When I say on paper, I mean through the lens of visibly notable success. Let me elaborate: my team folded, leaving me raceless and without a wage for the better part of six months. I had some of the worst races of my life. I got burnt out. I accordingly missed selections for some of the most important races of my year. I gained weight, lost weight, and struggled my way through university. I pretty much earned no money. I also got hit by a truck.

So, with my absence duly noted from the races that would have been the biggest of my season, and my ProCyclingStats riddled with DNF, DNF, DNF, you can imagine I’ve been met with quite a lot of pity lately. Moneyless. Resultless. More focused and working harder than ever, but with less to show. Somewhere between blow after blow, that pity starts to rub off on you.

As much as I always preach that no one is really looking, the truth is that in elite sport, they often are. Poking, prodding, comparing numbers from this year to last year, this race to that one, the athlete you are now to the athlete you were then. Everywhere I go in Australia, I’m reminded of when I was supposedly at my best. The irony is that I’m pushing better numbers now. That is, however, part of the reality of being a professional athlete, and one I’m fine to accept. Especially as someone who shares parts of my life online, while still being pretty selective about what actually makes it there, realising that people will form their own opinions, give their input, and create their own version of your story from the tiny tip of the iceberg visible through a few posts or results is a necessary truth.

I’ve felt, for lack of a better metaphor, like a sponge: absorbing and absorbing until I’m saturated and heavy and incapable of taking on anything more. When enough individual things go badly, it becomes very easy to mistake them for evidence that absolutely everything leading up to it, by default, must have been bad too.

I woke up on a hospital floor sometime in May, blood streaming from my head, with stressed patients and nurses yelling and looking down at me. In a final accumulation of stress, I had fainted and smacked my head on a marble countertop, knocking myself out cold. Funnily enough, lying there on the floor, I had no idea. I was dreaming sweetly that I went home, did my training, ate breakfast and had a splendid day. The reality was that I needed eight stitches and have been left with a permanent reminder in the form of a huge scar on my forehead. Perhaps this moment perfectly encompassed how I was feeling: pushing my body and myself so hard I was collapsing to the point of a heavy blow, but here I am on the floor, kind of okay, just taking it.

The audit

When things go bad, the most painful but effective thing you can do is a truthful, ruthless, full self-audit. The natural point for mine was my birthday in July: one year to the next.

In doing so, I realised something strange. I was actually pretty impressed with the decisions I made, results aside. I made the best decisions I could with the information I had at the time.

When I got hit by a truck, I tried to rebuild for the World Championships and instead burnt myself out and performed awfully. But would I change that? Probably not. I had a goal of making Worlds and I gave everything I had to it. It didn’t work out the way I wanted, but I didn’t give up on it before I had to.

Later, I listened to my body and my coaches and took proper time off to recover, knowing I would arrive at the early races of the season with less fitness. Would I have made the same decision if I knew it would eventually contribute to me missing selection for some of the best races? I’m not sure. But again, I made the best decision I could with the information I had available.

I arrived in Europe with amazing form and have since done a lot of races that don’t particularly suit me, but have challenged me and made me a better cyclist. Would I trade that just to make the results look better on paper? Again, I don’t know.

Because behind the DNFs and non-selections, I’ve probably done some of the most consistent training of my life. I’ve hit personal-best powers. I chased track races all over the world and got myself to number five in the UCI world ranking for track. Everything within my control, I’ve done about as well as I knew how.

as I wrote here,

Well, logically speaking, I have now tested that theory.

I tried 100%. And I still failed.

Of course that comes with dsappointment. But there has been no room for regret. There is something quite peaceful about knowing there wasn’t some secret extra 10% sitting in my pocket that could have changed everything. I did what I could. I made the decisions I thought were right. Sometimes the outcome still wasn’t what I wanted.

And that was the other interesting finding in doing a proper audit.

In changing what did I fail to achieve? to what actually happened this year?, things began to shift. By looking at not only the things that could be measured from the outside, I could notice everything that had happened beyond them: what I had done for other people, what I had built for myself, the ways I had grown that would never appear on a results sheet or be immediately valued by the people immediately around me.

For someone who has built a large part of their identity around overachievement, this is not as easy as it sounds. But I’d recommend the exercise to anyone. Yes, it is an exercise in gratitude, but also in expanding your definition of evidence. Noticing not only what you have been trained to count but also the things you have subconciously been trained not to.

Things I guess I should call wins.

