast. Ooh, spooky, especially coming up to this Halloween time of year. But in fact, it's not spooky. I talk spelt stuff that I'm experimenting with. Like at the moment, I'm experimenting with ketone usage, and I probably won't do a dedicated podcast on it, but I will talk about it in my secret podcast. Okay, folks, some crazy things you will see in the Vuelta or any other boy craze at pro level, for that matter, that if you're seeing them for the first time, might be like what the hell is going on there? So we all know the structure in the team you have a team leader and then you have a bunch of domestiques and the domestiques are like great. They have different jobs. Someone of our domestiques guys who are going to pull the workload in the Hoi Mountains sort of saving those. Some of the guys are going to be riding the valleys. Some of the guys are going to be there for feeding and early stage duties. So what you will see is a rider They're dropping back to the team car. So how this works is a rider drops to the back of the peloton. Say it's one of the Ineos riders and he wants to come up and feed carapas. So carapas has run out of water and he needs a new bottle. So what happens is one of the Ineos domestices will drop to the back of the peloton. He'll raise a bottle in the air. That would be a signal to the commissar race referee that he needs feeding. So then there's an order in the cavalcade. The cavalcade is the group of cars following the race. Each team has at least one support card normally too. So that'll be an indication too. The team cards that a raider needs feeding. The commissar then will call the team card up. He's allowed to approach the back of the peloton, overtake it to other cards. Pretty chaotic if you're in the team card and scary as shit. Then he'll come up and out the window he'll distribute food or bottles to the raider. So it's not on typical to see a roid or common back into the peloton with 678 bottles stuffed down the back of his jersey.
Can look pretty crazy, Michelin, Michelin man like and I tell you…
It can look pretty crazy, Michelin, Michelin man like and I tell you from experience, it's not easy. I've had a jersey full of bottles just as a climber about to start because I hadn't read the roll book properly and had gone back at the wrong time and I was like, oh shit, I'm screwed. Because each bottle, we're going to get into this in a second, they melt away like two bottles is nearly a kilogram of weight and a kilogram of weight makes a big difference going uphill so you can imagine if you 4x for kilograms of weight distributed pretty haphazardly and dangerously down the back here Jersey you want to ditch them as fast as you can and that's what I've had to do on occasion so if you do see a rider coming back up full of bottles hopefully has more experience than I did the first time I'd done it and does it at an appropriate time and distributes them to the team so that's number one on feeding from the car. Number two, I've probably got six or seven of these that I've really noticed yesterday's stage that I think somebody's going to find interest in. So I didn't notice this yesterday, but you will notice this from time to time if there's a problem with the race leader. So in the Vuelta, that's by now the red jersey is the race leader. If he has a problem, if he crashes, if he's sick and he's gone back for medical treatment, the race will stop. There's a marker respect, it won't formally stop. It's an informal tradition within the Peloton that nobody will attack. They'll cruise along and they'll wait for him to get back into the race to see if he's okay. It's a marker respect for the leader of the race. I haven't seen us in any of the races this year. I don't think it's happened in the Vuelta de Giro Auditor, but you will see it from time to time. Number three, it's newspaper down the jerseys. Now this This is one that has saved me on many, many occasions. And I know it seems pretty crazy with the mad tech that companies like Rafa and Velochio and that are putting into Jersey technology to think that you would get to the top of a climb and stuff the daily mirror down the front of your jersey. But why is man once said to me, if you want to know what's a good insulator, look at what the homeless guys are doing to stay warm and newspaper is such a good insulator. paper, cardboard, anything like that. It's an amazing insulator that's obviously disposable. So, you get to the top of the climb and you'll typically see fans or sworn yours holding out newspapers, Reuters grabbing them, stuffing them down to front of their jersey as a windbreaker and having descended like Mount Toida in cold, cold conditions and you're coming downhill for sort of the goats of a half an hour, 40 minutes. I can tell you the difference between having a newspaper down to Jersey and not having a newspaper, it's huge. It's the difference between you actually enjoying the descent and being borderline hypothermic at the bottom of the descent. Number four, ditching every single bit of weight you can think of as a climb starts. You'll see this typically in a breakaway and this feeds into the story of me ditching the bottles when I was coming back. Two bottles weighs about a kilogram but also unnecessary food in your pocket weighs extra weight. So you'll see especially if it's a hilltop finish and it's the real GC guys. see them emptying their pockets and emptying their bottles to ditch every single bit of weight. One kilogram is one minute on a 10 kilometer climb and basically every one climb in this world that is 10 minutes is 10 kilometers long. So ditching that weight that's going to give you one minute difference. That's absolutely huge. That's the difference between front group and horde group a lot of days. Number five we've got timeouts. This is something that probably baffles a lot of non-scycling hardcore fans. The idea that the race is informally stopped or called a ceasefire to at some point in the race. So where this happens if you're watching the stage early enough it's typically glossed over in the hoylites but you'll see attack attack attack all morning to establish the break. Then once everybody's happy with the composition of the break, like team leaders are happy that there's no one that's a threat to the overall gone into the break and each team that wants to be represented is represented.
