In the days before online training apps, I kept track of my training on paper, in a diary. Recently, trying to settle an argument about the date of a particular race, I fished a 20-year-old one of these out of the attic so I could check
It took me a long time to find the race. I kept being distracted by the training details. I vaguely remember training quite hard in that era. But not as hard as the diary recorded.
A sample week: Monday, 120 miles steady; Tuesday, 110 miles steady and 35 miles with the local chaingang; Wednesday 90 miles steady, finishing at a local 10 (which, incidentally, I won); Thursday, off ; Friday, 50 miles steady and 10 one-minute intervals; Saturday and Sunday, two-day stage race.
Miles rather than hours, because, as Grandpa says in The Simpsons, that was the style back then. Including the weekend’s racing, that’s 560 miles, or around 28 hours.
And was the following Monday a rest day to recover from a weekend’s racing? Of course not. 110 miles steady, with two 30-minute tempo efforts.
Looking back, it seems like lunacy, or a punishment of some sort. I even wondered briefly if it was invented, just so I could spook myself 20 years later. But I’ve never been that clever, and anyway it would have been brave to assume I’d survive that long on that sort of regime.
The thing is, it wasn’t that unusual. A lot of us either trained like that or tried to train like that. If you couldn’t survive it, you weren’t good enough. This was regarded as sufficiently obvious not to need spelling out, which was lucky, since spelling requires some blood left over for your brain.
We were trying to ape the elite pro, the riders who would now be the WorldTour. They devoured even bigger mileages in stage race after stage race. We, of course, were fuelled by Special-K and Jelly Babies; they were more often than not fuelled by huge quantities of experimental drugs. We were all well aware of this, but I have no intelligent answer to the question, “Did you not think that that might possibly be relevant to your relative capacities to absorb training?”
I might have been stupid, but I was resilient. A couple of days after the last race of the season, the diary records, “Funny time of year. Nothing to train for. 120 miles steady. Felt pretty good.”
It was also, I suppose, something to do all day. One of the problems of being a pro athlete before YouTube and Instagram was what to do all day. “There’s only so much training you can manage,” you’d tell yourself, then go and try to prove that this wasn’t really the case.
You might be wondering about those lucky athletes born naturally fast. Well, that’s simple. They trained 30 hours a week like the rest of us until they weren’t naturally fast anymore. I knew several good riders who turned pro, doubled their training load, suffered a total physical collapse, and retired almost immediately. “Couldn’t take proper training,” the coaches would say wisely, and move on.
The thing that bothers me most about all this isn’t the time wasted, or the fatigue accumulated. In some way those miles are all still in me somewhere, and I suspect in the very long term it didn’t do me personally much harm.
No, what bothers me about it is the certainty that right now we’re doing something equivalently misguided. And that in 20 years’ time we’re all going to look like idiots. Or, in my case, an even bigger idiot.
