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In today's A1 Show I give a review of the new devise which everyone in Cycling seems to be talking about - Whoop. I look back on the Tour de France discussing the tears, the crashes and the prize money.
I also take a slightly more philosophical twist and consider the culture of materialism and how that impacts choices we make around personal development versus consumer goods (wheels, bikes etc).
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Hello you beautiful cycling fans. Welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome. It's another A1 show getting into the groove of this podcast and yeah, enjoying it, enjoying it. Got a big show today. It's a Tour de France review show, but it's not a Tour de France review show. It's a Tour de France review show just because I have Cole Torquay and I'm missing the Tour de France, which I'm sure a lot of you guys are. So I've tried to drag the bones out of it and pull the last but interesting and exciting stories which I think I've done quite a good job in doing. So we're going to talk about Tour of France prize money, what the tour is up to now as they start a Criterium series. What you should be doing instead of watching the tour, what Aleph will leap up to this week, a new bit of kit that I'm using at the moment and testing out what happened Dan Martin in the tour. I'm going to talk to you about a couple of polls we're running in a one at the moment and then I'm going to drop to you a couple of knowledge bombs along the way on sort of just my experience walking with riders this week, specifically a couple of conversations I had with junior riders. So I think there's definitely some lessons that everyone's going to get out of that and make you kind of reflect upon the decisions you're making in your own life, cycling and otherwise. I think a lot of our stuff, it's a lot of the stuff we're gonna touch on in that section. It's gonna be very inseparable from cycling, life decisions, relationship decisions. They're also interwoven that we won't aim to separate them and we'll go down a little bit of a philosophical rabbit hole on that one. I'm also gonna finish off and talk about Tivo Pino and you know Tivo Pino, he's obviously abandoned a bunch of Tour de France's now and he's talking about the remedy how he's gonna get over that. So we've got a Exhale, and show ahead, so without further adieu, I'm gonna jump right on in. As always, we don't have a show sponsor at the moment, but what I do do is kind of protect a little slot to start, maybe a random one in the middle and another one at the end. I'm not full gone, the lancer Armstrong on it, which I love the lancer Armstrong move, podcast during the tour, but it's heavy, heavy on show sponsors. Although I do feel a strange pressure to avoid that weird as a black dot, black dot, some sort of contraption for a walk-in-out injuries, a bit of an erector, spinae, back issue, going out to moments, this hunched podcast position probably isn't helping, but yeah, I feel a weird pressure to go and check that out, but I'm resistant. So our show sponsor, as always, is A1 Coaching, and I don't actually have a product today more. I have something that I'm thinking about. So I'm about, what are we, about nine weeks to the end of the season here in Ireland, UK, Belgium, France, everywhere else in mainland Europe. I know Canada, America runs on a little bit longer, but not much more. So for me, at the moment, and a lot of our clients, motivation is starting to dwindle a little bit. A lot of people are going for that mentality of, I'll have a big winter. the seasons are over but there's still a lot of good weather about we spoke about this year that is a lot of good weather and the winter is long so I'm really encouraging people not to do that to just keep pushing and make one final push this season because one you're going to go into the winter at a higher base physically two you're going to go into a shorter winter because you're not going to be taking your break in August when the weather is still great so you're going to have a lot more mental energy for the season ahead so and trees still have a chance to get results like it's still totally possible like weak clients making huge gains in six to eight weeks so especially if you've been doing unstructured stuff so far this season so I'm going to try and put together some sort of eight week challenge I don't know what it looks like yet I've been looking around experimenting with a lot of morning routines are very powerful for me at the moment so I'm going to maybe look to build in some sort of eight week training plan you know basically I'm building something for myself and if other people want it you know I'll make it available you can go and check it out I'm going I'm gonna build something where it's gonna be my morning routine, force me, give me accountability around the morning routine that I've designed for myself.
