1.From Quitter to Cat 1 Pro

Rolman, today I want to tell you my story. 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 longevity? That is the question and this podcast will give you the answers. My name is Anthony Walsh and welcome to the Rolman Podcast. Roman, welcome back to another Roman Cycling podcast. This episode is a little bit unique because this time I want to tell you my story. This is a story I actually haven't told a lot of times and how I arrived at this podcast. Some of it's quite a personal story and I suppose it's a measure of where the podcast is at. I've always felt the podcast is like an intimate little chat and intimate whisper. And I never wanted it to be that Instagram life only shown the best parts. So today I'm going to be a little bit vulnerable and I want to talk to you about my story. I remember getting started as an atree and I wasn't really a good atree when it got started. In fact, I was actually quite a bad atree. race, it's the swords grumpy, I even remember faking a puncture just so I'd have an excuse to quit. And that day I remember the break in the A1 race going past, as I was quit on the side of the road and just seeing the muscles glistening, the shiny legs and I thought, there's no fucking way I'm ever getting to that level. Those guys are a different breed completely. But then I got a coach and I got a little bit better and I got myself a power meter by kind of hook or crook I got myself a a power meter, I went to the bank and I told them I needed a loan to buy a car to travel into university. So one falsified loan application later, I was the proud owner of a brand new SRM. These were the world's rights of power meters but they were the only thing on the market at the time. I got faster, I got promoted, I got promoted again, I got to category one, then I started riding my first professional stage races. Just to give it some context, I finished my undergrad and around this time I was finishing my masters. I was gone into law school and I was getting better and better at cycling, but I was absolutely obsessed. Every time that my face wasn't in the books, studying for law school, I was on the bike. I was literally training. I had this compulsory dinner I needed to go to once a week. It was a throwback to when barsters were educated informally around a dinner table. We wouldn't normally finish up until about 11, 11, 30. I remember one I was the norm for me and I fell asleep on the rollers, smashed through my parents coffee table. I was absolutely obsessed. Straight off the back of graduating from law school, I got off for the contract in France. Super hard racing out in France, racing for division national team, apochet super U, but I was learning the craft and like, lametiate the process, the grind. I moved there, I moved on, I had a Canadian girlfriend at the time and I raced over there towards the end of the season and a team out there, Jeff Fule, picked me up and asked me that I want to come and race the Milwaukee Tree Week race with them and it was brilliant, Milwaukee Super Week. I loved racing with Jeff Fule, stayed on, racing with them for a while and they've such a proud history, they've had the Yellow Jersey and the Ross and Canadian equivalent of what on post-war's in Ireland It was an honor to be a part of Jeffio. The following year I signed probably my first proper contract with Estella Sancology in the US and this is the first time I actually got some money for a ride in my bike. But this was around the same time I started figuring out, you know, at cycling at this level it's just enough for me. I don't see myself making that progression to World Tour and the level of sacrifice is just too high. too much time away from home, miss birthdays, friends weddings, misgraduations, miss my dad's 50 years. So I made the hard decision to turn down another contract and to come home and race domestically in Ireland. But I was still obsessed with her. I was trained in 25 hours a week and I hit the podium that year, I'd say almost every week.