1. I graduated with two degrees.

   Eight years later. A degree in law, and another in marine biology. Ironically, I didn’t go to my graduation because I thought it was the better thing to do to race nationals instead. As a result, I kind of never celebrated it all. But perhaps I should have. Now, the average study load for a full-time student in Australia is eight subjects per year. I took 12. They were also all final-year subjects, so there were no ‘bludge’ subjects, and I completed most of them from Europe. That meant missing almost all of the actual teaching and having to learn everything myself instead, which is vastly inefficient. It also meant I also ended up doing group assignments largely alone. Double that and pass it to the next. No, but in all seriousness, it was a sprint that required many tears and many late nights, but I am relieved to have it done.

   

   because i didn’t go to my graduation, i apologise that the only photo evidence is this supplied by my 21 year old sister

2. I created spaces I wish existed.

   This included free event rides, beginner rides and rides specifically for women. From them came some of the most inspiring stories and connections I’ve experienced all year. I remember looking around at all the women who showed up to my beginner women’s ride and thinking, wow, is this even real? People who were nervous to clip in, ride in a group or simply take up space on a bike were suddenly doing it together.

   It reminded me how easy it is, in high-level sport, to become disconnected from the thing that fuels all of it in the first place. I also don’t think many people appreciate how difficult, or how much organisation, goes into creating spaces like these. A lot of people didn’t really understand it either: why are you doing this if you’re not gaining anything financially, or otherwise, from it?

   But that was never really the point. The motivation came from wanting to create something I wish had existed when I first started. If I can give that to someone else, it’s worth it.

   

3. I taught myself Spanish.

   This was hard to put on the list because I still feel like I don’t speak Spanish. But last year, my goal was to get to a level where I could make friends who don’t speak English. I haven’t gone to a single class, nor did I learn it in school. I learnt from pretty much zero. I embarrassed myself a lot, and yeah — as a result, now, some of my most valued relationships are in a different language. I spend almost all day speaking it. As someone who never fathomed learning a language, let alone believed it was possible in your late 20s, this has changed my life. It has given me confidence that I can learn things on my own accord, as long as I am willing to tolerate some level of embarrassment.

4. I organised my first ride for an environmental concern I care deeply about.

   When the algae bloom hit, I collaborated with FrontRunners to bring awareness to the issue and bring together people who felt the same. Nearly a hundred people came, and I realised how powerful sport and movement can be as a way of gathering people around something they care about beyond themselves.

   It was the first time I had used this little platform I have built through cycling for something environmental, and something I care about deeply outside of sport. It also led to having my writing on climate change published in The Guardian, which still feels slightly surreal.

5. I dove with Manta Rays.

1. Since as long as I can remember my bucket list resembles less of a list and more a collection of animals I want to swim with. This year, I finally took the time for myself and went diving in Nusa Penida, where I was rewarded with more than 12 manta rays soaring above me. Yes, I cried.

   6. I climbed the UCI Track Ranking to world number five.

   At my highest point, I was sitting fifth in the world in women’s endurance track. Seeing that ranking reminded me of the work behind it, and of the consistent accumulation of races it took to get there. I had been near the top all year. I cast my net wide, raced as much as I possibly could, and kept showing up.

   

   7. We launched a creative project / business.

   PainSports is still small, but the process of iterating the concept, creating in collaboration, developing it and slowly giving it shape has been wonderful. Although our progress has appeared slow, it is for good reason. We are developing the narrative with intention and it seems to be shifting constantly. I am super excited for everyone to see it, and if you are curious, you can find our instagram page here.

   8. I started that podcast.

   This was perhaps the best lesson in being able to start things without needing a grand announcement. I had always wanted a podcast, so I just started one. I record it in my bedroom. It is a little shit, but it is something.

   9. I learnt heaps of random soft skills.

   Screenprinting, website design, podcast production, how to register a business. I tried ceramics and put myself into dance classes and scuba dived. Letting myself learn things outside of formal education, on my own accord, and to simply indulge my curiosities has felt liberating — almost like a rebellion against needing to be good at everything all the time, and also a rebellion against only learning things to improve your career or gain financially.

   10. I started writing on substack (and it changed my life).

   I realised people actually do want to consume long-form, nuanced writing, and that a lot of people are craving depth, realness and the chance to learn something slowly. It changed my perspective on what people want, what they notice, and how much space there still is for slower things.

   It also shifted the way I think about writing and creating. I still write for myself, but I value creativity far more now. It has given me practice, discipline and a reason to keep taking my own ideas seriously.

