Inside the Lines: pro sport psych/scientist, amateur athlete

I'm a pro sports psych/scientist, but lifelong competitive amateur athlete. The other day I found this old piece I had written about my amateur cycling career - if you're interested in how I thought as an athlete, and whether I walked the talk, have a read ...

When I was a young boy I thought that an adventure was like a fairy tale, it was something that only existed in a book. Then as I got older I realised it was something that you could seek. So I did. I jumped into a shark tank, rolled giant rocks off mountains, surfed giant waves, scuba dived into narrow limestone tunnels deep under the sea and drove my father’s 1988 3.0l V6 Ford Sierra very, very fast. My wife only let me drive her fast once, as an experiment, otherwise I would have to do it when I was alone. When I was in my early thirties I went on an advanced driving course in a BMW M3. My instructor was the national saloon car racing champion and I lapped the Formula 1 circuit one second slower than him. That seemed to satisfy me. I was a husband and a father of three, and I left my adventurous ways behind.

But as I approached forty, I took up road bicycle racing to stay fit. I thought it would be like road running. I didn’t realise that each race ended in a sprint, with between ten and fifteen bikes tightly packed on an open public road doing 60kmh as they contested for the win. The first race I did went to a sprint and I did not participate. I thought it was too crazy. I decided it was not for me. But the second race I did I won. A switch flicked and I went long, and so was in the lead and didn’t get involved in the mass pile-up that left people concussed on the ground and broke bikes, hips and collar-bones that were still being attended to 20 minutes later when we finished our warm-down lap.

Me and my friends were amateur racers. We raced for no reason, and every Thursday evening we would get together and race on public roads. It was like fight club, a secret activity that our families did not fully know of or understand, a group of incredibly fit men with day jobs doing something that required an ambulance with flashing lights to follow us in anticipation. We were so fit we would ride for an hour just to warm up, we did not notice the effort at all. I could ride 200km for fun, I rode 100km once when I had forgotten my water bottles and did not need a drink. One evening I was pipped into third place. My strategy was to pull onto the wrong side of the road. There was less chance of getting blocked by other bikes, so I could deploy my sprint, although obviously more chance of a head-on collision with a car. I had learnt how to extract every molecule of energy from myself, so as the race finished I was in oxygen debt and unable to concentrate properly. I sat up on my bike but stayed on the wrong side of the road, still doing about 40 or 50kmh and only slowly realised I was about to hit a car that contained a horrified family all peering through the windshield. I recovered my senses and flicked the bike to the left to avoid them.

I realised that I was still crazy. It had not gone away and I had not outgrown it. It had just been waiting for me. I am a mild mannered person but I have this switch. I was chasing the lead group down a steep hill once and was on the wrong side of the road again when I had to go onto the gravel to avoid an oncoming truck. That would have killed me, but I forgot it as instantly as I recovered my trajectory. We had a Staffordfordshire Bull Terrier which would chase seagulls on beach sand until her feet were raw, or flip into fight mode in a moment, and that was me also, under certain circumstances my awareness of pain and risk would diminish.?

In another race I locked handlebars with another rider at over 50kmh. I knew one of us was going to crash, and I knew it was not going to be me. He went down with a wail and bounced off my back wheel as he fell. Someone died. The tracks that we raced on were not safe and he hit a fence and was killed. We raced the next week and there was another crash. We raced past blood and teeth on the track, someone got smashed into an armco and slid along the top for a while before sliding along the road on his face, groaning, as we flashed past. Someone else got thrown over the barrier and into some concrete steps and lost a kidney.

Nothing I have ever done is more exciting. The bikes are so close, the speed is so real, and it’s so tactical that you have to think like a predator. I started to race indoors, on the steeply banked wooden tracks. The track suited me better than the road. I have heavily muscled legs and an unusual metabolism which allows me to deliver high levels of power for up to sixty seconds. The professional races are won with a 10 second burst, but amateur races are not as organised and require sixty seconds of effort - perfect for me. My sister was a champion 400m runner when she was young - about a 60 second effort. I share her exact mitochondrial DNA, and it was delivering for me too.

At the end of one race, two of us had drawn ahead. We had about 150m to go and were level, except my opponent was at the bottom of the banking and I was at the top. He looked up at me helplessly and I dived at him like a falcon. I deliberately rode too close to him so he would feel the shock of my slipstream as I went past. I wanted to scare him into giving up, and I rode to the win alone. I won a lot of races. Because of my metabolism, if I was in the lead group with about 300m left, it was hard for anybody to beat me. I won so much that I became afraid of not winning.

We spent more on our bicycles than we did on our family cars. I had a mountain bike, an expensive indoor exercise bike, a road bike, a race road bike, and a track bike. I drove a small second hand hatchback with roof racks. I had built the track bike myself. It had an aluminium frame, to resist the forces I would put into it during a sprint, low-slung handlebars, a solid disc aero rear wheel, and a five-spoked aero front wheel. It looked like the batmobile, but better. There were no brakes and I rode a giant gear because I was the one who started the sprints. I wore a grey long-sleeved skinsuit and an aero helmet with a reflective full-face visor, and white shoes.

But the races were terrifying. Nothing was more fun, but I hated them. Sometimes my heart would hammer so hard inside my chest before a race that I would fold my arms because I did not want people to be able to see how afraid I was. There was so much to fear. There was the guarantee of being completely physically expended. I did a race in Glasgow where I led the field for nine laps. I produced enough power to have kept up with an Olympic pursuit team for half a race and afterwards felt as if I had torn a gash in my lungs. That hurt me for weeks. There was the risk of a crash, and a long fall down the steep banking, or being hit by other bikes and riders. But most of all there was the fear of not winning, not being the best, the fittest, the hardest, the most muscular, the smartest … and the craziest.

In the race, I cared about nothing. After the group had been thinned by the pace, and the danger was mostly over, I loved to be inside that bubble of pain, sitting low on my handlebars tucked centimeters behind a competitor’s wheel as he tried desperately to escape me, and counting down the seconds until I would stand on the pedals, rip up on the handlebars and bend the bike with power and leave him behind. Then there was the desperation of being chased, no matter how far ahead I was. I won one race by half a lap, so far ahead that everyone else had given up, but even at the finish line I was bending the pedals and emptying my lungs as if I was being chased by wolves. Just as I won I glanced across the track and saw everybody looking at me as if I was mad. My whole body would convulse as I forced it to produce effort when it was depleted. So now I think about it, in the race I was afraid also, but only when I was in the lead. But that only lasted seconds.?

The fear before the race lasted hours, then intense minutes. It was the worst feeling in the world. How stupid was I? Guaranteed physical pain with a healthy prospect of physical injury. For nothing. I was a middle-aged family man. They would gather us on the track and I would hate every single person there, in their skin suits, shaven, defined muscular legs, skinny arms and mirrored visors hiding sharp, lean facial features, sitting on expensive batmobile bikes with aero disc wheels. Thirty or forty men, all to be beaten, by me, alone, again. I don’t do it anymore because it’s a numbers game and I am not stupid. The switch is off, but when it was on it was the best feeling in the world and I miss it still.