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 path, which couldn’t be more at odds with reality. Leith Walk is big, bustling, frenetic and fairly manic, and it’s no accident that it and some of its pubs provide the backdrop to much of the action in Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting, the novel that exposes a different Edinburgh to the one you might see in the tourist brochures. I always liked Leith Walk, though, and ended up living in a flat there from 2000 to 2002.
My job in the bike shop was pretty unglamorous and definitely belonged more to the Edinburgh of Trainspotting than the posh Edinburgh. As the name of the shop suggests, its main business was recycling old bikes, scrubbing them up and making them roadworthy, then selling them on. There were some crappy jobs, and, as the most junior member of the team, I was given the crappiest ones. I’d get the real rust buckets, and have to go at them with the steel wool and TCut, scrubbing all the muck off, or as much as I could, then sticking on new tyres, and making sure the gears and brakes worked. I loved it, absolutely loved it – the banter, the oily smell of the place, being surrounded all day by bikes – but it was hard work. And, given my fondness at school for maths and other logical subjects, I had moments when I contemplated the economics of it. The owner of the shop paid about £20 for the old bikes, then sold them on – sometimes just a few hours later, after I’d worn my knuckles to the bone – for about £50. For my labour I was paid £2 an hour. It didn’t really add up. And to make it worse, and on account of my considerable appetite, I spent approximately half my day’s earnings in the ‘deli’ around the corner.
I loved working there, because I was mad about bikes. But I wasn’t daft. I didn’t like the idea of being taken advantage of, and so I decided that if I went back the following summer, I would ask for a raise. When the call came, I was ready. Sort of.
‘I might have a vacancy in the summer,’ said Mr Recycling when he phoned in the spring, ‘if you’re looking for a job.’
‘Possibly,’ I said.
‘Great,’ he said, ‘you’ll still be on £2 an hour.’
‘I’ll think about it,’ I said, ‘and get back to you.’
There was another bike shop on the other side of town, called The New Bike Shop, owned by Chris Hill, who had been helping me out with a little bit of sponsorship. I knew Chris, but I didn’t speak to him about a job. Yet for some unfathomable reason, when I called Recycling back, I said: ‘I’ve been offered a job in a different bike shop at £3 an hour. Could you maybe match that?’
‘Oh yeah?’ said Mr Recycling. ‘Who’s that with?’
‘Er … it’s The New Bike Shop,’ I said, mentioning the first bike shop
