By Tyler Wren — With forty switchbacks of uninterrupted suffering ahead of me and the main peloton five minutes behind, I felt confident in my ability to prevail on the queen stage of the recent Tour of Chile. Concentrating on my rhythm and jeered on by my director from the team car, I struggled and inched my way up the behemoth climb, being careful not to look at the switchbacks above me. The time gap was disappearing just about as quickly as the kilometers-to-go. One minute with three kilometers to go shrunk to ten seconds at the kilometer mark. Marco Arriagada, the race leader and Chilean national hero, passed me in that last kilometer, ending my hail-mary attempt at glory on the day and relegating me to second.

They’re a peculiar enterprise these days, cycling podiums. Cheer for the winner with one hand behind your back as you await the results of the drug control. In this case, the winner of that queen stage Arriagada (he was also the eventual victor of the race overall) tested positive. We were awaiting the results of his B-sample, but recently the news broke that I inherited that stage win.

My enthusiasm over my first international race victory is thus quite tempered by the way in which it was achieved- by default. Marco, it seems, robbed my of a chance to stand atop the podium that day, the satisfaction of struggling up that climb ahead of the field. What comes to mind is the enormous amount of work and sacrifice this endeavor of professional cycle racing demands. Training through Utah winters; juggling college and training; forgoing desserts and larger salaries afforded by more traditional work; interval training in the rain- these are all part of what Marco stole from me.

My outlook on this darker side of our sport has evolved over the last few years. I’ve progressed from cynicism to acceptance. Further, the slimy headlines no longer bring me despair. In fact, they affect me in just the opposite way- I feel more and more confident and happy in my own decisions to race clean. At the end of the day, there will probably be cheaters in most endeavors that I pursue. For me, my happiness and satisfaction comes from the choices I make, not theirs. I’m content with my cycling career, and will be proud of winning that queen stage of Vuelta Chile as a clean athlete. I continue to be fascinated by the nature of our sport- man overcoming the resistance of nature and the determination of his fellow competitors. Doping would obliterate that interest for me, and my pride. I don’t normally like to champion the decision to be a clean athlete- it feels to me a little like bragging about filing your taxes- but in this circumstance, when the victory was allegedly snatched from under my nose, I feel compelled to declare myself so.

For me, there is no positive test that will destroy my interest in the beautiful sport of cycling. For every doping scandal, I also see the story of the honest, hardworking clean athletes struggling in second place or further anonymity. Longfellow penned my favorite of Princeton Cycling’s mottos- “Know how sublime a thing it is to suffer and be strong.” Of all the things dopers rob, they can never take this from me and will never know its true meaning, for of this they have robbed themselves.

Thanks for reading, and train hard now that the sun’s out again.

-Tyler

Tyler lives in downtown Salt Lake City and races around the world professionally for the Jamis/Sutter Home Pro Men’s Cycling Team. He also provides cycling coaching services and can be reached at [email protected] or (610) 574-1334.

By Tyler Wren — I strolled into a Walgreen’s pharmacy with my giant teammate Tom Zirbel late Saturday night ahead of the recent USPRO Championships in Greenville, SC looking for knee-high pantyhose. When the attendant showed us a 40-pack and I told her that that amount would not be sufficient for our needs, I realized with profound clarity that us cyclists and our little schemes for achieving our bests can really look silly to outsiders.

The goal that night in Greenville, as some of you may have guessed, was to procure about 50 short pantyhose and fill them with ice in order to help the entire Jamis/Sutter Home squad cope with the temperatures and humidity levels both predicted to be in the high 90s for the national championships. We wanted to be our best, and part of that was to stay cool, but to the attendant my teammate and I were just a couple of skinny dudes dissatisfied with the paltry pantyhose selection.

The incident that night in Walgreen’s got me thinking about the silliness of other methods that we cyclists seek out in our quest to achieve our best. It’s funny how the night before a race you can spot all the other cyclists in town from a mile away. Often it’s the compression tights peeking out below the shorts (a practice that I do not condone) that give them away. I admit that I use the medical grade ‘granny stockings’ for my compression wear whenever I travel and have spent quite a bit of time consulting pharmacists on this product normally meant for elderly hospital patients with heart troubles.

A few more examples come to mind, as I have spent quite a bit of time with quirky cyclists throughout my career. Whenever I spend time during the summer out West, I seek out cold mountain creeks to sit in (in my chammy) to soak my legs after tough rides, which invariably draws funny looks from passersby. During my tenure at the Princeton Cycling team, a teammate of mine built his own ‘altitude tent,’ designed to boost his red blood cell count and enhance performance. The device consisted of a canister of Nitrogen gas meant to lower the oxygen content of the air he was breathing, and a trash bag to contain that space! The same innovative cyclist measured his lung capacity by inflating old milk cartons while submerged in the bathtub. Thankfully this teammate survived his experiments, but sadly he failed to progress past the ‘B’ field. Since graduating from the collegiate field and moving on to the professional level, I have witnessed a rider using a homemade masochistic hammer-like device to beat the soreness out of his legs, and even a cyclist removing a safety-pin from his jersey and using it to stab away the cramps in his legs- an on the bike self-acupuncture treatment! While waiting for our chartered plane at this year’s Vuelta Chile, the entire peloton was scattered around the terminal with half of the riders inverted, legs climbing the walls in an effort to save their legs for the following stages. There was no mistaking the cyclists for the ordinary travelers that day, that’s for sure. ‘Space Legs,’ wind tunnels, massage sticks, foam rollers, and public displays of stretching and calisthenics are all further examples of the silliness (or, perhaps, genius) that I’ve witnessed as part of our cycling culture.

We’re weird, that’s for sure, but I see all the weirdness as an interesting and endearing consequence of our struggle to ride our bikes as fast as our bodies will allow. Keep searching for the fair competitive advantages, but remember that the biggest one is hard, consistent, intelligent training.

Thanks for reading,

Tyler

Tyler lives in downtown Salt Lake City and races around the world professionally for the Jamis/Sutter Home Pro Men’s Cycling Team. He also provides cycling coaching services and can be reached at [email protected] or (610) 574-1334. Watch for him in this year’s Tour of Utah.