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Fresh ‘Korn: The romance and adventure of the open road

Fresh ‘Korn: The romance and adventure of the open road

“Wow! You’re a professional cyclist? How cool! You must see everything! How lucky is that! Like one huge paid vacation traveling around the world!”

Response: “Yep, see it all. Pretty cool.”

To answer honestly with “Well, we see the insides of lots of hotel rooms, airports and a few hundred kilometers of road a day, but it’s not like we actually see anything,” simply isn’t worth the complicated explanation required afterwards.

Most people simply can’t believe and that we don’t spend our days cruising town, checking out the sights, doing a bit of shopping, hitting up swank restaurants and maybe fitting in a bit of wine tasting when time allows and we’re not busy with the occasional “bike meet.”

Thus, the “uh huh” response becomes the norm.

Life on the road
Before everybody starts thinking that I’m a darky-Mc-dark-dark pessimist, I should probably say that cycling is a great way to make a living. Though we’re all professional complainers, for the most part we’re doing this out of love for the sport and the interesting life it provides.

Sure, there are plenty of days when conversation spins to what we’d be doing if we weren’t racing, but one good day on the bike quickly erases thoughts of anything else. While some will retire with a well padded bank account most of us will move into something else when we hang up our cleats, looking back fondly on the years spent traveling around the world enjoying experiences few could even dream of.

When you’re racing across Belgium in mid-March, with rain coming at you from all directions, it’s easy to lose sight of the big picture but from time to time things aren’t all bad. As I tap away on my laptop I’m sitting on our suite’s balcony, overlooking the pool at the Four-Star spa where we’ve camped these last few days leading into the Tour of Portugal. The rides have either been along a beautiful mountain ridge looking down on the sea below, or right along the waterfront. Meals are served in an old town square, converted by the resort that now owns this renovated old village, into a restaurant.

In a few hours when gun goes off and the suffering begins it might not be so sweet, but right now it would be hard to ask for much more (other than maybe having our wives and girlfriends along for the trip!).

While we do occasionally get accommodations like this most of the time however we’re stuffed into postage stamp sized hotel cells with views of team trucks and hustling mechanics. Our “European vacation” is a Cliff Notes version with quick glimpses of many towns, but lacking in substance.

Sure, we do manage to hit up the café from time to time and I do know of patisseries in obscure towns all over the world, but see the sights? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve flown through Paris, yet I’ve never been around town. London? Same deal. Madrid? Barcelona? Lisbon? Frankfurt? Rome? Geneva? The list goes on.

Wine regions, areas dear and near to my heart and palate, in nearly every country? Other than one awesome week in the southern-Rhone two years ago, same deal. I’ve ridden through countless hectares of some of the world’s most treasured vineyards, yet tend to taste the juice back in Colorado. Some day…

Though we rarely, if ever, hit up the tourist spots we do get to see some incredible countryside and if one day I have a year or two to travel without care I have a long, long list of spots I plan to revisit and fully explore.

Now, more as a mental exercise for myself (one has to do something to repair the brain cells burned by every hard effort:) than out of any actual interest to you, the reader, here are two quick lists. First: what our days actually look like while on the road. Second: where I’ve been this year on the road with Slipstream.

A day at the races
8:00-9:00 - Stumble out of bed (I know, this sounds late – remember we just tried to kill each other for 5 hours on the bikes the prior day), stretch for a few minutes, get the day started. 9:00 - Breakfast; generally a big buffet that the soigneurs supplement with a boat of just mixed muesli and a bin of condiments. 10:30 - Race meeting. A chance to run through the route, tactics, daily logistics, etc. Toss out the suitcases for collection and transport to the next hotel. 11:00 - File out, load up and depart for the race. Sometimes we get lucky and start in the same town and can just roll down on bikes to sign on for the stage. 12:00 - Roll out neutral for a few kilometers of chat time before the battle begins. 5:00 - Finish, chow, clean up quickly and drive/ride to the next hotel, hopefully not too far. 6:00 - Settle in to the rooms, catch a bit of veg’ time, get a massage and do our best, normally with great success, to overload and crash the hotel wireless network 8:00 - Dinner. Generally another hit at a buffet with a few key items out of the “flavor box” to dress things up a bit. 9:00 - Back on the net, barely back online after a few frantic conversations with the front desk. Dig into a book or see what English programming might be on TV. By this point in the season I’m more familiar with CNN international’s program loop and anchor-people than one should ever be. 10:30-11:00 - Knock out for the night.Repeat.Rest days are surprisingly similar with travel taking up much of the racing time and then followed by a short spin afterwards… and not much time for seeing the sights.