And I can get about six hours on the bike at the moment a week, and so it needs to be very structured. So it's gonna be some sort of challenge thing. There we go, we might even call it the challenge. We might even call it the eight week challenge, the eight week challenge or something like that. Don't know what it looks like, yeah, but I'm gonna put my head down this week and I'm gonna try and build something for myself and then I'm gonna try and make it available to you. So you'll hear about it next podcast, I'm sure. That wasn't, I told myself it in Joseph's there because that wasn't really a show sponsor. There will be a show sponsor plug there in the future. That was just entertaining, waffle for myself. I'm drinking some nice coffee here at the moment. It's an espresso for all you coffee snobs. That's right, it's an espresso and I'm proud of it. I've been joined in espresso. I had a gazia machine before. And it was just such hassle. It was such hardship to the growing dirt, the tampon, like this has come from I had a coffee shop last year that I happily no longer have. But yeah, I'm just on this press I'll buzz them on. Maybe I'll go back, I hear the rocket coffee machine is pretty cool. So maybe I'll get one of them, who knows? They do look bling. And you've got a rocket coffee machine. Let me know where you're finding that, ping me a message on one of the social platforms, of the many social platforms. How many social platforms is there? I've seen a new one through the Twitch, TWE-TCH. It's like a new Twitter alternative. I haven't got the time today for too many in my moment to keep track of. Tour de France prize money. Eigenbrenal, $500,000. Tour de France prize money. Sounds a lot of dollar-dollar, but then when you think about, Brenal has to split that with all the boys and his Luke grow getting a split, who knows, I'm sure he is. It's not a lot of cash split out, split among the team relative to, okay well there's two relatives here, relative to Bernal's background, the dude's a baller now, right? So I'm sure he's very happy with that. Relative to other top sporting events where we can't trust it, the golfer we can't trust it to, you know, just premier like footballers are in that every week. It's not a fair comparison to compare football and so I could maybe we'll do a wedge comparison some day detail one where I'll do a deep dive into it and look a little bit more undergrads economic so I'd be interested definitely to delve into the economics of the why footballers are in so much more obviously commercial interests are one of the big reasons. Obviously we have a supply and demand issue as well. We're cycling straight out in Jordan sport. There is quite a heavy supply of riders, you know, once in a generation talents like Bernal, not as heavy a supply. Obviously, under less supply, price that they attract than the open market goes up, but relative to something like cycling where you have, you know, a Christiana Ronaldo, you probably have a lot more run the mail, pack fail guys. And yeah, it'd be interesting. I might be something I'll stick on the list. It was very non-committal to me. It might be something I'll stick on the list. I don't have a list. So 2.2 million in total prize money went out across all the GC guys. So that's GC, young rider, green jersey, stage placements, KOMs, hotspots, and also interestingly, GC places 20 to 160 got 1000 euro each. That's not bad. It's not really its €333 per week. So it's still gone. They don't deal with the money. So when you think about the US golf open, it's number 10 on the rich list and that has $12.5 million of the price So 2.2 to 12.5, the World Cup has a total price of 400 million in 2018 and nearly 300 NBA players make more than a season than the entire Tour de France price force. It's pretty minuscule compared to other sports, but as I say, Bernal's a big baller now rolling around Bogota in his new Hummer with those cool shocks. What are the boys up to now? Criteriums. As hard as it is for some of us to imagine. The lads are gone after on criteriums. I was gonna try and guess Nicholas Roach on to the show next week if possible and just loved to hear how Nico got on over the tour how we found it. Big me any questions you want for Nico and I'll try and get them asked. But yeah I was just looking roaches off riding criteriums this week in Bernal's off riding criteriums as are many of the jerseys and notable GC riders and stuff like that.
