By now, my cycling ‘career’ had taken me away from the hills of the Pentlands and down two more conventional paths, one covered in tarmac, the other in wood: road racing – encompassing time trials and mass-start road races – and track racing.
I was a member of the Dunedin Cycling Club, a longestablished Edinburgh club whose colours were (I thought at the time) a stylish, eye-catching combination of bright red and garish yellow. It was a club that catered for everyone, from dedicated club cyclists to aspiring racers. At the helm was Ray Harris, the club coach, and his wife Doreen, who did as much as Ray to help the club run smoothly. Together they would officiate at club 10- and 25-mile time trials, their stopwatches around their necks, clipboards in hand, but Ray’s speciality was coaching, in which he was way ahead of his time. Ray was into ‘numbers’ and tests, whereas many others were decidedly old school, still basing all their thoughts on tried and tested principles.
On the road – which was by far the biggest area of the sport – that meant miles, miles and more miles. Typically, winters would be spent doing ‘club runs’ on a Saturday and Sunday; maybe 50 miles with a group of anything from a few to 20-plus on the Saturday, then around 70 miles on the Sunday, traditionally with a café stop. These rides would maybe average around 18–20mph, interspersed with a couple of sprints using 30mph road signs as imaginary finish lines. Midweek, club riders would do what they could, fitting their training around work, university or school. Most would do sessions on a ‘turbo trainer’, a contraption to which you attached your bike, having first removed the front wheel. The back wheel sits on a roller connected to a flywheel, meaning that as you pedal harder, the resistance increases. These lent themselves to shorter, more intense training – mainly because of the boredom of not going anywhere. To alleviate that, I used to listen to music. There were stories of others setting their turbo trainers up in front of a TV, and watching old videos of the Tour de France, or something similarly inspirational, as they pedalled away, going nowhere.
It could have been my winter turbo sessions that did as much as anything to convey to my family how serious I was becoming about my cycling training. Though my dad understood it, having accompanied me to BMX and mountain bike races for the best part of 10 years, my mum, though always very supportive, appeared quite bemused by it at times. As I have said, she was a nurse at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, working night shifts in the world-renowned sleep medicine department, and she would frequently pass me on her way out in the evenings. Invariably I’d be sweating and wheezing, and in a generally pretty horrendous state.
The reason for these encounters was that I would set my turbo trainer up in the stairwell, the half-way point between our flat, on the first floor of the house, and the freezing cold outside. I’d have the window open, an attempt to cool myself down, and Mum would have to squeeze past me and my turbo trainer on her way to work. I’d be between sets of intervals (short, sprint-like efforts), and I remember her looking at me with an expression that combined bemusement, affectionate amusement and mild concern.
‘That can’t be good for you,’ she’d say.
To which I’d reply: ‘ ’.
In other words, I’d be slumped over my handlebars in between sprint efforts, gasping for air, and incapable of conversation. Not that my silence ever stopped her shaking her head and remarking, on the way out of the door, ‘That can’t be good for you.’
Had I been able to reply, I might have said: ‘Well, actually, Mum, it is good for me. That’s the point.’ Because this kind of high-intensity interval training, which really only came more widely into vogue in the late 1980s and early 1990s, was considered essential for any racing cyclist, even if it ran against the grain of the old ‘miles, miles and more miles’ school of training.
You didn’t really need to be a genius to work this out. In fact, the ‘old school’ methods of training made no sense at all. What would happen was that the bedrock of the amateur cyclist’s winter training would be the weekend club run. And in March he would start racing. The trouble is that races don’t tend to be run off at 18mph. And they don’t include a café stop. The saving grace, for many, might have been that most of their competitors were spending their winters doing exactly the same, accumulating lots of steady (a euphemism for slow) miles. As the season progressed everyone would get fitter – and faster – simply by racing.
Ray was different. He ran tests on his fabled ‘Kingcycle’ machine, which resembled a modified turbo trainer. This measured power output, a measurement cyclists were hardly even aware of until about 1990, which is strange, given that it is arguably the single most important factor in performance. However, until the Kingcycle, and later ‘power cranks’, there was no accurate way of measuring the watts you were generating through the pedals.
Incidentally, I say power is only ‘arguably’ the most important factor because there are others, such as pain threshold and mental toughness, and also because some riders who’ve gone on to have successful careers – the Tour de France cyclist Mark Cavendish being one example – have ‘failed’ lab tests intended to determine their potential based on their power output. As Mark, whose lab tests weren’t exceptional, has shown, there are other significant factors, in his case ambition, determination, guts, doggedness, a healthy level of cockiness and self-belief … and a loathing of lab tests. The converse is also true: you get ‘lab rats’ who perform outstandingly in tests, and less well in actual races.
When I joined the Dunedin, my introduction to mainstream cycling – as opposed to BMX and mountain biking, both of which were regarded with some suspicion, or outright disdain, by cycling purists – consisted mainly of road cycling. But the club was more progressive and open-minded than some traditional clubs, embracing mountain biking, going on rides in the Pentlands and organizing races. This can be explained, I think, by two things – the fact that the membership was quite young, and that in our coach, Ray, we had someone who, though in his fifties, was young at heart and in his ideas. Now in his seventies, Ray still has his youthful enthusiasm – he is always one of the first people I hear from whenever I have any success, usually in email form, and with an exuberant message that is unmistakably Ray.
Despite our mountain bike outings – on which we were usually joined by Ray – the bulk of the club’s activity centred on the road, and it was inevitable that I’d gravitate there as I moved away from mountain biking. Road cycling is quite diverse – time trials over any distance or duration from 10 miles to 24 hours; road races of up to 65 miles for juniors, 100-plus for seniors; hour-long criteriums, or circuit races. Theoretically there is something for everyone, and my early road career suggested my strengths lay in sprint finishes and short-distance time trials – I won the short ‘prologue’ time trial to the Forres Two-Day race, a race for seniors, though I was still a junior, then punctured, wearing the yellow jersey of leader, about 50 metres after the start of the first road stage.
By 1990 I had started riding on the track – I’ll come to that in the next chapter – but I was persisting with the road, too, and in August I was selected to represent Scotland in the biggest event I’d ever ride on the road, the nine-day Junior Tour of Ireland. It was an eye-opening, and in many ways a chastening, experience. And, as with my rowing training, it can be summed up in one word. Brutal.
Before the Ireland trip I had a busy summer, with a bit of rowing thrown into the mix, and a job as well. I had moved on from my shifts at the local garage – scene of my encounter with my childhood hero, the footballer John Robertson – to a famous Edinburgh bookshop, James Thin’s, before landing the plum job: in a bike shop.
In fact, there was nothing very ‘plum’ about the work I did in Recycling, a shop located on a side street off Leith Walk, the well-known thoroughfare that runs for about two miles from Edinburgh city centre to the neighbouring port of Leith. Now I think about it, the name Leith Walk conjures up an image of an idyllic, meandering