What motivates a cyclist?

What motivates a cyclist? Not necessarily a racer, just an ordinary person that rides a bike.

For me, I began my adult cycling journey in December 2014. I was very overweight and a heavy smoker. I ate all the wrong foods and took very little care of myself physically. 

How did I end up like this? 

As a young man I played rugby, just for fun, with a local team on a Saturday. Ultimately my career as a rugby player came to an abrupt halt when I broke my right arm requiring surgery to repair. This led to a very slow 7-month recovery and a change to my mental health and outlook on life. I stopped caring. I stopped trying. 

Fast forward 16 years and my wife showed me a photo that was 8 years old of me holding my then 6 month old son.

I looked awful. Overweight and in need of help. I didn’t see any of this until I saw that photo, never in the mirror and no one said that maybe I should take better care of myself. That was it, I was going to do something about it. I stopped smoking there and then decided to buy a bike.  1 bike quickly became 2 and then 3 (I am sure smoking was cheaper). I would set myself a weight goal and when I hit it, I would buy myself a reward.

• 4th September 2015 saw me complete my first major challenge, Imperial Century, and ride from The Hilton London Metropole Hotel to The Hilton Birmingham Metropole Hotel. A distance of 117 miles. It took me about 10 hours to complete this (including stops). I felt amazing. A real buzz. I started looking for more challenging rides. 

As an addition to my training, I invested in a Wahoo kickr and a subscription to zwift, this helped me work out when I couldn’t get out and gave some structure to my training. This has now become a whole other animal with team racing and general competition. 

• 24th April 2016 saw me go out on my first club ride, nearly 70 miles and pushing quite hard for most of it. Again, this changed things, it was better, but something was still missing. 

• 18th August 2016 saw me complete my first Time Trial (10 miles) in a time of 27:12 (road bike) I enjoyed this new dimension to riding but I had no understanding of how to get better as most people give the impression you have to ‘buy speed’.
   
• 28th May 2017, I completed the CFC 150. 151 miles in 9 hours with nearly 9000 feet of elevation gain, this was a monster effort, it was mostly solo but what an achievement. I’d found my fix. This is what I needed. I did the CFC again in 2018 and again in 2019.

May 2019 and Steve Ingram finally convinced me to join Apache Brave Racing for a club ride, WOW! This was the missing piece, everything finally made sense. I found more reward in what I was doing, and Richard helped me find more focus by identifying specific abilities and weaknesses and then training around them to improve and develop, mostly without me even realising.

 
As a rider for Apache Brave Racing, I have learnt so much about working as a team for a goal as well as pursuing individual goals for self-improvement. Richard and the team have encouraged me to develop in road and crit racing as well as time trials improving my PB time to 23:44 in 2021 and completing an imperial century with my teammates in 4 hours 40 minutes.

I still prefer the endurance style events and look to the next ‘crazy’ challenge. 11th February 2021 saw me complete the vEverest 10k in 13 hrs and 7 minutes covering 241km (150 miles) and climbing 10,000 meters (32808.4 feet). This was a challenge of epic proportions, not only the physical performance but the consumption of sufficient nutrition to fuel the effort without triggering GI distress. I must have enjoyed it as I have agreed to do it again real soon. 

For 2022 the team have lined up the Chase the Sun sportive, from the Isle of Sheppey in Kent to Burnham on Sea in Somerset, a distance of approximately 220 miles to be completed between sunrise and sunset on June 18th. 

As for the future? Who knows, satisfying this level of crazy is going to be hard work, hard, but fun. 

What motivates a cyclist? Specifically, this one? Difficulty. If you find it easy, where is the fun in that? 

As John F Kennedy said in 1962 “They may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? 

We choose to go to the Moon. We choose to go to the Moon...We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.”