Kind of the culture for anyone who doesn't know the culture for criteriums is there like exhibition races to go on the week after the tour de France. So you know a local town in Belgium like local businessman, why put up some money for appearance fees for you know Sagin, Bernal, a few of the boys and they'll go and they'll race this small little town criteriums and get big appearance fees for for the week. Now it sounds tough to me like the criteriums are largely rekt i will say uh this is not opinion this is actual fact there's a few other orders we've talked about especially in autobiographies uh i don't know if they're all rekt but i suspect that vast majority of them are like you see you know frillm last year being sagan and bunch sprints coming to the end and things like that but the brighter still have to go and he's still have to travel to get around to these races and i was just reading bern i'll talk about his force christ and he said i've got a bit of a headache because i have too many beers and to be honest it still hasn't relays what's happening I'll need a few days at home and then I realize what's happened. I'm away to Belgium at the moment where it's just special. The race started here. So I've kind of completed the spherical Belgium. There's a lot of history and so I think it's always a pleasure to be here. So he's come from Paris back to Belgium for the post-tour crits. Now considering a lot of these boys pronounced a 58 kilo rod or a lot of these boys hit the beer heavy on Sunday night after three weeks of the tour. They're waking up then on Monday hung over to Sheyas. They don't have a swan yore with them for the the first time in three weeks. So they're looking after their own bags, they have their dead bag which carries all their extra stuff which is you know you see it at the start and you see it at the end. Then they have their day-to-day carry bag. They'll definitely have one bike with them, potentially two. So there's a lot of kind of wife, girlfriend, kids, whatever, knocking around as well, I'm never headache. So there's a lot to think about for them on the Monday after the tour and then to get themselves organized and get gone into Belgium or whatever for the post-war crits. It's a bit of a logistical nightmare and I can see why someone would update because it's yeah, it's hard going. Speaking of hard going, I was down to the gym this morning for a bit of strength and conditioning myself. I haven't done a lot of strength and conditioning in the last few years so when you haven't done a lot of strength and conditioning and you get back into the gym, what happens? serious amount of doms. Delayed, unsaid, muscle soreness. So I would imagine tomorrow and the next day I'm going to be quite sore. So I'm going to keep you posted on how that's gone and yeah, really, size is the price, as well as the goal. No, the goal for me is just getting a bit more functional strength and I think with Sauthlin, I suppose the culture I think is changing and it's definitely something that I'm going to try and also change and be a voice for change over the common months that we had this really old-scale light came up with and I know, you know, having raised in France, Canada, America and here it's the same culture that flows through all those places, the culture of you need to do so I can do the exclusion of everything else, that it's, you know, the old Sean Kelly doctrine of, you know, never stand if you can sit, if you can sit, lie down, if you can lie down, always go asleep. You know, that's utter nonsense, like, we're just not well around that athlete if we're doing that. So I'm making more of an effort at the moment to get back as well as my trying to get out doing a little bit of jogging, five or so out of the lads or something once a week back into the gym. And it's all research based for me and I'm experimenting with that at the moment. So I'm looking forward to joining on it and chronicle that sort of journey over the next year and months. get her some content on that that I bring to you guys for the winter. I know a lot of people sort of recalibrate fresh start in the winter. And you know, because coming home from a training session and lying down on the couch, what that leads to is this all or nothing culture with cycling. And when that all or nothing culture with cycling leads, it is a very transient existence for a lot of athletes.
