By David Ward — In the prologue to his book, Riding with the Rocketmen: One Man’s Journey on the Shoulders of Cycling Giants, the author states: “My name is James Witts. I’m 45 years old and I write about cycling … I follow the professionals, many of whom are 25 years my junior. That makes me feel old … At the end of 2021, I realized I needed a challenge. ‘What about completing a stage of the Tour de France?’ no one said to me … ‘You’re on,’ I said to myself.”
So began Witts’ journey, as chronicled in his book, to prepare for and ride the 2022 L’Étape du Tour de France. The Étape usually follows the same route as the Tour’s “Queen Stage” for that year, always a humongous climbing stage. L’Étape 2022 would tackle, in order, the Col du Galibier, the Croix de Fer, and finish atop L’Alpe d’Huez. These are among the hardest climbs that the Tour de France offers up. This would be no easy task for Witts.
Witts self-designates as a “sports hack”, a sports journalist who writes about cycling. He explains that, as such, he has access to some of the world’s top cyclists and, more importantly, top cycling coaches and training experts. And as this book follows his preparation for the Étape, therein lies its greatest interest.
The author interviews former and current top cyclists, coaches, physiologists, nutritionists, equipment specialists and others. His goal is to learn what makes the pro peloton roll at the highest level, and then apply those lessons, as much as practicable, to his preparation for the Étape. In each chapter, he first shares his interactions with those at the pro level and then tells how he applied that to his Étape preparation.
Witts has a very entertaining writing style. A good sample of this is in the first chapter, where he details his intent to attend the UAE January training camp: “It’s [the training camp] all in the name of marrying nature with nurture, of ensuring a happy and long-lasting unity before the season passage of time depletes power output, lung capacity and endurance. And what better place to lay the foundations for any marriage than that bastion of monogamy, Benidorm. It’s an incongruous backdrop to the world’s most monastic sports stars, but within its hedonistic shadows nestles Dénia, where UAE Team Emirates and their talisman Tadej Pogăcar are hosting their January training camp.” Such writing charisma, replete throughout the book, renders it a delight to read.
As Witts progresses through the book, he tackles bike-fitting, sports psychology, cyclocross as training, metabolic blood profiling and doping, riding cobbles, aerodynamics, recovery, nutrition, altitude training and course profiling. Arguably, all of this is essential to professional road racing success, and certainly most is. He explores these topics with the professionals, and it was very illuminating for me. Some of it I was aware of, though not in great detail, but of much of it I didn’t even have a clue.
But while all of this may be critical to professional racing, it is questionable what and how much of this is relevant to us recreational competitors and riders. That’s where I really liked how Witts took each aspect he examined and then applied it to himself as a casual commuter and recreational rider preparing to tackle a very challenging event. For example, in a chapter on nutrition, Witts spent time with Owen Blandy, team chef at EF Education-Easy Post discussing nutrition in detail for the team generally and for specific riders. Of course, these riders have everything done for them. Witts then discusses in the latter part of that chapter how he takes that and other information and applies it to his training for the Étape. As I read these chapters, I found ideas that I felt I could apply to myself, with my only desire being to ride as reasonably strong and recover as reasonably well as I can.
Witts prepared as well, likely better, than most riding this event, and certainly with much more professional advice. So it was ironic how it nearly all came apart the day before the event, also related with amusing humor as well as self-deprecating irony. I’ll not give much of that away, but there was the incident of removing his front wheel from his bike when loading it into his car, only later to realize he had failed to also load the front wheel. (I’ve also stupidly done that.) That was only one part of a day of misfortune, much of it brought upon himself. The one big lesson he learned from that day was that he should have signed up for a race package with an experienced company. Going it alone cost him about the same as a three-day race package.
Finally, race day arrives, and despite the previous day’s woes, Witts is at the start and ready to go. He describes his day’s journey such that I could almost feel what he must have been feeling as the day progressed: Elation and satisfaction in the early hours of the ride to pain and suffering as he struggled up, riding and walking, the final climb to L’Alpe d’Huez.
I was excited to read and review this book as I rode L’Étape du Tour de France in 2009. When I rode it, we climbed, in order the Côte de Citelle, Col d’Ey, Col de Fontaube, Col de Notre-Dame des Abeilles, and finished on the top of Mont Ventoux. More climbs, but only Mont Ventoux was as daunting as Alpe d’Huez, the Croix de Fer and the Galibier. Still, it was a major undertaking at my age of 58 years, and to take on Mont Ventoux at the end of a 100-mile ride was cause for concern. It would have been nice to have had the same access as Witts to these experts. I’m sure I could have done better than I did. As it was, my preparation mostly consisted of long rides with a lot of climbing. Still, I did reasonably well, and unlike Witts, I never had to stop and walk my bike uphill. And I was 13 years older than him when I rode the Étape.
Probably one of the aspects I enjoyed most about this book were the many stories, stories about professional cyclists, past and present, such as Andy Hampsten talking about the experts and coaches who mostly work behind the scenes to help the riders and teams perform at their best, and the author’s personal stories relating to not only his preparation and riding of the Étape, but also, being a person with a full-time job and family, his on-going life and personal dramas during that preparation. Following his life story during these seven months leading up to the Étape was something that I, or anyone who has a life outside of cycling, can easily identify with.
Witts is a good storyteller. Nothing can kill an otherwise potentially good book like mediocre or worse, bad writing. Witts’ writing is anything but that. He writes seriously yet with a great deal of humor. Rather than getting fatigued as you read, you really don’t want to put the book down. It is interesting, informative, entertaining and fun.
Riding With The Rocketmen: One Man’s Journey on the Shoulders of Cycling Giants
James Witts (Author)
Bloomsbury, 2023
288 pages, paperback
ISBN: 9781399403504