   

   The fact that more than 20 people have gone as far as paying for a subscription still makes me want to cry a little. Just for my writing? Because you value the time I put into it and think what I have to say is worth paying for? That is still slightly unbelievable to me.

   So, thank you to everyone who reads, opens, shares, replies or hits subscribe, and especially to those of you who pay for it. It has become this very gentle reminder that what I am making has value, and that I should keep working at it.

11. I did my longest ever ride, 300km, and later my highest elevation in one ride, 3,700m.

    Both came with their challenges, laughs and stories that will last a lifetime. I also hit personal-best powers this year from five minutes all the way to two hours. It’s a good reminder that physically, things are still tracking up, even when adjusting to new styles of racing.

12. I spent more time with family and prioritised my relationships.

If anything, this year I have prioritised my relationships, and time with family and friends, more than ever. It meant trips to Darwin to see my grandparents, spending the off-season with my sister, and actually making space for the people I love. The people who have entered my life over the last year have felt more aligned than ever, both in Australia and overseas. I feel a little like I spent the last few years planting seeds, and this year I finally got to watch some of them flourish. To be honestly proud of the people around me but also be willing to give the time to be there, to listen, to not rush, to sit around the table and linger a little longer. Perhaps more than anything else on this list, that has been the biggest shift in my energy to date.

So, there you have it.

I’m sure many more will come to me in the following days, which is the beauty of it. The super small moments or decisions have perhaps been the most life altering.

Underlying a lot of it, I think, have been the same few shifts: creating things and spaces I wish existed, turning parts of my life into art, working hard at what matters to me, and trying to put good things into the world without always asking what I’ll get back.

I can’t say that will always win you the game of life. I am certainly not richer, nor more conventionally successful.

But I feel more at peace, and richer in other ways. I can sleep pretty well knowing I’m trying my very best to do it right, and that I’m giving it 100%.

Another quote from my recent post:

I don’t know what the next 12 months will bring. But I guess I am doing okay, thanks.

Thank you for reading. My name is Maeve Plouffe, and I’m a dual olympian, double degree holder and occasional writer blending sports with philosophy and other musings.

If my work has resonated or given you any value, and you’d like to help me keep making more of it, you can become a paid subscriber, buy me a coffee, come to an event, follow along on social media, or recommend my work to a friend. Every bit of support genuinely helps more than you know.

but there is a season to create and one to absorb. creative output can only follow a steady flow of input. this july i am a sponge: listening, watching, absorbing until every pore is filled and heavy. people enter my life and linger a little, rearranging seashells on my windowsill. others arrive singing in a language i’m still unsure whether I fully comprehend. he smiles as he folds the tea towel on the kitchen bench into a neat rectangle and places it where i would have folded it into a square.

noticing, noticing.

my friends tell me i’ve lost a lot of weight. my reflection in shop windows confirms it. i don’t own a mirror, nor do i seem particularly interested in

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I’m reminded that last year, I too woke up on my birthday in Barcelona. One, two, that’s three years now? More by fate than design. I am beginning to enjoy the ritual of being in the same place on my birthday. When everything else in my life is changing, it gives me one fixed point against which I can juxtapose it all.

That evening, I wrote in the leather journal I had bought two years earlier in that same place. It later became one of my first Substack essays: 26 Lessons from 26 Years, published here.

Naturally, I dabbled with the idea of doing the same thing again. A new year, a new list. But when I reread those lessons, I didn’t see an obvious need to replace them. I have learnt plenty in the past twelve months, but very little has arrived as an entirely novel revelation. It has been less about discovering completely new truths and more about testing, refining and deepening what I already suspected.

The science-university-educated part of me can’t help but draw a parallel between this and the standard scientific method of hypothesise, test, observe, refine. These, lessons, I suppose, are my hypotheses — first formed and then tested against reality in the field.

This year, with a little more wisdom, a little more age, and a far better sense of self, taste and what I really want from my life, I came back with something slightly different. Not another set of lessons, but 27 conclusions. Or, at least, 27 things I now feel fairly certain I know to be true.

In a world where I so often don’t know, where nearly everything can feel provisional, shifting or open to revision, I have recently felt something unfamiliar: certainty. Not certainty about what will happen, but certainty about what matters to me. A sense of being anchored. These are my values. These are the ideas I return to. When everything else changes, they stay constant.

Perhaps having truths to return to is what keeps you anchored when the storms blow.