2.Burnout from Building Businesses

But it was getting to the time and every one was saying to me you have to grow up. And I had that entrepreneurial book because I'd initially set up the coaching company in 2012 to fund my law skill loans. But I got this notion from reading entrepreneurial books that needed multiple streams of income. So I set up more than one business and within the space of a couple of years, I'd launch an app pocket coach, if anyone remembers it, with a development team spread all over the US. Excuse me, in San Fran, I built an event pre-registration company with another friend, and A1 registration. I bought a coffee shop here in Dublin, FU, set up soapbox, social media marketing agency. And pocket coach at the time took a lot of, pocket coach took a lot of time. Like we'd won some awards, we won best app idea. I was out in MIT for the sports analytics conference, got to the final of that media attention and it was particularly stressful as well. We were in the financial times. It was very time consuming and it was a little bit stressful, especially when I came time to start to raise phones because I was effectively working Irish hours and US hours. I kept training and I was still riding my bike like 15 hours a week, but I knew something wasn't right. My body just didn't feel like it was responding to training anymore. I just couldn't put my finger on it. It was difficult to articulate and I've always pride myself on being someone who is decent at articulating stuff and I couldn't put my finger on it, but I just wasn't myself. I constantly had low energy. I'd wake up tired, I was always stressed. And I was a little bit self-conscious about extra weight I was carrying. And this was hard to say, I had a low libido at the time. And the worst of all, I actually wasn't shown up the way I wanted for the important relationships in my life. I was constantly flicking through social media. I was distracted when I was spending time with my girlfriend at the time. When I was with my family, I just wasn't there. I was pretty unhappy around then. And I had a vision for myself. When I grew up and started cycling, every kid has dreams of winning bike races and being on podiums. And that's what I told people. I suppose that was my external goal, the one I told people about. And this is where I wanna get a bit vulnerable with you because that wasn't really what it was about for me. My dad had an accident when he was in his late 20s. He lost his toe, a forklift dropped on his toe and he was a very good bad man and the player he'd been full time and he'd been Irish National Champion. But after that, I don't know if it was genetics, if it was the accident, if it was a combination of both, but when he stopped playing sport in the aftermath of the accident, he put on a lot of weight and like I'm talking north of 25 stone and he went through a large part of his life carrying that extra weight. So I grew up seeing the lifestyle limitations that extra weight brings. the stuff he couldn't do, the stuff that we couldn't do together. When I started cycling, I made a promise to myself that that would never happen to me, that I would never carry extra weight and allow it to limit my lifestyle. But I can remember the tip and point in this whole saga very clearly. I completely fooled myself. I avoided anything that was going to give me a reality check. I'd stopped using the SRM Power Meter, I didn't replace the battery in my weighing scales, I was in total denial about my condition. I'd avoided my normal training partners, training groups. I avoided absolutely anything that would give me a reality check. I want to talk to you a little bit about this tip in point. It was the Torvolster. Torvolster is sort of a pro-arm race. It's the highest, the best Irish riders come and they race with some of the best teams from the UK. And it's one of our big stage races. And I can remember this day vividly because I was late getting there. I was on a borrowed bike from a buddy of mine. I actually had SRAM E-Tap and I didn't know how to shift from big ring to small ring on it. I had no pains.

