What Pros Use

The Race Across America [RAAM] is the antithesis to the Grand Tours featured in glossy magazines. Instead of the surging peloton and the high-intensity stages, RAAM is a meditative contest that delves deep into human psyche to push the very limits of the body and mind.

If we dissect the history of sporting it’s evident that behind strategy is an inherent honesty in the physical. Whereas modern sports are consumed by arbitrary limitations ranging from the rather onerous round-by-round judging system of martial arts to the four swim styles competing in the Olympics, there still exists an event that embodies this honesty.

The RAAM’s reason for being is to deliver one answer: how quickly can a person traverse the United States? Participants in the event cannot be described with superficial words like: fast, or good,  or even strong. Their vocabulary is of a heavier – more brutal – stock: endurance, fortitude, willpower. These are the words that describe a persons character, because that is the requirement to even compete in the Race Across America. Racers are expected to race around the clock for 3000 miles, winners have slept as little as 1 hour a night and completed the course in as few as 8 days. Compare this to the 2500 mile – 3 week Tour de France and you can see why Christoph Strasser may be the greatest endurance cyclist in the world.

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There are innumerable superlatives orbiting the world of sport. It seems players are endlessly crowned with hardest, best, fastest, strongest, etc… in no particular order and sometimes without reason. I’d be a liar to say that WPU is the exception, we beat the drum as loud as our nemesis and unlike them - we mean everything we say. Sport is an appreciation of drama, a respect for the pregnant silence prior to an attack, and a worship of perfect execution.

If there has ever been a sporting event that mirrored the sentiment of perfection it is the cycling time trial:

1. Put a human on a bike
2. Draw the finish line
3. Give the rider a pat
4. Watch the suffering drama

The time trial is simply a race against yourself and the clock. There are no other competitors to draft behind, no smug satisfaction of dropping your competitors, and no one to inspire you to be a better cyclist than the you that showed up. Today we feature a time trial specialist who is so good that they invented a way of cheating just to explain his performances: Fabian Cancellara.

Mechanical Doping

Fabian Cancellara has been accused of mechanical doping. Rest assured that this is not the same accusation lobbed at Alberto Contador, Floyd Landis and Lance Armstrong.  They’re accused of regular doping.

Doping: the use of a substance (as an anabolic steroid or erythropoietin) or technique (as blood doping) to illegally improve athletic performance[1]

"Does this helmet make me look faster?"

The folly that Cancellara has been accused of is attaching a motor to his bicycle[2]. Of course these accusations are silly, when we all know that mechanical doping is actually just another way to say perfection. Put this unholy being in a time trial and a spandex-clad behemoth will emerge.

Fabian has more metal than Fort Knox. He’s has won countless trophies in time trials, classics, stages of the Grand Tours, gold in the Olympics and the WC stripes. Let’s translate this for regular folk: he rides his bike faster than I drive a car. This is Cancellara’s 2012 bike with Team Nissan, Leopard, Trek, Radioshack[3].

1. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/doping [↩]
2. a.k.a., riding an e-bike – not sure whether it’s as grave as arriving at the TdF on a recumbent [↩]
3. Can we all agree on the absurdity of this team? [↩]

For the better part of my sporting life I considered cycling to be a selfish sport. A sport of solo racers attempting to claw their way to the finish at all costs. How is it possible to be selfless? There are only three spots on the podium – two of them are there for funsies – while a lycra laden field of hundreds awaits to eat the lunch right out of your musette.

There are moments when your entire viewpoint of sporting shifts. As if a trigger has been flipped and you’ve suddenly entered the zone of interested person. Memorable moments include:

• The value of great defense in Puyol’s stellar 2010 World Cup performance for the Spanish national team
• Strategy in mixed martial arts and the rise of Lyoto Machida
• #Linsanity on the importance of an intelligent point guard and dare I say selfless play (lookout Kobe)

I’ve felt this sensation about all the sports covered here and I’ve felt this once upon a time about cycling as well.

I’m not ashamed to say cycling entered my awareness during the era of Lance Armstrong. An intriguing story and the fact that he is the winningest American in pro-cycling would definitely pique the interest of anyone. However, it wasn’t until I was introduced to George Hincapies role in Lance’s success that the switch was flipped.

A domestique is a road bicycle racer who works for the benefit of his team and leader. The French domestique translates as “servant”.

Hincapie was a domestique. Without him, the legend of Lance would be a mere bedtime tale. If this were basketball, people would praise Hincapie for his hustle. The cognitive dissonance of someone so selfless paired with someone so selfish shattered my conception of the sport. It became clear that cycling is in fact a team effort albeit only one man can stand on the podium.

Of late, that man is usually Mark Cavendish: also known as the fastest man on two wheels. The caveats are that he must be in a contestable position 200 meters from the finish line in order to rise to the occasion. So to frame it a bit differently, he is the fastest sprinter on Earth when in the presence of great domestiques.

Look ma' no hands!

He’s won stages in the grand tours and currently wears the World Champion Stripes. This is Cavendish’s 2012 bicycle riding for Team Sky.

The Ironman is the unholy spawn of endurance racing, cross training and suffering on earth. This three-headed chimera of a sport breaks down into three sections:

• Swimming 2.4 miles
• Running a marathon ~26miles
• Bicycling a +century (over 100 miles)

In 2011, there were 1773 finishers. The worlds population is 6.8 billion. That means only 2.59191314 × 10^-7 % of humans had the fortitude to even complete the task. They say people have a hard time processing extremely large numbers, which is probably why the 99% of us still don’t understand the causes of the Global Financial Crisis 2008[1]. To give you an idea of the awe inspiring magnitude of just how infinitesimal the probability really is: you have a better chance of winning the lottery.

The challenge is insurmountable for mere mortals like us. Those that have made it are miracles of nature, even when they have to crawl to the finish line after soiling themselves. 2011 was the year of three time winner of the Ironman: Craig Alexander. This is Craig Alexanders bike & triathlon gear.

1. see what I did there; fix your pitiful lack of knowledge with This American Life [↩]

My Australian friend gushes about Cadel Evans as if there weren’t a million Europeans on the podium prior.

This is the bike that propelled Cadel to an astonishing victory in the 2011 Tour de France…

The Teammachine is the penultimate all-round bicycle in BMC’s line. Perfectly suitable climbing the cols of France and the being chased by the peloton. BMC calls their frame technology: “Tuned Compliance Concept”, I call it good-enough-to-win the Tour de France. Source »