While Monk is still racing – for the Continental FNIX-SCOM-Hengxiang Cycling Team out of China – his time in the pro ranks is over ... at least for now. In this post, he shares some of the lessons he learnt while racing at the professional level.
Cycling is a sport of lessons, some simple, others harsh. Most of these lessons come for riders within their first years in the sport: always bring extra food on a ride, don’t brake mid-corner, don’t wear undies under your bib shorts. Despite taking an unusually long time to make it into the pro ranks (I debuted at 26 years of age after first racing on the road at nine) there were an unexpected number of lessons that weren’t learnable until I reached this tier. Here are some of them.
1. The best riders aren’t always the best trainers.
The first training camp on a new team is a daunting experience. Dozens of new faces, completely new equipment, expectation to show you belong at the top. Testing day is probably the most daunting – have you actually got what it takes?
Some of the numbers put out by teammates at the start of January were world-class; top of the top for lactate testing and critical power. Some of these same riders also seemed to be completely missing come race day, either not able to lay down the same power under pressure or not able to get close enough to the front of the peloton to show anything.
The best racers, however, weren’t riding out of their skin on testing day or for the training efforts, but turned it on when it mattered for the big races.
Conversely, some of the best riders on the team were half-wheel kings, always creeping into the wrong zones for efforts and turning endurance days into race sims. Even at the top level, the correlation between how well someone follows their training program and their results on race day isn’t as strong as you might think.
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