3.Hitting Rock Bottom Mid-Race

I was honestly fat as a fucking fool shown up to this elite bike race. And I remember going to the lion. I had to call the race organizer and use my historical pole and a bit of a reputation that wasn't a current reputation. It was definitely a historical one. I had to call him and say hold the race for me, but I remember getting to the line despite all that and still thinking I could get a result today. That's how much in denial I was. Fast forward 5km and I'm in the last group in the road and I remember comments from guys like in the group with me going, oh my god I've never been in a group with you before. I honestly at that point I wanted a hole in the ground to open and and swallow me up. I just felt absolutely small and vulnerable. I finished that. That was the fourth stage of four and I finished that stage cramping all the way into the line, trying to hold onto that last wheel in the last group on the road for dear life. My teammate actually won the stage. So I posed for a picture. Honestly, it was my best fake smile. I got into the car, I'd said I was injured, I abandoned the race and I drove home to Dublin. It was one of the loneliest, one of the saddest soul-searching few errors in my life. Driving home, I thought that was it. I definitely thought I was quitting cycling for good, but more than that, I was close to quitting on that vision I had for myself. The vision for the sort of life that I wanted, because I'd never envisaged myself as an overweight guy heading towards middle-edged, stuffed into Lycra. And that's what I was be coming. I can remember back when I was full time, I used to look at some of my older friends, lads who were in their forties or maybe a little bit older, and they'd come home in the evening and they'd sit down in front of the TV, maybe flick on Netflix, get a takeaway, barely say hello to their wives, distract it on their phone, they'd have no energy and they'd tease me and they'd be like, yeah, Anthony, we'll see how much energy you have when you're in the real world, when you're working full time. We see how much energy you have then. And on that drive home from the Tour of Ulster, I taught to myself, you know what, maybe they're right. Maybe just this is my new reality. Maybe I need to stop chasing this fantasy life. Maybe I'm just like them and this is my fate. Honestly, that drive, I just felt so lost and so scared. And luckily I have a friend and he helped me out in A1 at the start when I was building it. And he's built some huge businesses and I'm chattering with him the week after that tour of Ulster. I told him how down I was. good mates so I didn't mind opening up and I told him I was close to giving up on this vision and he told me a story about the power of focus and I just wanting. So he gave me some pretty radical advice but I trusted him and on that advice I sold everything. I literally torpedoed my life folks. I sold the cafe, the media company, wrapped up the app and I put the coaching company on life support like indefinite pause A1 coaching. You remember it just went dark. Like our current client stayed getting coached with the coaches, but the media shut down and I was just absent. I focused on just one thing. He called it a big domino. It's the one thing that if I could topple down this domino, it would start to chain reaction in every other part of my life. And every problem in my life is going to become inconsequential. So after a lot of soul searching, after a lot of travel, I came up with my big domino and it was how could I use cycling as a tool to achieve health, happiness and longevity? And that's the focus of the podcast now. That's why I beat this drum every day. Health, happiness, longevity. Because I knew if I could solve that problem, how can I use cycling as a tool for health, happiness and longevity? That winning bike races, balancing my life, all these would be an unavoidable bike product. Getting back to my optimum, fight and wait. So that was my big domino. I put absolutely everything I had.

4.The Cortisol Breakthrough

I'm talking my soul, my focus, my money. I put everything into this day and night, all my focus into solving that one problem. I traveled the world. If you anyone followed me on Snapchat or Instagram stories around then, you would mean like, where's this lad now? I attended conferences all over the world. I met experts. I saw answers as in Bali, Toronto, China, USA, Dubai, all over Europe. I must have read thousands of books and courses, I spent hundreds of thousands of dollars. I chatted with athletes, coaches, performance experts. I devoted my entire life to that one single question. And I was almost close to giving up and I met a buddy in Colorado at the end of all this. He was a mountain runner and this was such a eureka aha moment for me because he defied my experience up to now. I was taught when I started making my way through cycling that you can only have two of the following things. Career, relationship, social life, or sport, that if you tried to balance more than two of these things, life would fall apart. And that's exactly what happened to me. I tried to balance multiple things and it all fall apart, but this lad had it all. He had a career, he had a beautiful family, a beautiful home, hobbies, tribe and social life, and he was a successful international mountain runner. I had no idea how this was possible. but he taught me one secret and that changed my life. He taught me about cortisol, the stress hormone. And some of you might know I've had podcasts on this since. Cortisol is released in response to training, eating, sleeping, any physical or emotional stress. Cortisol is kind of like when I was 16 and I got a moped. The moped had the restrictor on it when I got it and it wouldn't let me go above 50 kilometers an hour. Cortisol has the same effect on the body. It essentially restricts her ability to go beyond 50 kilometers an hour and cope with balancing career, family and training. So Cortisol can actually inhibit your ability to sleep, to recover from training property and it's a massive impact on your ability to lose weight. So he told me that it was possible to reduce Cortisol. I'd never heard this before. I'd only heard of people adding stress but never taking it away. So what he done was explain to me the key to excelling in every area of your life, lay in having strategies to manage cortisol levels. Beyond that, he told me the key to that was biohacking. I had never heard this word in my life, biohacking. I quickly realized that biohacking, it's the key to feeling good every day. It's the key to combating the effect that cortisol has on us. And I'm not just talking about weekends when you're relaxing or when you're on top of all your work and everything's running smoothly. I'm talking about unlocking potential and consistently feeling, working and training at your very best. Biohacking is the key to that. And that's why if you listen to the podcast regularly, you're maybe wondering, boy, I'm buying that biohacking drum so often. And this is, I'm trying to join the dots on it. Biohaccids are fairly new term and it covers a wide range of practices undertaken in the pursuit of optimal mental and physical human functioning. So biohaccids are a new name but some of these hacks are human practices that honestly they've been around since antiquity like meditation. You might be surprised how many of these things you're already doing in your day to day life. Think about your morning coffee. an example of a new tropic which is a biohack, their substances that can be used to increase cognitive function. That's for bettering memory, attention span, focus. So my job was to dig through all these biohacks, test them, research them, work tirelessly to invalidate my trusted cherished findings. That's what science is about. I worked tirelessly to invalidate these cherished findings that I had for myself. I became a human guinea pig. I was armed with a new focus, cortisol, and I started building a system, a system for cycling and human performance. I was incorporating processes like grounding, photo, bio-modulation, specific nutritional practices and new way of training. I built this series of morning routines and evening routines. When I finally created this system, it was like nothing that I've ever heard or nothing like that I've ever seen. It training plans, nutrition plans, strength and conditioning plans, it had it all. My initial threshold test when I started this on myself was 300 watts.