They come into this board for, you know, three, four years, hit it hard, give it absolutely everything, make huge personal sacrifices in life. but then they decide, oh, it's too much sacrifice. I can't keep cycling. Cycling shouldn't have to be that. It shouldn't have to be all or nothing. You can have a healthy relationship with the bike. You can do other sports. You can be functionally strong and still win bike races. And so that's what I'm going to try and prove true. That and stuff this year and then my, I have a little sample group, a beta group, going at the moment, which I'm trying a lot of stuff out on. So I'm looking forward to that because I think it's important that message changes. I've seen GCN and they were talking about things you could do instead of watching the tour. I didn't agree with any of their suggestions, so I watched it briefly and then it's like, not about that they were all a bit stupid and not very practical, but it kind of got me thinking as to how I have filled. I wouldn't be a big TV fan. Normally wouldn't watch a lot of TV. Might get stuck into the odd Netflix documentary are they all Netflix series every now and then. If I do have a series, I kind of binge on it. And then, or else, I'm to either binge on it or I watch like 10 minutes of it a day for like two months. Like one of my last chance of you at the moment. I think I've like, I'm out about seven cracks in the forest episode and I'm still not sure. But what I did watch an episode of the order day was at Amazon Prime, sort of a fly on the wall, documentary following Michelton Scott. It's called e-race win where they've actually profiled the chef from Michelton Scott and the idea of food, food as a medicine, food as a motivator, food as, you know, food from more than its caloric intake. I thought that was interesting. The chef is, I think she was a Michelton star chef and then she's from I think she's Danish and it's interesting it's interesting I'm only an episode in but it's something I plan on watching a little bit more non-soycling releases what I'm about halfway through with them on which is fascinating is hack for life on Netflix that's where we're checking out what's about the Cambridge analytical scandal and how Facebook is how Facebook is complicit in this Cambridge analytical who's you They scraped a lot of personal data of millions of users on Facebook and used it to influence elections. Super interesting documentary. Amazing the power of social media and the power of profile. They looked at the Trump campaign. They looked to figure out the people who were on the fence and then they looked to see what the touch points are for people on the fence. They were really worried about health, really worried about education. then they designed hundreds of thousands of pieces of content, targeting those people around their touch points. Very interesting, well, we're to watch. Back to cycling. I think the podcast is gonna be that. It's gonna be my outlet for just random nonsense at times. So yeah, give me the feedback. Let's keep this as sort of an iterative process. Give me the feedback on if you're enjoying someone else's random segues, we'll keep them common. Yeah, Julie and Aleffleap, the housewife's favorite. He's only back in action again this weekend. Classic Desan Sebastian is on Saturday and he won it last year. So he's back in the line up this year along with his teammate Mass which is absolutely unbelievable. He, I don't know, I can't see him. Winnip, who knows. Also Tour de France Reuters that are down is Greg Van Evermert, who to me looks very heavy this season. He looks like a complete pud. I don't know what's going on with him. it's that CCC kit, but yeah it's not doing anything for him. When he attacked on the chance at least, I just didn't have the power to use that. If an Avromart attacked with Tic-Cait to go, previously alarm bells went off, like the tumbleweed when he attacked there, no one gave a shit. And Michael Landers also there, corn world champion Al-Handro Vaveri, Moica Woods, Tim Wellens, Adam Yates, Dan Martin and George Bennett. George Bennett is especially impressive the beater because he smashed himself that day in the Alps with Nicholas Roch. So to recover, get back, finish the tour, be a valuable part on the short and stage of Groeswick hitting the podium and then start to sound Sebastian. That's pretty killer, pretty killer respect for that. You might have seen this week, anyone watching this on video, we'll see these pauses but these are water drink pauses if I was organized I'd play some sort of kill music. Anyone who is a YouTube fan will see that there's a bunch of YouTube cycling influencers.
Orchial in the same product this week from GCN to field game and it's called whoop and there you go if you're watching the video you'll see it if you're on the podcast you will see that it's sort of a white band that goes around your arm. I'm gonna do a podcast review on it and I'm gonna let you know what I think about it at the other podcast or the other YouTube reviews that I've seen on it have been paid promotions mine won't be a paid promotion, my initial reaction to it is so what we've done, it's a it's a device for calculating recovery and your ability to try and hire the next day. So it's a readiness to try and score. It's actually something that was building an apocalypse a few years ago. It's something we tried to do to find someone's readiness to try and put the guys seem to have done it. So what the metrics are Now they're looking at sleep, error-slipped, sleep quality, like our sleep cycles, how much time we get an orient versus deep sleep. They're looking at our heart rate variability. That's the amount of time between beats in your heart rate in the last slow wave of