And so my boy is, I know, cycling. It's a really, really simple solution, but it has the power to solve the world's most complex problems. And that's my boy. The big question is this. How do we use cycling as a tool to improve our health, our happiness, and our long-chevel? That is the question. And this podcast will give you the answers. My name is Anthony Walsh, and welcome to the Row Man Podcast. We're going to try something a little different this week folks. I have decided to err against bringing a guest on this week. I love having the guests. It's been an absolute pleasure to chat to you know, Bling Matches last week, Steve Cummins, Tyler Hamilton. I'm just name dropping because I can. Yeah, we've put some pretty amazing guests. But as much as I love getting the guests and as much as I love hearing their insights, I think increasingly I'm gonna start giving the podcast a bit of my own voice and a bit of my own opinion. This week I want to talk about a topic that fascinates me. I'm an absolute student of it and I'm sure it's gonna be of absolutely critical fascination to you. It's about the topic of why do some people succeed and others don't. So I'm talking about sport, but I'm going to draw examples from outside sport. So I'm talking about why do some of us succeed in cycling and others don't, whatever success looks like to you. But to illustrate that, I'm going to draw examples from tech companies, I'm going to draw examples from aviation, from public figures through the years, and I'm going to talk to you about a key principle which we brought to light by a brilliant speaker if you ever get a chance to see him call Simon Sinak and he talks about a concept called the Golden Circle, the why, the how and the what. So let's think for a little bit about a company like Apple. What makes a company like Apple pop? What makes them succeed? What makes them so unique? Well, like any company, there's three real things that determine their success, their access to capital, their access to talent and market forces. But when we We analyze Apple. They have no appreciable advantage in any of these. They're not capitalized any better than other companies. Their talent certainly isn't better. Arguably, there's better talent in companies like IBM and Dell. They're producing on manufacturing with the same market forces as everyone else. Yes, they have carved out a product that has success, multiples of their competitors. These examples are a little true history. If we just go back and we look at the Royce brothers and their quest to be the force to bring an airplane mechanically propelled aviation, they had absolutely no funding. It was all funded from personal savings and debt. The entire staff at the Royce brothers, it was the two brothers and they had a bunch of other guys but no one had a college education. Even their main competitor at the time, he was super well funded by all the banks. He was college educated, he had a handpick of all the finest minds and finest talent, and the New York Times even decided to do a daily fly-on-the-wall type story, assuming he would be the first one to bring a mechanically propelled plane into this guy. But he lost, he lost to the right brothers, he lost to the right brothers with no fun them. What separates them, the same at Martin Luther King, he wasn't the only man of colour facing adversity back in the day, he wasn't a particularly well-connected guy. He wasn't even the best auditor of his time, but he succeeded in getting the message out there. He succeeded in loiting a spark and starting a revolution. What makes them succeed? Of all the cyclists in that past generation, why is it that the mass of the open, why is it that Armstrong put such a stranglehold on that whole era and won seven toward the Francis? Why is that? Everyone was the open at that era. We know that now. is it? Is it what he's doing? Is it the training method? Is it because he's working with Ferraris? Loads order, cyclists working with Ferraris. Does he have genetic talent? It doesn't look like that from the stuff, the research that's out there. So what's the extra, you know, as the French would say, je ne sais quoi? Well, Simon Sienak stumbled across this thing and he calls it the golden circle. And I want to talk to you about the golden circle and how we use this in A1 coaching. It's predicated on what every company knows what they're doing, cycling coaching. Some companies, successful companies, know how they're doing this. They have a framework. They have a structure. And then the really great companies know why they're doing this. And that's what we're going to get into. That is, that's the essence of what separates It also runs from greats.