5.Cold Exposure and the Weight Puzzle

And this was like, I was just getting back into a 300 watts. I'm embarrassed to tell you that from someone that had a threshold of over 400 when I was riding full time. But three months later, I was at 390 watts threshold and my weight had dropped from 96 kilograms to 86 kilograms. I was happier, more productive, more energised, my libido was up. This was about the time I set myself to target a ride in the World Track Championships with my buddy Peter Ryan. I had a problem though. I'd lost 10kg, but I was still 7kg above raceways and I knew if I was going to get selection for the national team for the world championships that deadline was fast approaching. This is what I heard a really cool story and I got the chat with Ray Cronice. He's a NASA scientist and he was speaking about his struggles of losing weight. So he went about doing what any scientist would do. He brought it back to raw numbers. So we've been talking for a long time that weight loss is calories in versus calories out. But Ray crunched his numbers and it didn't make sense. He was looking at my co-films and his reported consumption of calories was like 10,000 a day. in the most hard core ambitious training plan. There was no way Phelps was ever going to exceed 6000 calories a day. Crown Knight's new there had to be a torrid variable in this, so he started focusing and trying to broaden his mind and he worked on rockets all day and the answer was literally staring him in the face. Termo dynamic load was something he worked on all day and that was the torrid missing variable. Termo dynamic load is the energy our body burns to stay warm. Phelps was in water all day and his body was fighting to stay warm, burning these excess calories. Adding cold exposure to my daily routine, that was the missing piece. That was it for me and this is why I'm in the sea every day now and this is why you're starting to connect these dots. One of the proudest moments of my cycling career happened at a time when I taught my cycling career was actually over. Not only did I get to pull on the Irish jersey again and race with one of my best friends. Pulling on the Irish jersey is such a huge honor. But I got to ride that World Championships with Peter which was an amazing cherished memory. Now the World Championships, Dave, come and go on, that was the last year. But I continued to use this system. I wake up every day now. I have energy, I have focus, I have productivity. I honestly get more done in a day now than I used to get done in a week. I'm super motivated to smash out every session. Folks, I'm not saying this stuff to impress you. I'm saying this to impress upon you how transforming of the biohacking can be when you incorporate it into your training and into your life. There's one of my friends. He lives in mainland Europe and he came to me last year and he was stuck in the motor of all ruts. I was almost going to name them there but I better not just in case I haven't mentioned it to him. But he was stuck in the a mutter of all ruts. He tried unsuccessfully so many times on countless training plans. He wanted to lose weight and wanted to complete an Ironman in under 11 hours. But this couldn't be at the expense of his career. And the initial concentration that I sat down I had with him when he started at the coaching. His goal seemed pretty unachievable if I'm honest. He was completely sedentary. He was one of the first athletes outside myself who I tried this blueprint on so I wasn't exactly sure if this was possible. I knew my transformation was pretty hardcore but I wasn't sure for him if I'm totally honest. But in 12 months this dude lost 35 kilograms and he crossed the finish line, 7 minutes inside his goal time, 10 hours, 53 minutes. For me the most rewarding part of that, It actually wasn't the physical transformation which was insane, but it was watching this guy's confidence grow throughout the year. The new confidence inspired this lad to start dating. He's now engaged. It's just so powerful to watch somebody come out of their shell like that. Now, there's definitely a hard way to do this stuff and there's an easy way to do this stuff.