sleep and they're looking at your activity level from the previous day. And they take all those and they mash it together and they give you a readiness to score, a readiness to try and score. That's a tongue twister. And the idea being that this score represents the stress of a session on your nervous system. Much in the same way I'd get out of bed and you might ask me what is your muscle soreness today and I might say, oh, it's like six out of 10. This is your nervous system speaking and it'll say you have a seven out of 10 nervous system fatigue. And if you're to listen to this over a long enough period, like it'll tell you days when you should do hardroids, when you shouldn't do hardroids, when you need to hold back, when you need to layer on intensity. That's how it works interior. Now, in practicality, I'm not sure yet. What I've noticed so far is it's a white band. You're meant to wear it every day. I've had mine four days. It's already monkey. You're meant to wear a train and sleep and share or whatever. Already a bit of a ping off smells a bit. The data side of it, I'm not 100% convinced yet. I'll dig deeper into it and I'll do a YouTube review on it. We've a lot of intersect and metrics to get a little bit nerdy for a minute. We have something called chronic training load, CTL. And then we have chronic training load ramp rates. How much we want to increase our chronic training load week on week. So I'm looking at divergences between heart rate, variability, and our readiness to try and score. and chronic training load ramp rates, and then even toward variable of the athletes subjective feeling, motivation, sickness levels, muscle soreness, that sort of self test that we get athletes to do in the morning. So, and then we've, the coach has planned for them. So, the practicality of it, I'm looking at it, like, you know, all these intersecting variables, how do we weight these intersecting variables and which should give them priority, and obviously we need to wait them different depending on an athlete's experience level, an athlete who knows his body has been trying and hard for 10 years. We got a way their subjective interpretation of how they're feeling a lot more than somebody who's new to the sport and transition from, I don't know, soccer or golf into cycling and they don't know their body as much. It's interesting that I like to see people moving the bar on us and I think it's definitely a step in the right direction. So yeah, I'm looking forward to playing around that a bit more and I'll try and bring you guys a comprehensive YouTube review on it in the next couple of weeks. Something else in the news I found really interesting was yeah Dan Martin last week alluded to potentially something that wasn't right within the time Hinton Addis poor performance there. People are speculating like okay this is uh it's almost not news word he it's like a he said she said he said hearsay type stuff and you or there's a reason they don't let hearsay into courts of law and it's because hearsay evidence is not reliable evidence and that's what we seem to have here is you know a Tor Housoff talking about what he heard from somebody in the Peloton that's a sports drink change before the Tour de France is blamed for UAE's poor performance in the the grand tour and the sports drink was poorly balanced and it was causing others to absorb too much fluid, making it difficult for them to function at 100%.
I find the story a little bit implausible and I know that you have had some problems with nutrition in the past but just to think that cycling culture 101, we always say to athletes don't try anything new on the day of race, don't try anything new on the day of race and to think that one of the biggest teams in the world with the commercial interests behind it tried a new sports drink for the biggest race of the season is a little bit unbelievable. Stranger things have happened. But yeah, I find that one hard to believe. I think it's, you know, the paper never refuses ink and I think that's maybe a story that's better not discussed and relegated to the place where you relegate stories that shouldn't be discussed if that has a name. Thinking time with the idea of a training camp, we haven't done an A1 training camp in a while. Well, I'm going to call this one more of a, again, I'm just starting to think of stuff that I want. And that's the way I like to run A1 and do shit that I want. And then I think there's a bunch of people out there kind of like me with the same You know with the same challenges with the same problems and if it you know speaks to me It's probably speaks to a lot of you guys as well Yeah, I'm thinking around October time more of a get together I haven't put any solid plans in place. I'm thinking maybe something like Like a weekend in somewhere rural or a bit of an epic rocky forest oil field to what maybe we were in the cottage in the hills in Wicklow and we'll experiment with some of this new nichey sign stuff that I'm working at, maybe an introduction to some of that stuff for you guys. Again, not too sure what it's going to look like or dates, but I'm just thrown out as a random talking point. I think it's nice to put something in the diary to look forward to and it's at a time of the season where we can also kind of say we've taken a break and we're coming back and this is going to be a mental kick start for us into the new season. So yeah, we look at that in the in the comment weeks. What do you guys reckon on the frequency of the podcast? How often should I roll with it? I'm thinking once or twice a week, the Tour de France obviously was in the Sustainable Cades. I think I like that idea of podcast cadence. See there's not many you can't if you're in a non-cycling podcast, you can't