Media Hype

BRITAIN’S Olympic cycling heroes may be returning home exhausted following their efforts at the Beijing games, but for one cycle courier it’s all in a days work.

Because Eva Ballin can cover up to 80 miles on every shift – equivalent to an Olympian’s training regime.

… says Deadline Press & Picture Agency

Hmmm, is that so.

It might be the same distance, but over an 8-hour work day, 80 miles is an average of just 10mph. That’s fairly easy, even with a bag loaded full of packages. I could ride ‘up to’ 80 miles every day if I wanted to, and I’d be knackered, but that wouldn’t put me anywhere near the level of an Olympic athlete. During a fairly hard training session, an olympic road racer like Nicole Cooke might do 80 miles in under four hours. Obviously Cooke would include some huge climbs in her training session – city centre hills are dwarfed in comparison.

Olympic athletes like Hoy and Cooke generally train at a much more intense, regular pace than we ride at work. They’ll train on fast, relatively quiet A-roads in the countryside, or on velodromes, or on stationary rollers (some train in rooms with reduced oxygen content to force their bodies to use oxygen more efficiently). We work in city centres, which means we have to ride relatively slowly in comparison, and we cannot maintain a regular pace – we slow down because of congestion, we have to stop very frequently, whether it’s for junctions, traffic lights, collection and delivery, or quiet periods when there’s no work to do.

And it’s not just about distance over time, it’s about the type of riding too. A big sprinter like Chris Hoy would do intervals on the track; that involves going as hard as possible for a given distance (e.g. 500m), then taking it easy for the same distance, then hard as possible again, then taking it easy, and repeat, perhaps for eight miles. Even if such a session involved riding only 8 miles, believe me that would be more physically shattering than averaging 10mph for eight hours.

Another thing is that they will do training off the bike; for example Chris Hoy will do weightlifting sessions in the gym to increase his leg and overall body strength.

Athletes also incorporate really easy rides and regular rest days into their training schedule, which help them to recover from the hard training sessions. We can’t take a day off in the middle of the week, or decide to take it easy on a given day – we generally just take what’s dished out. We probably don’t get as much sleep either; sleep is as important as the actual training, because it is during sleep that you recover from the training, and thus get stronger.

So it’s not equivalent at all is it, really.