6.Introducing the Biohacking Blueprint

For me, it took me years of struggle and trial and error to figure this out. But I'm hoping I'm gonna be able to shortcut this for you guys That's what the bio hacking blueprint is gonna be the bio hacking blueprint is something that I'm working on It's I haven't brought out a product since we brought out the 14 day challenge We brought out the eight week challenge, but I haven't brought out a product in probably 18 months And that's because in the background I've been testing this new blueprint and I've brought a true beta group I've tried it on myself. I've tried it on a select number of clients and it's getting to the point where I'm starting to consider rolling it out to the podcast audience. It's not quite there yet. I'm hoping it will be there inside the next four weeks But I'd some I was getting so many Questions in a piece made a fashion across our different social media platforms Just about my story and how it linked up and how I came to do this full-time and specifically why I'm not practicing law Why am I podcasting to you guys every day a week? Everyone has this idea that laws this crazy well-paying job And it is but why do I choose to sit on front of a microphone and talk to you guys on a podcast? every day and It I almost feel like I'm called as Cheesy and corny as this sounds I feel like I'm called to get this information into your hands because I know it changed my life life. And I know it can change your life. And that's what I want to do. And that's what I'm devoting my life to doing is to get this information into your hands and changing your life. So watch this space for the roadman blueprint coming very, very soon. In the meantime, please do support the podcast over on Patreon. It's just it's patreon.com forward slash Anthony underscore watch. It's literally by me the price of a point of beer once a month to support the podcast. It means so much to me. It means we're moving forward all the time at the podcast. You can also follow the journey. It's on Instagram, roman.seitlin. Roman, this was a hard podcast. Yeah, it was a hard podcast, if I'm honest. A lot of that stuff I didn't think I was going to open up about, but I feel like we've got an intimate connection now. And yeah, I'm glad I did. Roman, I'm gonna be back tomorrow and have a super interview lined up tomorrow with the general manager from Outside Magazine, John Dorn. He's like 70 million monthly active outdoor enthusiasts under his platform, biggest in the world. Don't know how I got that interview lined up. It's a whopper and it's coming to you tomorrow. Chatty then, Roman. Okay, stop what you're doing. It's Anthony again. I want to talk to you for one second about the next step in the roadman journey. I'm laying down a challenge for you. It's called the eight week challenge. So for eight weeks, I'm challenging you to be the very best version of yourself. Whatever that is. For eight weeks, I want to take you under my wing and I want to personally build for you the customized training plan on our analytics platform. This plan is going to be laser focused on your goal and I'm going to navigate around your life, your work, your social commitments. So don't worry about what your circumstances are right now. I remember after I took some time out of cycling, I went off and thought I was a really big businessman. I came back and I realized I wanted to get into cycling, but I knew after a bit, to train them alone, it actually wasn't making me any fitter. I needed an entire system. It needed a 360 overhaul. So for the first time ever, I wanna share with you this exact system I used to get back in shape. I'm talking stuff like, I'm gonna give you my morning routines, the cold therapy I used, the cookbooks and recipes I used, and even the motivational audios by listening to get back on track. So right now what I want you to do is pause this audio, go to www.roadmancycling.com forward slash eight week, or check out the link in the bio, click that. So one more time, it's roadmancycling.com forward slash eight week. Chatty also.