5 Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me About Ultra-Cycling

I must be feeling nostalgic.

Maybe it’s because I’ve spent so many decades racing bikes that I find myself looking backwards almost as often as I look forwards these days.

When you’ve been riding and racing for a lifetime, you accumulate a lot of memories. Many are good. Some are painful. Some you’d happily forget.

And somewhere along the way, you realise that the things you thought mattered most when you were younger aren’t necessarily the things that matter most now.

So here are five things I wish someone had told me before I started ultra-cycling.

1. Mastery matters more than winning

When I was younger, winning mattered.

A lot.

If you knew me in my younger racing days, you’ll know I was single-minded, abrasive and bullheaded at times. In the 80s and 90s, that was what it took to forge your own path in cycling.

And it worked.

I crossed a lot of finish lines first.

But somewhere along the way, my relationship with racing changed.

I still love winning. I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

But I’ve discovered something much more satisfying than winning, and that’s mastery.

Mastery is loving the craft for its own sake. It’s the continual refinement of something you’ve spent years learning. It’s knowing your bike, understanding your body, reading the road, managing your effort, making the right decision when you’re tired and finding another gear when you thought there wasn’t one.

It’s becoming better at something because you care deeply about perfecting it, not simply because there’s a result waiting at the end.

The strange thing is that this doesn’t make you less competitive.

If anything, it makes you more dangerous.

Because when you stop needing the result to validate the work, you can become completely absorbed in the work itself.

These days, I get enormous satisfaction from getting things right.

The preparation, pacing, and equipment. The decisions, discipline, and tiny details that nobody watching from the roadside will ever notice.

That’s my craft.

And after decades of racing, I think that’s what I’m really chasing now.

Not just the finish line.

The ability to ride towards it better than I did yesterday.

2. Keep moving forward

When my last professional contract ended in 1997, I entered a profound period of uncertainty.

It was a significant ending with no clear beginning.

For me, that was a scary place.

There was outside pressure to stop riding and racing completely and I considered it.

Thankfully, I didn’t.

I raced Gran Fondos for a time and then, twelve years later, I stumbled into endurance racing.

Almost immediately, I knew I’d found my new beginning.

That’s one of the things I’ve learned since: you don’t always get to see the next chapter before you’ve finished the current one.

Sometimes you simply have to keep moving.

Keep riding. Keep learning. Keep showing up.

You don’t need to know exactly where you’re going.

You just need to keep moving forward long enough for the next opportunity to reveal itself.

The road has a funny way of doing that.

3. Failure isn’t a full stop

Don’t be afraid to fail, and please don’t sanitise failure.

Failing to complete something is a failure of doing, not a failure of being.

Understand the difference.

I’ve had enough experience of racing over the years to know that things don’t always go according to plan.

Sometimes you get beaten.

You make the wrong decision or your body won’t cooperate.

And sometimes, the race wins.

It hurts. Of course it does.

But the greatest lessons I’ve learned have rarely come from the easy wins.

They’ve come from the days when things went badly and I had to work out what to do next.

If you cannot tolerate defeat, you limit what you’re willing to attempt.

And if you limit what you’re willing to attempt, you’ll never discover your true potential.

Perseverance isn’t glamorous.

It’s simply the ability to keep going when the outcome isn’t what you wanted.

Hone that skill.

As an ultra-cyclist, you’ll need it.

4. Dreams don’t have an expiry date

Dreams matter at every age and stage.

When you’re young, it’s easy to think dreams belong to the future.

I’ll do that one day.

Race that race.

Ride that distance.

Eventually, I’ll see what I’m capable of.

Then life gets busy.

And gradually, those dreams can become things you used to talk about.

I don’t believe they have to.

I’ve learned that a dream doesn’t become less valuable just because you’re older.

If anything, pursuing one later in life can mean more because you understand what it takes to make it happen.

Turning a dream into reality demonstrates something powerful. You’re still capable of imagining something difficult and doing the work required to make it real.

That’s worth protecting.

So don’t give up on the things that still pull you towards them.

You never know where they might take you.

5. Surround yourself with people going in the same direction

Magic happens when a group of people decides to achieve something together.

I’ve seen it many times over the years.

It’s easy to talk about teamwork.

It’s much harder to build a team that stays together when pressure is applied and then reapplied.

In ultra-endurance racing, you discover very quickly who your people are.

You need people who don’t disappear when the race dismantles you.

People who can catch you, care for you and tell you the truth.

People who understand when to push, when to back off and when to simply sit beside you and keep you moving.

On the uphills, downhills and at three in the morning.

When the plan has gone completely out of the window.

No. Matter. What.

It took me a while to surround myself with people like that.

Don’t wait as long as I did.

Final thoughts

After a lifetime of racing bikes, I look back at the younger version of myself with a mixture of affection and amusement.

There were some great times and hard times.

And there were plenty of things I got wrong.

But I wouldn’t trade those experiences or where I am now.

I’m still enthralled with the bicycle – two wheels and three triangles.

I still love exploring roads and the challenge of finding out what’s possible.

And, after all these years, I’m still curious about what comes next.

---

If you’re wondering what might be possible for you on the bike, that’s where I can help.

After decades of racing and learning the hard way, I coach ultra-cyclists who want to go further, race smarter and discover what they’re capable of.

Because the road ahead is always more interesting when you have a plan for getting there.