So, behold: my list of 27 things I am pretty sure I know to be true.

I also uploaded these as a podcast with further explication and personal stories, learnings and parallels. If it fascinates you or prompts you to create your own list, have a listen.

27 THINGS I KNOW TO BE TRUE

1. The people I connect best with have the same value: curiosity.
This is independent of outward-facing factors or circumstances, and I find it to be true even amongst those with vastly different backgrounds, cultures, experiences, ages or points of view. Furthermore, I’ve found it to hold true for friendships, co-workers and romantic relationships alike. If curiosity is a trait we share, I will likely be able to build something with them. I believe this is because curious people, to me, will always be evolving and perceptive. They have the ability to not only question and understand other points of view, but also enjoy experiencing them. For this reason, I find they’re more compatible long term: they absorb new information, redefine challenges rather than fight over them, and exude a far stronger drive and contagious zest for life.

2. Invest in tomorrow.
In terms of finances, yes, buy stocks and enjoy the freedom later. But also invest in learning, skills, relationships and time. Compounding truly exists for these things too, and although the fruits of your labour might not be initially apparent, they will one day open doors to lives you could never have imagined possible. With that, the best day to invest was yesterday, simply because we always underestimate the value of compounding in favour of waiting for the perfect moment.

3. Following the theme of compounding, not every project needs to be perfect before you put it into the world.
Often there is actually some power in putting imperfect things out because it gives you an opportunity to iterate, seek feedback, refine and improve. Waiting until it is perfect will result in never putting it out. I’m slowly coming to this realisation with my writing and art, although I’ve unknowingly practised it my whole sporting career. I owe much of my improvement to simply showing up and racing, even when not perfectly prepared.

4. No one is really looking.
Everyone is focused on themselves. You are not the main character. Fear of judgement is therefore founded on nothing.

5. Document it.
In whatever form feels true to the moment. Time warps our perceptions of things, and a journal has become both an ongoing source of reflection and an anchor point for me. Furthermore, a life worth living is worth recording, no matter how mundane it might feel in the moment.

6. Carry a pen and perhaps some paper (or a napkin will do) for exactly this.

7. Build a life you never crave a vacation from.
I recently realised that I had finally reached this, and I see it as a far better goal to strive for compared to a number in the bank, how you look, or any other external measure of success.

8. Movement is one of the best ways to process emotion.
For me, it is also one of the best ways to learn. I absorb more information walking with a podcast than I do sitting behind a computer screen. Learning this has helped me stop feeling frustrated when perhaps I don’t learn quite as well as others in a lecture theatre and instead discover works best for me.

9. If you want to fear the world, watch the news. If you want to fall in love with the world, travel it.

10. The importance of seeking out people outside of your usual sphere.
Doing this has given me some of my most beautiful and cherished memories and experiences, and has opened my eyes to the world. Particularly in a world of increasingly personalised algorithms, it’s easier than ever to stay in your own echo chamber. Talk to the taxi driver, hang out with people on the street, say yes to locals, learn the language. It’s also a chance to live and try on different lives, lives you didn’t know were possible until you’d seen them.

11. Learn the language.
(It really is worth it.)

12. The best first date idea is something you already wanted to do.
Firstly, because you’ll be happier and more relaxed doing something you actually love. And also because if the date is terrible, at least your Tuesday wasn’t.

13. Every object you own ultimately owns you.
Buying and consuming more intentionally, donating or repurposing what no longer serves you, and regularly auditing what you actually need releases a surprising amount of mental weight.

14. I like people with niche passions, hobbies or skills, especially when they combine them unapologetically.
People with one foot in science and another in art. People who get excited explaining a niche interest. It exudes confidence, originality and self-assuredness.

15. There is a huge difference between your first impression of someone and actually knowing them.
I’ve learnt that, as humans, we are psychologically predisposed to categorise and generalise with the information we have. For this reason, it is far more convenient for the brain to make shortcuts: someone successful must have a good work ethic; attractive means kind; sporty means disciplined; smart means organised. But these shortcuts are rarely reliable. It takes discipline to resist early assumptions long enough to actually learn who someone is.

16. The big light does not need to go on. IN ANY CIRCUMSTANCES.

17. Staying in one place and learning it intimately often beats travelling to 12 cities in seven days.
As I get older I see more and more clearly the value in a trip where I can stay in one spot, learn the streets, befriend the barista, absorb every detail. I’ve discovered that similarly, my most authentic travels have been those anchored by a goal, hobby or purpose because it means that you meet people more organically and collect more aligned experiences.

