Toguri Training

“Master A Tough” in St-Raymond

When you drive to a race in the rain, you can feel the added nervousness in the car. As you approach the race site and turn the radio down, people speak in shorter sentences. They laugh a bit too hard at any jokes, as their eyes scout any visible portions of the course. Then there’s a standard set of complaints, or negative comments, as they step out of the car and into puddles: “This is going to suck!” etc.

Getting caught in the rain is usually ok, but starting in the pouring rain… The worst case is getting soaked at the start line of a crit while listening to instructions as you notice all the traces of gasoline and oil glimmering on the first corner. I’ve done a few crits like that. You just try to stay on the front while listening to the crashes behind you.

Some guys, however, LOVE the rain. They love it when it’s cold and wet, and they love getting all Paris Roubaix.

The gritty, soft-spoken Sean Kelly making everyone's legs scream at Paris Roubaix

Here’s Toguri Training’s Rod Matheson (Synergy) and JF Houpert (Synergy) soaking up the fun at St Raymond:

Rod: "Sigh, my booties are holding 2lbs of water." JF: "Doh! I forgot my booties, but it's ok. My feet are numb." ©2010 Antoine Bécotte

Ok, they’re not as gritty as Sean Kelly, and they’re not riding over cobbles, but they are racing in the rain with droopy arm warmers. That’s “Master A Tough”!

Eventually, the storm cleared and slick François Doyon (Quilicot-Rackultra) won a comfortable sprint from Dominic Chalifoux (Trek-Curaprox) and several others who had creeped 30 sec up the road from the field.

"Your kung fu is good... " ©2010 Antoine Bécotte

"but not good enough!" ©2010 Antoine Bécotte

Matheson performed a stylish, soaking seated sprint for 16th place, though he could no longer remember where he parked the car.

Matheson, second from the right. ©2010 Antoine Bécotte

Luckily Houpert rolled in a few riders back and had a photo of the vehicle in his back pocket. Towel off; change to dry clothes; hop in the car; radio on; drive home.

"I swear we were going to wear our sponsor's kit but it got soaked in the rain!" Senior 3 Podium: L-R...Maxime Labrie (4th); Robert Ralph (2nd, Rio Tinto/Martin Swiss); James Piccoli (1st, Rio Tinto/Martin Swiss); Vincent Lessard (3rd, Brunet); Nicholas Geoffrion (5th). ©2010 Gene Piccoli

The time trial, it is often said, is “the race of truth.” OK, but the truth of what?

L-R: France Bordeleau (Rio Tinto/Martin Swiss); Judith Hayes (Independent); Manon Gobeil (Lapraicycle) ©2010 Nick Van Haeften

The commonplace understanding of “the race of truth” is that time trialing represents your “real” strength, without the aid of drafting and group racing skills. It’s just you against the elements. This approach to time trialing can be extremely stressful, and racers who haven’t done a lot of TTs often become afraid to do them in case they reveal their “real” abilities. The mythology that constructs time trialing as “a revelation” constructs the victor as capable of immense suffering as they ride the threshold of a maximal effort and collapse. This association of TTs with pure suffering further intimidates cyclists from trying them out.

Instead of cowering under the fiery trinity of truth, revelation and pure suffering, I prefer to approach time trialing from an earthly, material perspective. In fact I have a real aversion to coaching regimes organized around the mythologization of PAIN. It is a mistake to narrow all the incredible experiences one can gain from cycling into a single word or slogan. Clients all too easily believe that they must suffer to train properly. Worse, those being trained under banners of pain are then repeated chastised for exceeding their watts or heart rate ranges during endurance rides–even though the whole approach to cycling celebrates pain! So the client gets blamed for overtraining!! Understanding time trialing as a particular kind of cycling scenario helps avoid this narrow, unproductive, and ultimately intimidating approach to the sport.

