Newsletter 1 - Thanks for joining this ridiculous venture.
Welcome to my newsletter!
On the Winter Solstice, over dinner, my friend Sonia got everyone to write down 10 goals for 2025. The idea was then to fold them up as individual pieces of paper, put them in a jar and then every day until New Year pull one out without looking at it and burn it. The goal that was left on Hogmanay was the goal that the “universe was telling you to put your focus on.”
Normally I am all over goals and self-improvement, but autumn was a wild ride of emotional lows that culminated in vomiting all over the ancient splendour of Petra - so I had given goals for 2025 no real thought. I threw some ideas down and was quite pleased with the mix that came out (e.g. more multi day bike rides, learn to play bridge, call my mum more often, turn 40 with grace and enthusiasm). Having set myself 10 extremely SMART goals around my track cycling hobby in 2024 and then got bored of most of them within months, I decided to set only one this year. A sub-13 second Flying 200 effort. Specific, Measurable, Relevant, Time-Bound (opportunities to do a Flying 200 will end by September) - Achievable TBC but I’ve not gone crazy and aimed for a WHOLE SECOND off my time, because that would be a big one!
Guess which goal was left on the last day of 2024? Thanks universe.
There is part of me that is annoyed that that’s the (self-imposed) goal that was left from my burning spree - some of the other goals had some currently vague but exciting creative opportunities in there. Whilst a better Flying200 time would represent that I’ve got faster and stronger, and generally there’s some more exciting outcomes in your racing when you’re faster and stronger, I know what’s involved in trying to shave time off a Flying 200 and it’s not earth shatteringly thrilling. No shiny New Thing buzz, no glossy kit upgrade to get there. I’ve done the marginal gains work on the carbon bike frame and kit already (within budget), so achieving all this is going to be boring training and effort and HARD WORK.
For the uninitiated a flying 200 is an individual time trial over 200 metres in a velodrome, with about 400 metres to get up to speed. It is used to seed riders for short distance (sprint) track races. They do it at the Olympics in the morning, when the TV cameras aren’t there. Lea Sophie Friedrich (born when I was 15) set a new female record of 10.029 seconds at Paris 2024, where Harrie Lavreysen set the male record of 9.088 seconds (the Paris velodrome is an extra metre wide which gives sprinters more speed so there was a bumper crop of new records set). It’s not an exciting event to watch.
My best time is 13.36seconds, at an outdoor velodrome where there is always a headwind somewhere and the timing is done by hands pressing stopwatches, not by timing chips. I’m not aiming to fix either of those two variables to achieve my goal either because this is a ridiculous goal and going to Lee Valley is awkward and expensive. But if I can scrub 0.37 seconds off that time, I can tick a box on my 2025 goals list.
To those who don’t do track cycling, 0.4 seconds sounds like nothing. The blink of an eye. The time it takes someone to press the stopwatch when they see you cross the line. But those 4.272 seconds that separate my effort from Harrie Levreysen’s are unbridgeable and closing that gap by 0.4 even seconds is going to be a mission, even as he’s currently putting hours into professional training with a team of top coaches to maintain that record. One day someone will go faster, but since humans don’t travel at the speed of light there must be a ceiling on that record.
Honestly, maybe I’ve already hit my ceiling on how quickly I can travel that distance. I tested my peak power at the end of 2024, and it’s only improved by 16watts over 1.5 years (although admittedly Boxing Day in the off season isn’t the best time to measure that). But it places some doubt in my mind about whether, in my fortieth year, there are any more gains left to make. This week at the gym trying to group source a fix of my form on the T-bar row the PT casually said about me “she’ll need a smaller weight because she’s smaller.” When you inhabit a body you sometimes forget that it has limitations compared to the physiological make up of others. I’m not “naturally athletic” - I was always this kid with short legs who tried hard and still came close to last in PE. But sometimes training and hard work does have results, and I am curious enough to give this a whirl.
Making this goal my focus for the year pains me though. I have things I really want to do in 2025 (I started going to MTB skills a few weeks ago and that’s created a few new ideas for goals too), turning 40 is a milestone, and geeking out on a 0.4 second gain in a TT doesn’t feel like the right vibe somehow. Spending months overthinking a 13 second seeding event when Trump just entered the White House and a The Rest is Money podcast labelled this the ‘most important year ever’? Telling people I want to do a silly Thing, in the full knowledge from the last two seasons that the season could descend into me existing in survival mode because Easter weekend always seems to be the harbinger of excessive personal crises? A lot can happen in 9 months and I’m not doing anything here to advance world peace - sorry!
Anyway, universe, I’ve decided the way I’ll ‘focus’ on this goal is by joining the zeitgeist and dipping my toe into the waters of narcissistic newsletter writing. Then if this goal is impossible at least I overcome my extreme post-PhD writer’s block. I’m not sure what I will write about but hopefully not exclusively a run down of my training sessions or complaints about inevitable failures. Ideas welcome. What have you always wanted to know about this extremely niche event? Or do you want to know what it’s like to learn Bridge - because that also intrigues me!