I couldn't afford it. I was a student. I couldn't afford to get help and honestly help was hard to find. So I had to figure this out myself and I gradually pieced together. Like I'll tell you when I went out cycling at the start, honest to God, I wouldn't eat or drink on a training ride because I taught that if you eat and drink on a training ride, make you soft. This is honest to God, this happened. I wouldn't eat it, nothing. I wouldn't have a sip of water on the train ride. I'd go for four or five hour rides and my rationale being that when I get into a race on the weekend and I put this water and this food into my body, it's gonna be like a rocket fuel. And these are the hard lessons that I built this framework out of. That was one of the more bizarre ones that I ever dreamt up, but I was like a deranged Graham Aubrey, if you've ever seen Graham Aubrey taking the bearings out of his wife's washing machine, trying to figure out how they're able to spend at 10,000 revolutions a minute, but his cranks aren't able to spend at that speed. That's what I was like. I was like a deranged professor trying to figure this stuff out. And that all happened until I had a point and I met a mentor and I met Michael Barry and Michael Barry was racing for Sky at the time and I'd been a massive student into the sport and I'd read and watched every single thing I could get my hands on and I was acutely aware who Michael Barry was. He watched him as time-true, postal all the way, Columbia High Road and then he was at Skye when I met him. I chatted to Michael Barry, chatted to him, told him some of the stories like I'm not eating and drinking and training roads, man, I need help. I'd had some success at this stage but I still was very, very far from figuring out the processor, the system. So I met Michael Barry and Michael Barry said he got, he laughed, he laughed at me. And he's like, dude, there's a process, there's a system. And this was the first I ever heard of the framework, the how do we get this done? We have our vision to take back our use, like that's the what we're going to do. That's the result we're going to get. But the hell we're going to do with this framework was still unknown to me. And Michael Barry said, look, there's a system and he brought me in and he showed me the system. He showed me, look, these are the type of training rides you need to do. This is how the zone system works. This is how much time you can spend in certain zones each week. Here's how many endurance miles you need to accumulate. Here's the purpose of these endurance miles. Talk to me concepts like mitochondria being the powerhouses for endurance, how we developed them. Talked about the specificity of efforts like going in people doing two by 20 minute threshold efforts. Mike Barry just blew all that away from me and thought, think about the race, think about what happens. We never really had slowly into a climb and think, oh yeah, it's time to do a threshold effort. That doesn't happen. We explode into a climb, absolutely full gas and then it settles down. So everything I taught I knew about training and coaching at the time was just blown out the window. My 20 minute efforts became full gas, one minute efforts and then 19 minutes of threshold where my body was learning to deal with the lactate. I would replicate these things hundreds of times in training. So when I got into the race, I knew exactly what was going to happen. Amazing sessions that I still do to this day. Yesterday I was out on the Wicklow Mountains. I had on this session. It's a two by 24 minutes where you're forced, let me see if I remember this one. I hope Mike's not listening. He'll kill me if I get this one wrong. You're two minutes 30 watts above threshold, 1 minute 30 watt below threshold and you're repeating that cycle 7 times for 24 minutes and it's 2 reps of that. But this mimics the surgeon and the attacking that happens on climbs and honestly so many times you'd be riding beside someone and you'll open for your 2 minutes 30 watts above threshold, they'll assume that's your threshold, I can't sustain this, they'll think, they'll drop off. The sessions were rooted in sport science, they were specific to the demands at the event, but there was also heavy elements of sports psychology built into them. And this framework, this blueprint just absolutely blew my mind away. I tell you Mike show me this in about 2011 and then I went from 2011 to the end of 2014 kind of riding the bike full time.
I concur her. Like, what a joker. So the GP would agree and go, yeah, he is sick. And I take the antibiotics and I go home and I take the antibiotics, I never gave a second thought that consequences have taken them. I hate them like Smarties, but I'd be happy out and I'd be home all day watching my movies. One of the movies as a kid I loved watching was Karate Kid. And in Karate Kid Mr. Miyagi, if you haven't seen it, you need to go back and watch it. I assume you've seen it, but in Karate Kid Mr. Miyagi gives Daniel Son who wants to come in and learn the tricks of the trade, learn Karate. He says, you know, Now we'll go wax the car. Here's how you do it. Wax on, wax off. Wax on, wax off. Daniel's on, come on, I wanna be chopping bricks and shit. I wanna be breaking planks with karate chops. I'm gonna wax in your car. So he does this for ad nauseam, for days. And then he thinks, right, I'm ready to get going. Teach me some karate. He's like, no, now we paint the fence. Paint up, paint down, paint up, paint down. Daniel's on is losing his mind here. He just wants to get stuck into the heavy karate stuff. But what's not clear from to Daniel Son at the time is this painting fence waxing the car it's part of a framework it's part of a step by step guide to get him from where he is to the result that he needs. Later on in the movie we see when he starts fighting paper to block a kick he goes wax on to block a punch paint the fence wax on paint the fence block a kick block a punch and his technique it's impeccable from hundreds of thousands of repetitions of painting fences and waxing cars. So that's exactly what we try and do. At times it's not always clear why we're doing. We're saying to clients, it's not clear to a client why they're being asked to do what they're being asked to do. But you just need to trust that there is a process, that there is a framework. And the main thing you can do to guarantee your success, I look across all the clients. I'm in a pretty unique position I think in A1 because A1 we're gone since 2012 or nearly eight years. I can't wait for the 10th anniversary. I never, ever taught. This is going to be a small project. I was doing this, you know, to make it an apocalypse. To think in two years time, God, God willing, that I'll be 10 years, the only one coaching is incredible. But of all time in a one coaching, I'm in a unique position in that we've got a bunch of coaches. And I've kind of the master control and I can see everybody's training foils. So I can see what works and what doesn't work on almost an unprecedented scale. I'm not sure who is there another coach in the world? I don't know if there is. That's had that access to that many foils over that much time. I don't know. But for me, when I look at macro trends, economics was my undergrad and macro trends, big picture trends, like a a bird's eye view, if you think about a bird just hovering above a town and looking at what's going well and what's not. That's what I love to do. Teachability index is huge. When a client comes in and they think they know everything, that's when I know we have a problem. If somebody comes in and they're willing to open their mind and they're willing to learn, I can almost guarantee success for that client. society where just we structure learning in such a bad way and in a lot of ways the worst thing that ever happens to a lot of people is they get a college degree because all up until that point you're a kid and you're a sponge and you're learning every day, every day learning you're a student, hungry for knowledge and then at some point you're called up on stage. Some fat latch aches your hand, gives you a diploma, sticks a cap on your head and said now you know something and now you go out into the world and you stop learning and And at that point, you're just closing yourself to new information. And when I see these people coming in that are close to new information, I know we have a problem. Luckily, we do get a lot of the teachable types in, and that's where we are blessed to have crazy stats on success. There's a concept called hell who not hell and this is a concept I learned in business and then I applied it into A1 and you know that saying learn from mistakes but they don't have to be your mistakes and this is my place where I'm saying to you learn from my mistakes I told you at the start when before I met Mike Barry and before I met my buddy the mountain owner.