The importance of your equipment makes it obvious that materiality is an essential aspect of time trialing. TT bikes are faster than beach cruisers. To do well, you must be able to adapt your body to your time trialing machine or materials. Yes, TTs are about managing the materiality of your body to push its limits, but this is true of many scenes in cycling. What makes TTs different is that you race against the clock, as opposed to other riders. In this sense, time trials are symbolic of life. You cannot beat the clock, but you can excel beyond what your body would seemingly offer you on the day. In this sense, exceeding the body’s limits brings for the experience of excellence, which is not limited to suffering or pain. Your body can carve through space during time trials, and often your fastest rides are produced when you are so in the zone you barely feel the pain.

Time trialing is not the race of truth, nor is it a measure of you as a “cyclist”. Time trialing provides the opportunity to experience a specific feeling of excellence, one obtained when you excel beyond what your body would seem to offer at the time of the race. It is a feeling of excellence associated with the body’s race against the clock, and the fantasy that somehow you can get something more out of every day.

Noteworthy performances by Toguri Training Clients at Granby:

Judith Hayes (independent), 1st place, Maitre F. Not bad for her first race! Judith is coached by Michelle Paiement.

Robert Ralph (Rio Tinto/Martin Swiss), 2nd place, Senior 3. Robert is affectionately called “Jr” but after this performance…nah, we’ll still call him “Jr”

Michelle Paiement (Stevens), 6th, Senior 1 women. Good work coach!

Vanessa Cheong (Rio Tinto/Martin Swiss), 9th, Maitre E. Before the race I sent a list of 12 tips/reminders to clients. Point 9: Don’t miss your start!! I guess Vanessa skipped that point, and was penalized about 6 min. She would have been 4th or 5th!! You have to take what the day offered… still…

If the first race of the Quebec racing season is a jittery twitch-session on the windy farm roads of Ste-Martine, the second race is a short, relatively safe criterium just outside of Montreal, in Brossard. Racers do clockwise laps around a five-corner, 1.8 km course that is shaped like an upside down sock with the toe cut off. The start/finish is on the bottom of the sock, near the heal.

If this imagery is confusing, here’s a map

The crit is a relatively cozy affair, except for the third turn. It is off-camber, which means as riders turn right, the slope of the road banks from right to left, forcing their bikes to drift wide. To complicate things further, you drift from a wider road into a more narrow road while turning. For the most part this if fine, but I’ve seen riders “space out”–literally lose their sense of position in space–while drifting. They become sock zombies capable of thick, living-dead violence:

Or they over-correct their steering as the road narrows and create a sock of horrors:

One year, the time trialing PHENOM, Michel Brazeau, attacked into the third corner.

Awesome Time Trialist Michel Brazeau frolicking in Cuba ©2010 Michel Brazeau

Fabio frolicking because he is always frolicking in a composed way. He could TT if he wanted to, but he does not want to TT. He wants to frolick–with you.

Fabio the Miniature Horse frolicking. Also potentially good at shorter TTs

Brazeau attacked into the third corner, but he crashed. Amazingly, he jumped up so fast that he was able to stand in the middle of the road as the peloton whipped around both sides of him and through the corner. I don’t know how he did it, but there was magic at work. Out of my periphery,  he looked like this:

Lucky compression socks with TT shoe covers save the day!

So Brossard is mostly safe, but a little bit dicey. This year the forecast for rain scared many riders away. As it turned out however, the rains stayed away.

One of the most impressive races of the day took place in the women’s field. Two juniors, including the incredible Adriane Provost (Saputo), jumped into the break with four Senior racers led by Audrey Lemieux (Specialized-Mazda).

Audrey Lemieux powering the break. ©2010 Antoine Bécotte

The break maintained a 50-sec gap for most of the race until Lex Albrecht (Cascades) and Veronique Labonté (Nanoblur) started what seemed like a doomed effort to bridge.

