Cycling as a Habit

Training to compete on the Army Cycling Team

As a young sophomore at the US Military Academy at West Point, when I made it to the interview round of the tryouts for the cycling team, I was pumped! Understanding that the interview was a formality, I knew that I was about to finally make it onto a real sports team that competed in national championships each year. I was already a super fast runner and in great shape but had been struggling to get onto a team to go compete with. Both of my ankles had been sprained from summer training and a recent incident during the tryouts for the orienteering team. I had a ton of energy and finally a low impact sport that I could compete in. The only problem was that I had never biked for more than a half hour before. 

At the interview I had to ask the question that I was the most worried about, “How do you go from not biking at all to riding for over 10 hours a week?”

The team captain promptly responded, “It’s not as hard as you’d think. You’ll ease into the habit of riding for an hour each day, fast. It’s easy. You’ll start out riding 60 minutes a day, then 90 minutes, and before you know it the two hours of biking will feel like nothing.” I was surprised and looked at the faces of the other upperclassmen on the interview panel beside him. Apparently just sitting on a bike every day was the recipe for becoming a fast cyclist. His confident answer to the question made the process seem effortless. He must be right then. Sitting on and pedaling a bike for hours at a time, day after day looked superhuman to me. I guessed all those guys on the Tour de France built up to it somehow, and now I figured it had to be possible for me too.

They formally accepted me onto the team. Each day after classes ended I would rush to change and meet the team’s new recruits at the indoor, stationary bikes in the corner of the cadet gym. We would ride for 90 minutes each day while staring at the wall in front of us. This would be our training schedule for the next few weeks while we waited for our bikes to come in. The sweating from 90 minutes of riding an indoor bike was out of this world. Every day we would leave with a giant pool of sweat underneath where each of us had sat. We wiped down the bikes afterward, but the pool of sweat stayed. I doubt anyone else used those same stationary bikes in the evening after the ponds were left to stew each day. 

The first few days were exhausting. It did not feel great for the butt either. Training indoors was miserable, pedaling away on a bike that didn’t move while the sweat fell all over you, without much airflow to help dry you off. Yet we kept going to the gym, just four freshmen guys and me. The indoor training was a pretty miserable experience and not the best way to start off your time on a new sports team. Yet the conversations with my new teammates and my hope to get my new road bike soon kept me going. The urge to keep up with my teammates pushed me to show up every day and pedal the bikes in the gym that don’t even move. The reward was going to eat dinner together with your teammates after each practice. After doing this for a few weeks, the daily grind of pedaling became a habit. 

Eventually, all of our road bikes that we ordered arrived. At the end of class each day at 4PM we would rush down to the team room to change out of our “as-for-class” uniforms into our white, black and gold Army cycling team uniforms. We hopped on our bikes and rode all over West Point and the surrounding training areas, towns and cities. This was our escape from the gray, prison-like confines of the military academy. We biked up and down every single hill and mountain by West Point along the Hudson River. It was a beautiful and exciting way to escape the stressful and monk-like existence of being a cadet. 

The winters were even somehow bearable while training with the cycling team. December to February at West Point is known as the “gray months” and are quite depressing. Being in upstate New York, the winter is dark and cold. In those months, you can’t do much outside because of the freezing wind that will cut through your uniform. This time always brings a few attempted suicides among the 4000 or so cadets. The winter and boredom is just too much along with all the other stressors involved with being a cadet. Afternoons with the cycling team and training in the hallway outside the team room offered a refuge. Our team trained for almost two hours every day on rollers or trainers that we would set our bikes on top of. We always put a big fan and a TV and at the end of the hallway to stare at as we pedaled our afternoons away. Some cyclists would listen to music from their MP3 players, and others tried to hold slow conversations between heavy breathing. These long workouts gave us something HARD to do, a challenge each day to keep us motivated to get through the winters and back out onto the road to race. I figured I’d be racing up mountains and passing the pros soon.

Little did I know that it usually takes about four years to produce elite cyclists. Day after day of showing up, pedaling millions and millions of circles at least slowly built us into competitive collegiate cyclists. Each year we had a road racing season for about two months. During that time, we competed in multiple races each weekend. That’s when we saw how we measured up to other cyclists. The desire to win those races each year fueled our motivation and our habits. The practice of biking for six or seven days a week for a few years propelled us to podium at multiple national championships.