I was playing serious game at trial and error. If I had the cash, I was trying to figure out the hell, but I should have been trying to answer a different question. Who? Who already has this knowledge? I don't need to go and find this knowledge. I don't need to waste from 2005 until 2012, seven years of my life that I'll never get back trying to learn this knowledge. I was looking for the hell when I should have been searching for the who and I might have found Mike Barry and I might have connected with my runner friend much much earlier. So what I would say to you is don't go focusing on the hell, don't become a student unnecessarily, focus on who, who can show me this stuff and that is the best way to just you know supercharge your success. If you think about a guy that's coming in to build a house, a contractor. And if a contractor, screw the contractor, if I was going to build a house, you know, down in Kinsell, I love Kinsell, and if I wanted to build a house down there, I go on YouTube and I go, right, first thing is forced, I need to lay a bit of foundation, how do I do that? And I go on YouTube and I buy a book and I study for six months and I learn how to build foundation. Now the next thing is I need to stick up a timber frame and YouTube, books, no other six months I learned how to do it. Stick the walls up, stick the roof up, rinse and repeat. It's going to take me about seven or eight years to build this house because I have to learn every one of these skills. I'm looking at the hell. Instead, I should be looking at the who. I should be pulling out the phone book. I should be pulling Google and going, right, who lays concrete? Who sticks up walls? You get these guys in after one after the other. The house is knocked up in a couple of months, that's how we fast forward and get the success way, way faster. Right, I'm going to move on to the third point in our kind of framework. And I spoke at the start about Simon Signac and his idea of this, the golden circle. What do we do? So we bring clients in and we get clients a coaching result. We see where they are now. We see where they want to get it. That's the what we do. The how we do it is true framework. True that framework that I spent years trial and error trying to figure out this framework. Now we have a blueprint in place where we know at every step in the journey what needs to happen next, our own little recipe, our step by step got it. And then we get on to the why. And the why? The why is the most powerful question because the why is a question I get asked probably more than any other question. I spent seven years in university to graduate and qualify as a barrister and then I chose to spend the last eight years coaching people and teaching them a hell to be a better athlete. There has to be a big foyer, or I don't get up in the morning. There has to be a big foyer, or I'm recording this podcast late, late evening. There has to be a big why to do that. And there is a huge why for us. For me, I've seen how powerful a cycling coach has been. I've seen its effect on depression. I've seen friends, clients that are in a really bad way, that are going through some pretty severe personal trauma, everything from bereavements to breakups to health problems. and it's really severely affected their mental health and I've seen how powerful the boy can be at alleviating that depression. I've seen the confidence that it's given to people. People coming in and they just have no self-confidence. They just won't speak up on their own. They can't stand up straight. They're just, they're meek-timbered souls and I've seen them bringing them on this journey, bringing them from where they are to that result, to that recapturing that use. I've seen the boy product of that, that confidence that it instills. It's life-changing. It results in promotions for people in work. It results in being able to put yourself out there if you're single and going these Dayton apps. It's so powerful. I've seen the effect it's had on people's body weight. We all know how the health implications are reduced in your body weight, even a few kilograms. I've seen people share it. I've seen friends have been invited to their wedding. They were clients, then they were friends. I've seen them losing 25, I have 40 kilograms, but this stuff is real. I've seen the effect on people's mood on traffic congestion, like I'm stuck in a car for two hours, then you teach them how to cycle.