talk about podcast cadence but you can when you're a cyclist. Yeah, the podcast cadence twice a week I'm thinking I'm gonna shoot for that I'm not gonna commit to a schedule yet but I'd love to get it on a schedule of like Monday and Friday I think I'm gonna have to get a little bit more organized for that that'll be the way to do what I would imagine. Mitchellson Scott for me were big winners and the tour of Forest Edge wins is pretty impressive but also it They got me thinking about Lotto Jumbo because Lotto Jumbo had an amazing tour. They had Leadup Man, Tonistan, they had a bunch of sprints from Grand Wagon, Van Art, Crowswick, Podium, Team Time Trial, Wayne, did all that good stuff and last week I was talking about the need for team to step up and stick it to any else. more reflected on a lot of our pretty much there. Like if rumours are to be believed, Tom Dumelan is his own happy in Zone Web and it's been reported, at least during the tour by Lequip, that there's a clause in Dumelan's contract that will allow him to leave if triggered and we could potentially see Dumelan in a lot of colours as early as the Vuelta this year. So could we see Dumelan lining up alongside Roglage, George Bennett, Criesinger, Banart, that is a formidable time. That's something that's going to rival Inyos. So the call to step up, it's been answered swiftly, swiftly by Lotto. So who else is going to do it? We'll very soon start to see sort of, you know, scolia down there following on to Inyos is the forestry, kind of cycling dynasty we've seen I would say since post-all discovery. Back then we had team all about a kind of challenge in it but we obviously had Armstrong winning seven tours and I change Oric only one one in there. The Tordic win, I don't have a storefront for me. The Tordic win 98, the first day in it I've heard, I can't remember it one that one. Armstrong's 99. It would be nice to see it not been any else clean sweep for 10 years. That it's back and forth, where there's no money, no type 10 going on.
Even trigger foretimes in there. That would be an interesting one. Speaking of interesting stuff, I run a poll on Twitter about the best cycling kit. We have a bunch of the A1 custom kit. I really like at the moment. We have Sportful and we spin 11. I love the Sportful stuff. I have no financial affiliation with either company. I love our Sportful stuff. It's really comfortable. But I ran a poll on Twitter about the best kit. I think largely the options I threw out because they seem to be leading ones are Rafa, Asos, Castelli, Sportful. All them are available and costume kit at the moment, so I was kind of looking as to who's doing the best costume. And what I've seen, a lot of people come back with was Le Corle. And Le Corle, I fully brainwashed him to the France Le Corle by Wiggins. Le Corle seemed to be coming back with a lot of stuff, so I may look to check out not costume stuff, but I may look to just grab a bit of, you know, non-branded generic Le call kit and check it out because people seem to be raving about it. Another poll I ran on Twitter which I just checked before we came on air was how many people are going out the door without a specific plan for their training. I know 74% of people are going out the door without a specific plan for their training. That could be a podcast in its whole self because that to me is complete lunacy. The plan for the session could be to go out and enjoy yourself and put the with the garment in your pocket, but that needs to be the exception rather than the real. If you're anyway looking for a performance and let's you're just looking over hedges, tourists, sightseeing and even though oil and performance, which I don't suspect is the case if you're listening to this podcast. If you're looking to maximize your performance benefit out of the time you're putting in what you're going out the door without a plan, mental because when you think about how well planned out every other area of your life is from you know work, I'm sure it's key performance indicators, it's targets, it's reports and even you know the family financial forecast that you're doing is probably the same, you know coming for the family hall late this year, bloody blah, and then to go out the door and not have a plan for your session and that session to not fit into the weekly plan and the the weekly plan to not fit into the monthly plan and your monthly plan to not fit into sort of that's where we move from micro to macro planning. You know the monthly plan not fitting into the bigger goal like I'd like to accomplish this in a year I'd like to accomplish this in two years like basically in cycling it's there's not a lot of talent in this game lads it separates those at the very top but us amateurs there's not a lot of talent there's those who plan hard work execute under those who don't. So within reason if you're to pick any target, write it down and start aiming for it. It's achievable but you need to have a plan going out the door. As I said, that is a podcast or maybe a series of podcasts in itself that I don't particularly feel like jumping into right now. Mainly because it was something I wanted to touch on and again, I think this podcast at times it's gonna border on some philosophy type stuff, if you want to tag it as philosophy. I'm gonna tag it more as just my musings or we'll call it knowledge bombs. Something that I've seen a lot is athletes opting for material items rather than non rather than how word would I use this quib? I suppose material lines rather than non material items so it's what I'm talking about is you know where somebody likes to have something tangible that's what I'm talking about so the tangible versus non tangible so the non tangible being knowledge or the tangible