Welcome to a new week, and a new feature here at writebikerepeat.com - Monday musings: a blog-style post where I mull over the latest happenings in the world of pro cycling, in a similar vein to the 'Final Thought' section in my newsletter (for those of you who would like receive this but don't already, you can sign up here).
Last week was Not Fun. As weeks go, it was a Bad Week. The depressing hangover from world events lingered, as the temperatures in the UK dropped and the nights drew in, and it wasn't just me - it seemed as though a pervasive mood of gloom and apathy was shrouding even the sturdiest sets of shoulders. I recalled a similar mood around this time last year and lo and behold when I looked back into my archives (WhatsApp messages from this time last year) I was vindicated. Mid-November appears to be the absolute zenith of gloom, for me at least.
A term coined by a UK travel company in 2005 (thanks Wikipedia), the phenomenon of 'Blue Monday' refers to the specific date in the year which is deemed to be the most depressing, due to a combination of post-Christmas blues, the weather, the darkness, and of course, the fact that it's Monday. While it's particularly nihilistic to pick a specific date on which to be the most depressed, and seems to be a peculiarly British notion, given our preoccupation with the weather, there's a nugget of truth to the idea. Life is all about rhythms, and inevitably there will be peaks and troughs for us all, on a daily, weekly, monthly and yearly basis. While these will be largely individual, based on moods, hormones, external occurrences, and all sorts, there's also a scientific grounding in the idea of a waning at this time of year, reflective of nature itself; a kind of hibernation period, which our cave people ancestors would have observed in the winter months.
Is this website even about cycling anymore? I hear you cry. Well, yes. I'll stop digressing and Googling (other search engines are available) 'did early humans hibernate?' and get to the point. I put it to you, good cycling fans of planet Earth, that last week was not just a down week for me personally, but in my broader persona as 'Cycling fan', it also symbolised the nadir of the annual cycle. In short, I've identified the pro cycling calendar equivalent of 'Blue Monday'.
It falls in mid-November, and yes, if we have to pick a specific day we'll obviously choose Monday because - d'uh - it's always a rest day, right? So this year's pro cycling 'Blue Monday,' by my (not all that scientific) reasoning, was 11th November. The day of the year on which cycling fans are perhaps at their lowest ebb. Here is my reasoning (the usual disclaimers apply here - your mileage may vary, this is just an opinion, and I accept that others may feel differently on some or all points!) Now let's look at the evidence:
1) It's still ages until the new season
OK I know it's really not all that long, in the grand scheme of things, but at this point in the off-season it's been a month since the most recent road racing action concluded, and it's a month and a half until the season kicks off again in Australia in January. For the less obsessive among us, it's over three months (assuming you mark Omloop as the official season opener) or five if you're only interested in watching Grand Tours. We're in a funk. We miss opening up FirstCycling to see lists of races and instead, seeing the dreaded phrase 'No UCI races this day.' We don't have any start lists to pore over, nor any stunning race photography to look back at, from an exciting weekend just passed. We are, to overstate things a bit, bereft.
2) The excitement of transfer season has died down
The momentum of the cycling news carousel keeps us coasting downhill for a good while after the racing action has concluded, with exciting transfer news to digest and extrapolate into our expectations for the new season, resulting in plenty of chat on social media. There's the Tour de France route reveal which we can dine out on for a good couple of weeks, too, but once you hit mid-November, it goes quiet, and our forward momentum stalls. We're still a month or two from the first new kit reveals - apparel-based discourse can occupy the cycling faithful for days at a time - and it all just goes a bit flat. Reminiscing will only get us so far, and we've done most of that already, and looking ahead to the new season feels a bit premature. But what else is there to talk about?
3) The riders are all on holiday somewhere lovely
Yes, it's true, they deserve their holiday time after a year spent engaged in tough training regimes and attritional racing, and if I'm in the right mood I can quite enjoy a flight of fancy, scrolling through the impossibly blue views in their instagram snaps, where I imagine what it might be like lazing by a private pool at Club Med in Mauritius. For the most part though, when you're turning on the big light at 3.00 in the afternoon because it's so dark outside, and digging out your gloves and hats and firing up the central heating, it's quite tough to be bombarded with an endless reel of incredible images from around the world, where our favourite riders are kicking back and relaxing while we are trying to get around to doing our taxes and making a start on the Christmas shopping.
As I discussed in the newsletter though, off-season does seem shorter than ever, and it'll be no time until we're enjoying training camp content as they all come back together again to prepare for 2025. So I won't begrudge them their sun, sea and sangria for long.
4) The post-season cooling off period is over
Another topic I covered in the newsletter was feeling a bit jaded, post-season - and actually relishing a bit of a break from the relentless racing calendar, which is full-on for the most committed fans and those who are trying to keep up with all the results for work purposes. Even more casual fans are generally less enamoured with the later races than the earlier ones (compare the fervour and excitement for the early classics with the somewhat apathetic response to the autumn Italian classics, for example), and there's certainly a sense of a break being necessary for all involved. Once that initial separation has occurred, though, and we've all gone off and enjoyed something different for a while, there's a very real sense of 'I have had enough of normal life now thank you, please may I have some more bike racing?'
5) Other disciplines are just getting going
As always, there is cyclocross to get us through, and it's beginning to heat up on the not-quite-yet-muddy fields of Belgium and beyond, for those who are into that sort of thing (me). Again though, the peak of CX season is Christmas, and on our designated 'Blue Monday' the first UCI World Cup fixture is still two weeks away. Many riders are still riding themselves into form and others haven't even started their off-road season yet. For those of an indoor persuasion, track worlds have been and gone and the UCI league has yet to kick off, and again there's a vague sense of in-between-ness. It's just not quite enough, for the insatiable cycling appetites that we've developed over the years, is it?
It's not all doom and gloom
Those of you familiar with my work and/or social media presence will hopefully know that positivity is not only important to me but is actually a pillar of my personal existence - I spend a lot of time working towards being a more positive person and trying to spread that positivity to those around me - so this post feels a bit alien to be honest. I'm far more prone to trying to find to good, even in a negative situation.
On the flip side however, I'm also aware that the universe requires balance - yin and yang and all that - and that it's OK to recognise that not everything is sunshine and rainbows all of the time. Especially in mid-November. That being said, I'll be returning the scheduled programming very shortly - so you can look forward to posts later this week and next week celebrating all kinds of things but most importantly, celebrating cycling rather than being a bit down about it all. It's just because I miss all my favourite riders and wish I was standing on a roadside somewhere in France yelling ALLEZ!! as a technicolour peloton blurs past me in a rush of energy and passion. Rather than sitting here, wrapped in a blanket, with slightly numb fingers and toes. And I think we can all relate to that, right?
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