The ups and downs of life as a professional cyclist

Former Mid-Devon CC starlet and Torquay Boys Grammar School student Wood, 23, has just returned home at the end of a demanding first top-flight campaign with French team Cofidis.
It started in mid-January with one WorldTour race, Australia’s Tour Down Under, and finished with another, Italy’s Tour of Lombardy, ten days ago.
Wood has posted some impressive performances – he finished only a couple of minutes behind the winners in the marathon Milan-San Remo and Strade Bianche one-day classics. But he’s also had to recover from some nasty crashes, including one in the Tour of Poland at the end
of July.
“There’s some things that went well and some things that went not so well, and I’ve learned a lot this year,” said Wood. “It has been quite a big learning curve.”
Wood, who is in the middle of a two-year contract with Cofidis, went on: “You have to get used to the extra length and duration of the races. You have to be fearless riding in the bunch, where everybody can move up when they have to. You have to learn to waste energy to get into a position where you can save it. In amateur races, I could ‘float’ to the front – not this year, racing against 150 guys who can all do that.”
After a gutsy ride (10th) in the UK National Road Race Championships in north Yorkshire in June, Wood did three weeks of altitude training in the French Alps to prepare him for a busy last two months of the season in Europe and North America.
“Finishing the Tour of Poland wasn’t a good idea – it was a bad crash and I couldn’t even train for two weeks after it,” he recalled.“I haven’t gone as well as I’d hoped since then, although the five races in Italy recently were super-hard. This last part of the year, I’ve struggled physically, and we’re working on how to tackle that, but also a bit mentally as well. I think it’s important not to bottle that sort of stuff up, which can often happen in professional sport - Cofidis have been good about that.
“My coach there and my DS (directeur sportive) have talked things over with me, and several of the other riders understand, because they’ve been through it as well. It’s great to be home, which I have missed, and I’m looking forward to a good break. I’ll go out for a few rides with friends and the Mid-Devon, but my coach then wants me to have at least two weeks off the bike, before getting into winter training. By then I’ll know what my race programme is for the first half of next season, which will start again in January.”