being you know quills or a new bike and I'm I'm seeing it a lot and it's in cycling, it's almost a, it's a mirror of what's going on really in society because we see this, you know, gravitation of people towards stuff they can't really afford, you know, cars, houses, watches, clothes, a designer clothes specifically and they think that item, having that item somehow marks them out amongst their peers as having achieved a certain level of success in their chosen career. So if you can forward the fancy car, you've made it to a certain level so you should be someone to be respected. And it's very much at odds with how I think it should be and like the most secure people I know they don't need material goods to feel good about themselves because they have that intrinsic happiness and that's how they get their satisfaction from you know achieving their goals rather than somebody else looking at an item they have whether it's carbon whales whether it's a nice bike a car house and saying oh you know what that guy is doing very well for them.
It's too very, it's external versus internal validation. And I think that's very important to people's happiness. And again, I'm going to take, I don't like to work holistic, but on the podcast, I'm going to take more of a holistic view on performance, because I think performance is so linked to happiness. And when we're happy, we're going to be successful athletes. And so it's the idea of educating ourselves and like when I started out and the way I learned to cycle was we start with humble tools and we work our way up and we aim to increase our knowledge and we aim to increase our understanding of the sport our understanding of the body and it's the way we always saying you know tradesmen carpenters like you never get the apprentice carpenter comes in and has all the best tools it just doesn't happen the apprentice carpenter comes in with humble tools and he learns his craft. And like this is especially important for juniors because I think peer comparison is so big at junior levels and there's a there's a fight then and a pressure that goes on parents shoulders to give their kids really expensive bikes because the kid feels shit about himself if he doesn't have the expensive bike versus the guy who does have the expensive bike but the bikes make fuck all difference. They just don't make a difference. They're not they're not what marks out the successful writers from the non-successful writers. When you get to the point where you don't need stuff to validate your success, you'll start to make better decisions around self-development and around education. It's something that I was doing some reading last week and I was reading on education and the purpose of education. And what was education originally set up for? There's two theories or two skills taught on education. Education is something that improves your economic work to the community. So you'll get a better job coming to college for six years and then you'll get a better job at the end of the six years. six years instead of making 50k or 100k or else it's education for education's own sake. And that's what I think is being lost a lot in modern society, stuff for its own sake. You know, learning as learning as learning is the object of learning is not an outcome, but the process of learning. And it's something we're going to dive deeper into on process goals versus outcome goals, there's some really interesting emerging research on that type of stuff. But I see Dr. Mark and Luther King as everyone would know, I found an interesting quote from him. He was saying, in a world where people are subjected to endless prejudice, half-truths and propaganda, education should enable logical thinking facilitating the ability to differentiate between fact and fiction. Thus the primary goal of education is to save man from the morass of propaganda. It's interesting. It's definitely interesting relative to the culture we have in the cycle of dropping money on carbon wheels rather than exploring the body and learning the limitations of the body. And I think that's the part I'm going to try and get you guys to understand. What is the effect of things on the body like fasting, cold therapy, ketogenesis, controlling blood sugar levels? What is the effect of sleep? How do we control sleep? How do we optimize sleep? How do we improve sleep? What is sleep hygiene? What's the effect of blue light on sleep? What's the effect of front load periodization sessions versus standard periodization sessions? is a traditional taper suitable for you or should we, you know, go with a more compressed taper. This is understanding the body and understanding that there is no one answer that your body is unique and that we need to explore your uniqueness and that's how we'll get the best out of you as an athlete. So that's going to be one of the major goals of this podcast is helping you to understand your body and bringing you on that journey. Obviously there's gonna be a shit on a cyclone news and stuff along the way, but I'm gonna try and use like Tour de France or whatever's going on. As far as possible, I'll tell the story, but then use it to illustrate a point as to why you guys are doing what they're doing. And so I just wanted to get that out as I transition out of the Tour de France prior to the podcast and more into the A1 coaching, A1 show prior to the podcast. It's not going to be a straight up cycling results, cycling news podcast because there is lots of places you can go with that. Like I slayed the Raffle podcast last week, just for being a little bit bland and a little bit boring, but it is very factual and it's very deep and it's very detailed. And if you're looking for a straight up cycling news, that's kind of the place to go.