There's a lot of politics and Dyson goes into that composition of…
And there's a lot of politics and Dyson goes into that composition of that early break, and that's why it takes so long to form a lot of times. But once it is formed, the peloton shuts down and has a little bit of a lunch break for itself, but you'll typically see a rider that's high on GC at some point, maybe the race leader or one of these patreon's at a peloton who are super well respected, rolling towards the front of the bunch and making a T signal with their hand to indicate a timeout. Now this indicates a mass stoppage for the race so a bunch of guys will stop, some will go back and feed but normally you'll see 20, 20 guys stopping for a piss on the on the side of the road. Obviously in a five, six-hour race, you need to pee at some point and you don't always see it on camera. This is how they get it done. These sort of time out moments. This is also a time where people get back, they change clothes, they get extra food. If they need to, it's a little bit of a cease for before the second part of the stage where you start reeling in that brake that they've let go. Because if you don't let go of brake early in the day, it's all day people trying to get away. When they let the brake go, then they can chill out, then they can start to reel it back in. Feed bikes are another really, this is 0.6, sure to set it because I've been saying it all along, keep the consistency around any. Feed bikes are what we call the Musettes. Yeah, see, I'm getting handed out in designated feed zones. They're like, I remember the fourth year I competed in the Ross, it's like a tour of Ireland here, and it's eight day UCI race then. And we didn't know where to get these feedbacks. So we actually had the maid and they're just like a clawed shopping bag with one longer handle that you can stretch it over your helmet. So your swan yore or your helper on the side of the road will typically hand these up during the race and it's a good way to feed the whole team without having to go back to the car and you can get more into the bikes because each rider can grab their own bag. So the first year we done that when we got the maid, we left one of the roiders basically in charge of all the nutrition. And I must do a podcast on that force race because it was hysterical. It was our first ever UCI race. I was a complete new, but I think I just got promoted to Cat1. We'd know what our Cat1 riders on the team. We didn't have a clue what we were doing. We didn't know we needed a team car. I ended up buying one for like 150 year old week for the race. We got these muesettes made. Left one of the lads who didn't know much about nutrition in in charge of nutrition. And we ended up with just Turkish Delights. I should you not, eight days straight out Turkish Delights. So you would get your music back mid stage and you'd have like six Turkish Delights in it. It was horrendous. I don't even like Turkish Delights. Still hate them. I get nightmares when I see them for this day. Now the pros will have a lot more than Turkish Delights. You'll get mini cans of Coke, bars of chocolate. You might get brioche, sandwich, cream cheese, rice cakes. You'll get stuff, personal preference that you like. if you like a certain sports drink or a certain type mix in your ball. And what you'll see is a lot of trading as well between Reuters and teams, if, you know, for me with the Turkish Deloitte's every day, you gotta get bit, it's like Quincy, it's like trading cigarettes in prison. You gotta just go around and go, what have you got there? Ah, you got a little bit of a Fred Albar, swap your Turkish Deloitte. And that's the way it goes. But that raw story, I must tell you it someday because it was hysterical stuff. We drove eight days in a surrounded by guard with a team car which had no tax or insurance on it, it was the most illegal and only fills in horses, Del Boystoff you've ever heard, a will day with an entire podcast on it soon. The last one is a sticky bottle. You'll see if a rider has a crash, if he has a puncture.
Typically we have our set of rules and then we have our set of…
Typically we have our set of rules and then we have our set of unwritten rules. And our unwritten rules is if one of them, we talked about if a race later crashes, race typically doesn't attack him, but another one is if a rider has some misfortune, the ref and other riders will typically turn a blind eye to getting that rider back into the position he was before the misfortune happened. So one of the ways we have it doing this is called a sticky bottle. So the team car will come up beside the rider who's had the puncture and he will hand them out of bottle as if he's taking a bottle to rehydrate our feed or bring it back up to a bunch but instead of letting go of the ball he'll hold on to the ball. So it looks like to an audience that he's taking a bottle but what in fact this happening is the driver of the car is accelerating. So he's holding on to the ball and it's tonum. It's tonum along at 70, 80, 90 kilometres an hour at times with the super scaled riders. Now I remember I got the Squallified from a race for a sticky bottle because there is some you know I suppose discretion as to when it's allowed and then there's some places when it's definitely allowed in some places that's definitely not mine kind of fell in a grey area. I was doing a race called Visit Nino which is quite a big race here and I've been in the break basically since kilometer one. I think there was four of us in the break and a teammate there and we're coming into the last 15 kilometers and the gap was about 60 seconds back to the main peloton and I punctured. Now I had a especially slow wheel change like our mechanic mucked it up and really slow getting going and by the time I got going there was probably only 15 seconds between the break between me and the peloton so I was clearly visible from the peloton. Then my team car came up beside me and he said sticky ball so I grabbed the sticky ball and he accelerated and pulled me away from the peloton but I think the aesthetics of it looked so bad that the race referee or commissar came up and he actually disqualified me and I think if I remember our team car out of the race that day. It wasn't a good day. A nadir of us were particularly happy if I remember. So there are just so many crazy weirds going on that you'll see in the Vuelta to the train though, but you need to keep a lookout because as I keep saying in this sport, it's so textured and it takes so long to learn exactly what's going on. Initially, you think it's just four-smash across the line and then you learn there's the yellow jersey, green jersey, all the the different races within the race and the team tactics. So that's my job here. It's trying to illuminate for you guys some of these little nuances within the race. If you do spot any of these within the race or any sort of strange habits, so you're not too sure what they are, please take a screen capture the podcast, tag me and let me know what you spotted on your Instagram account. Guys, thanks for listening and I'm going to be back to you for another Roadman, so I can podcast tomorrow. Hey everybody, it's Anthony again. Really quick, I want to invite you to join arguably the best thing I've ever put out inside the Roadman community. It's a challenge, it's a challenge called a 14 day Kickstarter challenge. So regardless of where your fitness is at right now, this is gonna be the catalyst for making you faster and making you the leaner. I've created this challenge to take the guess walk out of everything. It's 14 days, training plans, Regardless of what your level is, there's the master's beginner advanced, there's meal plans shopping list and even a video course holding your hand and talking you true at all. So what I recommend you do right now is just stop everything, press pause on this audio and go to roadmansoidcling.com forward slash 14 day or check out the link in the bio. That's roadmansoidcling.com slash 14 day.