Hayman fights back on the Carrefour. Photo: @harminator
Failure and success are destinations not often visible to the traveller. This is why it is nice to focus instead on the beauty of the journey and try not to be become overly fixated on any particular outcome. It is with some regret that I admit I didn’t invent this idea; there might be a few religions and philosophies out there that have stumbled upon this concept before me. The best you can do when you are born an idiot is read the works of those who weren’t idiots and then proclaim their ideas as your own.
One of the characteristics that separates successful people from the others is less their intelligence or an uncanny ability to get things right, but more their ability to keep fighting even when a situation is hopeless. I haven’t done any research on this, but I can recognize a fact by how it feels, so I’m pretty sure it’s right.
The final of Paris-Roubaix this year was the best edition of the race that I’ve seen during my lifetime and probably the best single bike race I’ve ever watched. It wasn’t so much for the result or the fact that Roubaix is my favorite race, but for the fight that every rider showed. No secteur of pavé is easy, but the Trouée Arenberg and the Carrefour stand out easily as being the hardest of them all. Most secteurs, however brutal they are, hide within them a secret to how to pass through fairly swiftly; they typically have a crown which stands above the rest of the stones and it provides something resembling safe passage. But these two sections are brutal things; the state of their cobbles is such that one imagines a bitter old French road worker dumping wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of stones along the road, taking a look back at his work and deciding that neatly laid cobblestones are a luxury not everyone is entitled to experience.
The Arenberg comes early in the race; a contributing factor but rarely decisive. The Carrefour, on the other hand, is late in the race and decides everything. The biggest problem is that the riders have close to 250km of racing in their legs, and bad pavé has a habit of stopping your bike in ways we don’t often encounter; blow after blow after blow from the stones in rapid-fire succession, soaking speed from the machine one dirty cobble at a time. Accelerating again once the speed is lost is almost impossible; and if you watch the overhead shot of Boonen diving into the last corner of the Carrefour and coming to a stop, you will see the way he fights with his bike to get it back up to speed. He is not of this world; for us mortals, the ask is too great.
I had given Matt Hayman for dropped at the Carrefour, only to watch him claw his way back. Sep Vanmarcke was off the front. Vanmarcke was brought back by a group that was working together perfectly, and Matt came back to the group shortly after, riding like he would rather his legs fell off or his heart stop beating than give up the race. Then came the attacks in the final; each one a do-or-die effort put on by riders who between the lot of them had nothing left to give. But not one of them ever quit; they would be dropped, but they fought back. Attack after attack, they kept the pressure on and not one of the riders was ever willing to give up.
And in the end, the rider dropped on the Carrefour, when quitting seemed the most sensible thing to do, beat the greatest cobbled classics racer of all time. This is the sort of lesson that Cycling teaches us; never give up, always fight through. I take inspiration from this and apply it not only to my own riding, but to my professional and personal life as well: You can’t, and you don’t, and you won’t stop.
Vive la Vie Velominatus.
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Some excellent comment here on an excellent article about the best race I've watched. Still gutted for Tom, stoked for Hayman and excited for Sep who surely must win a PR before too long.
That race had everything and probably benefitted from being largely dry. The damp stones that did for Fab and Team Sky were enough to keep it exciting and although like the majority I prayed for rain, I don't think we'd have witnessed such an epic finalé had conditions been different.
Forget Christmas, THIS is the most wonderful time of the year.
@frank
I've been thinking about this too, as I'm planning to do my own tribute 'Hour' at Maindy sometime that week. I want to do it in the spirit of things so no aerobars and if possible I'll ride as if I were on a fixie i.e no gear changes or freewheeling. And likely as not I'll be there on my own so I'll need my Garmin on the stem for timing purposes I'll do it without a speedo or HR in the display, so I'll have to work out a pacing strategy.
Are you going to have a team with you? I thought the drill in that case was to have someone let you know each lap whether you're behind or ahead of your pace per lap? On my own I guess I'll just have to keep an eye on the lap times and try and keep a consistent time per lap.
Can you set a Garmin to 'auto lap' every 460 metres? I imagine it might be tricky to get the accuracy.
@RobSandy
If I ever have a lash at this, solo as you are, I will initially pace at km/h until my HR gets up, then sit on threshold HR until the end, and not care about km or km/h. But that is survival, not going for ultimate pace. I'm sure ultimate pace is just going uncomfortably fast for as long as possible, my strategy is round getting as much out of my body as possible, without blowing up before the end.
@frank
I have another syndrome: Sympathetic Pedaling. This is when you're watching a race, when you look down your guns are involuntarily flexing and un-flexing in time with your favorite rider's cadence.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CgJdafJUAAEnRFz.jpg
Photo from Mathew Hayman's newly established twitter account to show his training set up for Paris Roubaix. He always kept riding
@RobSandy
suggest you use an old school speedo to measure your distance (can also couple this with your knowledge of how many laps you have done).
Garmins - or any GPS for that matter - suffer minor errors when cycling or running around a sharp curve. This is because they typically record your position to around 10 metres or so every second or so and 'draw' a straight line between each point. This minor error gets smoothed when going in a relatively straight line, but becomes a major error after many short laps. Have used different GPS many times running on athletics tracks and they always produce errors. Its even worse when going at a faster speed on a bike around a curved surface of similar distance.
Think you can program a GPS to record laps on each passing of a particular point, but I wouldn't know how.
Go down to your local track, ride 10 laps and see how far away your GPS is from 4800m...
@frank
Wuyts said when he's at home (Kortrijk) he trains by riding every gutter he sees. Must be some rough gutters over there.
Dutch (Flemish actually) commentary is the best! Gotta love the lingo!
@Joe
Ha! That's awesome! I have not thought of that set up for my KKpro yet. Wouldn't be too good a set up for rollers though!
@Buck Rogers
Goddamn. What an amazing sport. One of the new legends trains...in his garage with his kids toys hanging about. Incredible.
@DVMR
Sympathy Steering is also a thing. Until you get used to it, there are a number of spots on the Sufferfest's Downward Spiral when you'll involuntarily follow the wheel in front. The end of the Arenberg and Carrefor secteurs a personal favourites.
It's not so much of a problem on a turbo trainer but it can be disastrous on rollers.