"This bridge is taking FOREVER!!" ©2010 Antoine Becotte

Each lap they crawled a second or two closer to the break, but seemed to lack the decisive power to get the job done as the timed race was running down. Attacks in the break, however, slowed the pace during the final laps, and the bridging duo not only closed the gap but won the sprint, with the fast-finishing Albrecht edging Labonté for the top step on the podium. Sarah Coney (Stevens) finished third.

©2010 Antoine Bécotte

As the break slashed across the line, Toguri Training’s Michelle Paiement (Stevens) attacked the field and finished solo, 3 seconds in front of the bunch.

Michelle Paiement launching a last lap attack to finish ahead of the bunch in 7th place. ©2010 Antoine Bécotte

Other notable performances by Toguri Training athletes included that by Frederique Fenneteau (Rio Tinto/Martin Swiss), who completed her first ever crit. After doing WAY to much work in and out of corners, Fred finished with the bunch and claimed 3rd overall amongst the Masters.

"Closing all these small gaps is killing my legs" ©2010 Antoine Bécotte

Max Joly Smith (Rocky Mountain) provided the most impressive ride of the day amongst my clients. An early break of 9 or 10 riders escaped the Cat 1 field. It was comprised of all the usual suspects: Hugo Houle and Jean-Sébastien Perron (Garneau); Kevin Lacombe and Guillaume Boivin (SPIDERTECH); Jean-François Laroche (Régis); Arnaud Papillon (Nativo), etc. Over 2 laps, Max bridged up with William Goodfellow (Bikereg.com) and another rider in tow. In the end, repeated attacks saw Houle and Lacombe slip off the front to finish first and second.

Lacombe, Houle, Goodfellow and Joly Smith. Lacombe: "There are four of us in this photo, but only one person is listening closely to how I want this race to end!" ©2010 Antoine Bécotte

Perron would elude the rest for third, while Laroche outsprinted those left behind for fourth.

Perron listening to his watch/video/phone: "Ok ok, Monsieur Bécotte!! I promise I'll attack after the start/finish!" ©2010 Antoine Bécotte

Max finished just behind Laroche for fifth, or for what we call… a place on the “chubby podium”–that excess area just to the sides of the steps for medal winners:

From L to R: Laroche, Lacombe, Houle, Perron, Joly Smith ©2010 Antoine Bécotte

Good work Max. After a fast day of racing, it was time to leave Brossard and put on some compression socks.

Congratulations to all Toguri Training racers for surviving the spills and thrills of Ste Martine! And yes, we had both spills and thrills. In other words, the season has begun! There were, however, a few special rides that should be mentioned…

Congratulations to Fred Fenneteau for winning the first bike race she ever did! On a hot sunny day, Fred rode at the front of the women’s peloton for most of the race and crossed the line first in the Maitre E category. She raced well and she finished well. Not bad for a rider who loves her duck confit and wine!! Now about that yellow helmet…

"Fudge!" ©2010 Antoine Bécotte

"If they gave me champagne, I wouldn't share a drop!" ©2010 Antoine Bécotte

Robert Ralph jammed across the line in 6th place (Cat 3), but I have to admit I was more happy that he was constantly in the right spot to get shelter from the wind and to jump into the action.

Robert making Rio Tinto/Martin Swiss proud. ©2010 Rod Matheson

And finally, William Blackburn popped into the break in the Cat 1 race and was away for about 100km. He hung in there until the final set of attacks into the brutal headwind, but still managed to finish ninth.

William leading the break. "I feel like a Belgian champion!" ©2010 Antoine Bécotte

William coasting home with busted legs for 9th. "I admit it. I feel like a soggy Belgian waffle" ©2010 Rod Matheson

We begin with a messy ending…

I want to use the following photos as a hook. They are a series of images pulled from the tumbling airs of Ste Martine by photographer Antoine Becotte. It is the end of a race that has already been decided because outside the frame the winning break has long since crossed the finish line. So here is the question that hangs on this painful hook: what caused the accident?

