the front wheel removed, handlebars held in place, back wheel sitting on a roller. As you climb on the soundtrack would be Prokofiev’s ‘Montagues and Capulets’, the ‘Dance of the Knights’. Just the thought of it could set your pulse racing.
You begin pedalling. It’s easy. Dum-dee-dum. There is little, if any resistance, for a minute, two minutes, three minutes. Then it starts to bite. Just a small bite – a nibble. You begin to feel a little resistance. The pedals aren’t quite turning themselves any more. Still, it isn’t hard. A rhythm comes easily. Seven minutes, eight minutes. Now you’re pushing more; and your breathing isn’t so regular. Sweat pricks at your brow, causing it to itch. You begin fidgeting, moving your hands around the handlebars, searching for a position that is comfortable. But comfort is a foreign land, a thing of the past. Now it’s really starting to hurt. The sweat is running down your arms, finding its way into the crevices of your hands. You wipe your hands on your shorts and replace them. No sooner have you done so than they’re soaking and uncomfortable again.
Nine minutes, ten minutes. Now you’re pushing the pedals, pulling them up, really aware that you’re not pedalling smoothly, but forcing them round; and it’s hurting your muscles, and you’re struggling to maintain the ninety revolutions a minute that the monitor attached to the Amstrad computer, perched in front of you, is telling you to maintain. If you fall below that then the game’s a bogey, it’s all over; and the worst thing is, you know you have at least another two minutes of this.
The seconds pass very slowly, v-e-r-y … s-l-o-o-o-w-l-y. Your heart feels like it might be close to some kind of explosion; your breathing accelerates to a point where it can accelerate no more. And, all the time, the resistance is increasing; it’s getting harder, and harder, and harder to just keep pedalling. Eleven minutes. You did thirteen last time.
And now, though you are edging ever closer to the point of total exhaustion, the mind games begin – horrible mind games. You make deals with yourself. If I make it to twelve, I’ll stop. I’ll alter the rhythm: that’ll make it easier. I’ll do fifteen seconds hard, fifteen easier, fifteen hard. Oh Christ, that’s not working. Maybe if I move my hands to the tops of the bars it’ll be easier. Maybe if I straighten my back it’ll be easier. Maybe if I straighten my arms it’ll help. Focus on your breathing; focus on your breathing. And stop that song, that brain worm, playing on a loop in your head – something really irritating. Hang on, maybe if I move my hands back to the drops of the bars it’ll be easier. Twelve minutes. Shit.
‘And stop!’
The voice of Ray Harris, standing by his monitor with a clipboard. You collapse into a puddle of your own sweat, panting like a dog, and await the whirring of the word processor, and the sheet of paper with the magic number: the number that could wipe away the pain of the previous few minutes, or increase it tenfold.
Like a sadist, Harris chuckles now at the pain endured by his subjects, or victims. ‘Oh, it was the holy grail alright! But you always got guys who thought they could beat the system. And you don’t beat the system! It always gets you in the end. It’s bloody painful; sheer purgatory towards the end. There’s no way around that. Doesn’t matter who you are: it’s going to hurt. But it does give you this number at the end that tells you the kind of power you are capable of generating. And that, ultimately, tells you how good you are.
‘I had Chris in for testing, like everyone else, and I must say, he was never one who wanted to steal the book to have a look at the figures. Some did. Some would blow their top when I told them the figure. They just wouldn’t believe it and they’d come out with all sorts: “Your machine’s rubbish! It doesn’t work!”
‘Chris was interested in his results to see if his training was working. And that’s where it was useful, really. I said to them: use it for making comparisons with yourself. Don’t ever say, “I’ve got to get 350 watts, or 500 watts.” Because, at the end of the day, someone who didn’t make 500 watts could still win the race. That’s one of the curious things about cycling. Power is bloody important but it isn’t the be-all and end-all. Having the power is one thing, employing it is another.’
Hoy, whose passion for training remains undimmed, remembers the Kingcycle tests with something approaching fondness – which could explain a lot. ‘Cycling is one of the most advanced sports in terms of scientific development,’ he says, ‘and the Kingcycle was an early example of a scientific way of looking at performance. I remember going for these tests in Ray’s lab at Moray House [the teacher training college in Edinburgh] and I remember just loving the measurability of it all. Getting that power read-out at the end of it, and looking at it thinking, “In April I was there; it’s July now, I’m here; by October I want to be there.” It appealed to my personality, this idea that if you did X it will result in Y happening to your performance.
‘As a kid I wasn’t the kind of person who did really well at sports that required a lot of intuition, skill, interpretation or subjectivity,’ he continues. ‘I wasn’t good at racket sports, which required good hand–eye coordination. I did alright at rugby but I was never that great. But I loved the science behind training for cycling.’
As well as his performance testing, Harris was particularly adept at working with young people; he was the adult who took your passion for cycling – and, by extension, you – seriously. Clearly he knew his stuff, and, through the likes of Graeme Obree and other leading Scottish cyclists, he did work with elite adult athletes. But what he was really interested in was helping aspiring young athletes, especially those just starting out, as Hoy was in the early 1990s.
It was unusual, in these circumstances, that he was taken seriously as a coach at all. As Harris explains: ‘You get your coaching credibility through coaching at the highest level. Your credibility comes from coaching someone who went to the Commonwealth Games or Olympics. But I resented this. I rebelled. I’m a bit of a reverse snob. This was really cherry picking, I thought.
‘The thing is, people think that you can coach children with a limited knowledge. But you can’t. You have to understand that children are not yet physically mature. You can push them too hard; I’ve seen this happen in swimming, with interval training for eight- and nine-year-olds. You can break them. So I thought I could really help young people.
‘A lot of my coaching has been with what I’d call minority groups – juveniles, juniors and women [Harris was the Scottish women’s team coach for a while]. I haven’t looked for the kudos of coaching elites. That was never my ambition. Plus, there was no shortage of people wanting to coach top riders. I could see where the gaps were, and I tried to fill those gaps.’
Apart from the coaching from Harris, there were other aspects of being in the Dunedin club that were different and progressive. ‘On Friday nights they did circuit training in the scout hut and then had a club meeting,’ says David. ‘So they were exposed to democracy, because they voted for what the club was going to do. It was good. Ray used to take the circuit training then he’d talk to the guys who really wanted to do something, and chat to them.’
Hoy says that it was Harris who taught him, early in his Dunedin career, the importance of keeping a training diary, and of setting goals. ‘He gave us these sheets and told us what information to put on them – heart rate, training, that kind of thing. I took my resting heart rate every morning and filled in my sheet. I didn’t really know at that age why I was doing it, but it was about getting into good habits, and learning – and I had a fascination with numbers anyway … He also taught me the importance of goal-setting – he was the first person who explained goal-setting to me. He told me there were three types of goals: long-term, medium-term, and short-term.’
In his Coldstream home, Harris digs out one of these goal-setting sheets for me to see. In fact, it’s pages: one for each of the goals. And it is with particular pride that Harris recalls
