Tour de What?

Nobody told me cycling could be a team sport. I thought it was always you, your wheels, and the road. That's it. Learned that as a boy in my driveway when my Dad freed me from the shackles of my training wheels, and after Mom bandaged me up when all of my body parts decided to group hug the concrete.

Then recently I found myself on my brother's living room couch, watching the Tour de France with my other brother, who happens to be a competitive mountain biking enthusiast. I'm less enthused when 8,000-foot climbs followed by 8,000-foot potentially funeral-creating cliffs are involved.

But here I was, watching bicycling's biggest race. Didn't know a thing about the art or science of bike racing. At all. I figured you just pedaled harder if you were behind and hoped your country didn't exile you if you lost. It was kind of numbing at first, seeing a bunch of guys in a pack going around a winding road. Somewhere in my movie binge-watching mind, I half expected the TV announcer to dramatically say, "And it's Secretariat. Secretariat is making a move. Secretariat is ahead by 5, 10, 15 lengths." Then a commercial came on, and my brother woke me up to talk about the metric system and something called the peleton. I thought it was a French dipping sauce and said, "Sure, pass the chips." 

I wiped the sleep from my eyes and tried to understand. Why were hundreds of bikers putting themselves through so much excruciating pain? It had to be more than the wonderful dual feeling of getting to wear yellow and being accused of using drugs.

Then it got interesting. Really fast. A group of bikers split off from the bunch. On purpose. My brother filled me in, and I was hooked.

William Fotheringham, a cycling columnist, this week wrote an excellent piece for The Guardian: https://ow.ly/QboHa. In it, he describes how the British champions, Team Sky, rebounded from a horrible loss at last year's Tour. In his column and from his interviews with the team manager, we get a peek into what it takes to go from loss to victory. There's a lot of strategy behind the sweat.

For example, the management team first got honest about what went wrong. Then they filled their cyclist spots with athletes who could swap roles, be all-round performers, and help the other guys' pick up the slack. 

One particular sentence Fotheringham wrote stuck out to me: "The defeat led to a realisation among the senior management that Sky had become set in their ways after three successful years." A good reminder to review our own performance and company's output. Sometimes you need to grind it out and not change a thing - like scaling a steep mountain when your legs want to stop and coast back down. But there's also something to changing gears and making small course corrections, all to get you on the podium, whatever bar you've set for yourself or that has been set for you.

Fotheringham goes on to quote the team GM, "[we had lost] the cognitive diversity we had as a group." Think about that after you read this LinkedIn post. What does cognitive diversity mean for you and your teams?

It's a great article, and I encourage you to click on the above link. I'm sure you'll find your own insights to spur you farther down the road.

The next Tour de France is going to be much more meaningful for me. 

Still working on that metric system, though.