All images ©2010 Antoine Bécotte

For all the European pros passionately following this blog, the well-organized Ste Martine race takes place on windswept farm roads about 35km to the south-west of Montreal. Racers do laps of a 14 km rectangular course.  Some years it is raining, some years it is freezing, and some years it is hot–but it is always windy. It is as if the wind itself shares in the turbulent excitement of the first official race on the Quebec calendar.

Even before the race began the wind swirled the smell of leg balm and the sound of nervous chatter around the parking lot. Riders fought with it as they tried to pin their race numbers onto their jerseys. They turned to face it as they clipped on their helmets. And they punctuated it as they twisted their cleats into the pedals and rode to the start. This year it would be a tailwind finish and a headwind on the long backstretch.

At the start line it was sunny, so an incredible number of riders were taking part. Because it was the season opener, there were also huge differences in fitness levels, which causes erratic riding in the peloton. There were also riders taking part in the first race of their lives. Differences in experience and bike-handling skills can also be the cause of accidents. Add some swirling winds to the equation and, well…you’ve seen the pictures.

So many causes braid themselves into the twisting body of the accident, and I am yet to mention that at least for one frame someone wasn’t looking where they were going. Sometimes, however, it seems too easy to blame the individual, especially when so many factors come into play during a sprint. Think of how many decisions and dynamic contexts have been put into play for that rider to miss the break, to be in front of some and behind others–even before he falls.

Anyone who has ridden in a peloton when the winds are swirling knows how jittery things can get. Wheels shift everywhere as spaces open and close a bit too rapidly between riders struggling to maintain their position. It’s hard to maintain a sense of the race itself as you get caught up in the spaces just in front of you. The key is to try and keep a sense of the big picture. Know where the wind is coming from and anticipate what the peloton will do as a unit. You will get boxed in. You will be forced to do more work at times than you want to, but that’s part of racing. You just don’t want to be so busy yelling at the guy in front of you that you don’t notice as the break walks away. Lots of riders told me after Ste Martine that they had no idea what had happened. It’s a common experience in racing if you’re absorbed by the little battles.

You can get lost within a small frame of vision when sprinting too. In most local races, teams lack the strength and experience to perform a proper leadout for their sprinter. So during the last kms, you get a small group of the faster riders establishing their presence at the front, and all sorts of battles behind them as other riders try to get into their draft. You also get waves of riders coming up to challenge the apex of the peloton. This is especially true when you’ve got long, tailwind run-ups to the finish line. The challenge is to anticipate and read the wave properly so you don’t get boxed in as it slaps into the side of the apex. If you do it well, you can sometimes beat sprinters who are usually faster than you.

A key skill of racing is thus to be able to read the big picture and commit to it. Whether you’re conscious of it or not, your ability to read the scene will lead you to your place on the road during the sprint at Ste Martine. You might be right. You might be misguided. You might suffer unnecessarily. You might excel. But in the end, visions of the scene will collide, merge, and spill in waves towards the finish line. On the other side of the line? That’s where the stories begin. How about this one:

During the day I watched several brutal crashes at the end of races as various categories crossed the line. I began to wonder how Ste Martine got its name. To be honest, I don’t really have a sense of the whole picture. Saint Martin is the patron saint of France and soldiers, but information about Sainte Martine is more difficult to find, and confusing, but here’s the story: During the rule of the Roman Emperor Alexander, Sainte Martine had her body gradually torn apart for refusing to offer sacrifice to idols in the Temple of Apollo, and then later, the Temple of Diana. Instead she continued to pray to Jesus Christ until her torturers were exhausted. While she prayed, an earthquake damaged the Temple of Apollo, a lion licked her wounds instead of attacking her, and winds blew out the fire upon which she was to be burned. Eventually, she met a cruel end but somehow the name of this saint of commitment and bodily sacrifice has come to mark the site upon which the cycling season officially begins in Quebec. By what route did such a name arrive on our shores? An answer to that question would surely require a sense of the big picture that exceeds my grasp. That’s like asking from where do the winds arise?