So I wanted to finish off and talk about Pino because Pino now has an absolutely horrendous record. finishing races and Pino will say it's just grand tours. So well Pino's come out and said that he's basically been traumatized by this experience of dropping out of the Tour de France and that the only way he can make good him dropping out of the Tour de France is to go and win the Tour de France. Now I I know listening to the move podcast and I saw it but Armstrong on this, I don't sort of, yeah, I don't sort of Armstrong on a lot of things. Maybe it's a brace of bully style personality. I wouldn't be in the Armstrong Hater Camp and we won't get into that Armstrong debate because you know, you could write a book on that, park in the morality of what Armstrong's doing for a second. I just find his personality a little bit abrasive and aggressive but he's entertaining and his knowledge is unquestionable. He's one of the taught leaders on our sport. So I think his opinion is to be respected, and I definitely saw it with him on this one. He said, Peano is just too soft. You shouldn't pull out of the sort of rants having hit your quad off the handlebars. I know he's saying he's a torn muscle or something, but it's just… So I could start harder than that. We've seen Tyler Hamilton ride on, I know he's on a lot of painkillers probably, no point speculating as to what he was on at the time versus what's legal at the moment for Pino to take. But Tyler Hamilton finished his stages on broken collarbones and that's not unique. We seen Gilbert last year having the big spill and finishing his stage and NBC Pino pulling out. With this, like Pino said, I don't know what I've done to deserve this. I don't understand that Pino told Zuri sent to the keep. He said, I've done seven tours and I've had to abandon four times. On other races, I never abandoned. It only happens on grand tours, even though Dermoy races. He not clearly distraught when he got off the bike. It wasn't nice to see, because he was one of the riders who animated it. Maybe it was an expectation. Probably carrying a knock. The expectation that he was going to light up the Alps. We just, ASO, the route was largely designed. That crazy high altitude, which rubbed us last few stages. Was designed a lot of retwepin on mind that he's got an altitude and bringing it up to the high altitude, gave a better chance for French winner and he felt the pressure of that to perform and they were knocked. He just wanted to save face and couldn't face getting dropped a little bit or tailed off but elators I don't know. I'd be speculating on a lot of that but I do know is yeah I think you've got to get to the finish and you've got to see how it is and he just needed to man up. He won't be getting the roadman award. Guys, that is it before we go. Brief shout out to the show sponsor again, A1 coaching. Keep an eye on this space because I'm gonna bring some sort of challenge to finish the season strong. I'll keep you posted on the next episode but yeah it's gonna encompass a little bit of the new stuff we're gonna be doing. The new stuff I suppose is collectively called Boyo Hacking but that won't be coming to for during the winter. But we're gonna delve into that a little bit and we're gonna talk about the power of morning routines in the next episode and that's gonna be built heavily into this eight-week challenge that I'm gonna put together and it's it's gonna be exciting. It's gonna be interesting and I'm looking forward to getting stuck into it. So thanks for joining me and I will be back. I I will be back, I'm gonna say I'll be back Friday this week, so it's Wednesday now. I'll show out another one this Friday, so we'll commit to two this week and that might be our cadence going forward, so it's two a week until you hear what it was. Thanks for coming lads and chat to you soon.
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