Bradley Wiggins: My Time by Bradley Wiggins Read Free Book Online Page A

that winter, but I’d refused to go because Cath was pregnant with Isabella. Simon was fairly annoyed at me, and told the guys when they arrived Down Under that I would never race with them again, something that I had no option but to accept. At the start of 2007, Dave told me he was letting Simon go, and said, ‘Shane’s going to take over, and I’m going to bring this guy Matt Parker in, he’s got some good ideas; he’s going to be the sports scientist.’
    Shane’s first words were, ‘You’ve got to start getting some enjoyment back into this programme.’ He asked me to lead the group. And he said, ‘We need to start loving our athletes a bit more.’
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘What do you need?’
    He bought me a phone and a SIM card, and said, ‘See this? This is the backbone. If you ever need anything just ring me and you’re not paying for this out of your pocket.’ Three months before I had thought I was out of the squad after I’d refused to go to Australia; suddenly I was being made to feel like a million dollars.
    It can be infuriating being trained by Shane, because everything in his life is so hectic. He’s got a lot going on and he really struggles when he feels as if he’s not in control. He will ring me at times: ‘What you doing?’
    And I’ll say: ‘I’m having a day off.’
    ‘What the fuck you having a day off for? You should be out on your bike.’
    But he hasn’t seen that I’ve been training for the last five days. When he’s not in control and he comes in and just sees what’s in front of his eyes, he can find it tough. It’s just the way he is and the way he operates. He’s constantly thinking about his athletes, often to the detriment of himself and his own family. There are times when you think, ‘For Pete’s sake, Shane, go and see your own family, don’t worry about us for once.’ His approach can seem extreme. For instance, he apologised to me at the start of the Dauphiné in 2012; he was really upset because he felt he had let me down. He had wanted to be at the race with me, but he’d had to go on holiday with his family to Center Parcs after being away at the World Track Championships in Australia. At times he expects you to show the same commitment as him. I’ll say, ‘I need to spend some time at home’, and he will say, ‘I haven’t seen my own family for three years.’ It can be infuriating. All you can say is, ‘No, Shane, we’re all different.’
    Shane is incredibly observant as well. He’s always watching and thinking. He looks at little details, like the way I am pedalling, and he’ll say to me, ‘You didn’t look comfortable on that climb’, or ‘You were pushing too big a gear.’ He is great at knowing when to make an athlete stop and rest. He’s always saying, ‘You need to recruit now.’ By which he means letting the work soak in. His argument is: you need to do all this training but you also need to take the time off to let your body recover and adapt. Not a lot of athletes do this, but you need to recruit all the effort and repair all the muscle damage for the training to have any effect. If you don’t rest, you don’t recruit. For example, before winning the Dauphiné in 2012 I had two days off. I wasn’t sure about taking two days without riding the bike but he was determined I spend some time with my family. That’s what he’s like. As a coach he is incredibly good at the human side of it. He knows how it feels because he’s been there; he knows what six hours in the saddle feels like and he knows the mental effort it takes to ride for that length of time two days after a race.
    Since the end of 2010 the way Tim and Shane have been working together is that Tim will write the training programmes and then Shane will adapt them to fit me and the world I live in. He’ll simply change the details, based on his experience of bike racing and his knowledge of me. It may seem small, but it makes a massive difference to the