Being a pro cyclist was sanctioned selfishness, but now I have to go to birthday parties

For me, one of the great attractions to a career as a professional athlete was that it’s more or less a licence to be a sociopath. At the very least, it’s officially sanctioned selfishness. If your body is how you make a living, everything you do to it and everywhere you take it matters, so you can get pretty choosy.

This means that there are many things you can’t really do. You can’t sink five pints a night. You can’t smoke. You can’t live on a hamburger-only diet. These are small sacrifices. They’re even smaller when you balance them against a serious upside: all the things you just don’t want to do that you can now wriggle out of. It’s like having a get-out-of-crap-social-events-free card.

Michael Hutchinson

Multiple national champion on the bike and award-winning author Michael Hutchinson writes for CW every week

In my career I opted out of a dozen weddings because they clashed with races. In the face of one especially appalling-looking destination wedding, I managed to get an organiser friend to move a race so it clashed. I once turned up to a friend’s party 12 hours late and complained there was no food left. I refused entreaties to go on nights out, cinema trips, dinner parties. It was a brilliant scam, because training and racing is not a constant obligation. If there was something I actually wanted to do, it was remarkable how often it fell on a rest day or an easy week.

And no one had any right to complain. Or at least I didn’t believe they had any right to complain, and in practice this has the same effect. You just have fewer friends.

The worst bit of retiring from full time sport is that you’re suddenly in the firing line for all this stuff again. And it doesn’t half get in the way.

The battle in the real world is that to get fit and stay fit is like running up a down escalator. Many is the former pro who has great plans to stay in top shape, but runs into reality. A friend of mine expressed it as, “Fitness, paying the gas bill, raising children without the intervention of social services. Pick two.”

I think what he meant was “Pick one.” I don’t have children, but every time I string a few good weeks of training together, something gets in the way. A refusal to go to a birthday party because it will interfere with training is fatally undermined if you have no answer to the question, “What are you training for, exactly?”

I may be giving too much about myself away here, but as a self-employed freelance there are guaranteed to be several times a year when I get offered a nice chunk of work, and my first thought isn’t, “Excellent. I shall be able to afford food this month!” but “Damn it. I’ve just done a nice five week block, my FTP is up 5%, and now I’m going to stop for three weeks.”

This outlook is a short-term problem. But it is the same as my long-term problem. Deep down I still think I can be as good as I ever was. I want to keep training so that I can keep my fitness up and stay around the age of 30.

Clearly this is a pointless delusion. I’m not so stupid that I don’t know this, but I’ve been trapped by it all the same. Every time I see an old teammate or rival wheezing helplessly as they try to climb a flight of stairs, or struggling to fit into their old racing kit, I feel a pang of jealousy. They have escaped the clutches of their younger selves.

I, on the other hand, know that one day as I prepare to face the sweet release of death, my last thought as the void closes in will be, “This is really going to screw with my fitness scores.”