18. Start alone and unannounced in your room on a Tuesday.
Starting the project, publication, podcast or brand doesn’t always require some crazy announcement or external validation. Of course, most people won’t do this. But I’ve found that starting many of my recent projects quietly meant I could focus on what was actually important and authentic, rather than trying to impress the masses. Furthermore, the small audience they gradually reach is far more likely to be truly aligned.

19. Have a system for capturing your creative thoughts.
This is so undervalued and rarely taught. Having a system to capture information and inspiration, whether your own or external, and then organise or curate it has saved me from endless mental clutter, helped me cross-pollinate ideas and prevented me from forgetting them.

20. The difference between voluntary and externally imposed discomfort can be the difference between perceiving something as ‘suffering’ or ‘challenging’.
The key here is agency. When we choose our pain, or at least perceive that we are choosing it, we are more inclined to see the value in it and therefore endure it, persevere or even enjoy it. For this reason, it can be valuable to mentally ‘reframe’ external pressure as personal choice. This can improve resilience and enjoyment.

21. The value in optimising the level of difficulty.
This is one I only learnt recently, as someone who generally throws myself in the deep end and burns out trying not to sink. But I have discovered that when learning or improving a skill, there is certainly an ideal ratio between too easy, comfortably challenging and overly difficult.

For example, an ideal structure could be seeking out the following:

• 60% comfortably challenging, where you can practise your skills but there is still some urgency;

• 15% ‘too easy’, which sounds counterintuitive but lets you feel proficient, build confidence and practise winning;

• and 25% ‘too hard’, where you are forced to expand, grow and adapt.

  Noticing and optimising the right ratios is key to maintaining motivation alongside growth, accomplishment and hunger.

22. Consistency always outperforms perfectionism in the long term.
It goes back to the themes of compounding and iteration. That said, taking advantage of bursts of energy or motivation to get a head start, or to focus deeply for a short period, can be incredibly effective and doesn’t necessarily undermine consistency. For example, I prefer to write deeply for four hours twice a week compared to one hour every day. As long as that intensity remains consistent, it’s fine.

23. Surround yourself with people and places where you feel like your best self.
Reframe the question from: Do I like them? Do they like me? To: Am I the best version of myself with these people? In this city? I’ve found this manner of reframing very useful when choosing where to live or with whom to spend your time.

24. My love language is to give people my time.
But everyone expresses love differently. Some like me through time, others through words, affection, gifts or service. Learning how the people around you express it helps you notice it.

25. Solo travel.
As much as you can, wherever you can. Learning to enjoy your own company is key because at the end of the day, everywhere you go, you bring yourself. Travelling solo heightens your capacity for curiosity and your ability to notice beauty in the mundane, or see things you’d otherwise miss. You’ll increase your chances of interactions and connections with new people.

Furthermore, being ‘bored’, or simply being alone in your own mind, is a life skill worth learning. It strengthens your capacity to think profoundly and creatively. Learning to love your own company, even in challenging or traditionally social situations.

26. Combining unconventional skills creates the highest value, as does applying skills to novel contexts.
What I mean here is that if you have many skills, one of the best ways to create value or push boundaries is to apply them somewhere they don’t usually exist, or combine them in new ways. A proficient writer might be completely undervalued at a newspaper but could change lives communicating science. Some of the greatest scientific breakthroughs, humanitarian solutions and works of art have come from cross-pollinating ideas from seemingly unrelated fields. Original thought is rarely entirely original; as I wrote here. more often, it is the ability to combine unique ideas or apply them in novel contexts.

27. The presence of beauty is not the absence of your own.
Or, more broadly: intelligence, success, charisma, love, skills. Basically, recognising that these things can exist in abundance and therefore coexist. Many people, by default, feel insecure or uncomfortable in the presence of someone else’s success or beauty. This stems from an underlying assumption that such characteristics are limited, and therefore that someone else having more leaves less for you. But logically speaking, it’s not true. These things are not finite resources.

Interpreting other people’s strengths as evidence of your own deficiencies converts admiration into self-judgement. Real confidence is not necessarily believing your light shines brightest in the room. That you are the most beautiful, nor the most talented. But it is instead choosing to surround yourself with brilliant people, to stand in the presence of their light without feeling the need to dim theirs or doubt yours.

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Thank you for reading. My name is Maeve Plouffe, and I’m a dual olympian, double degree holder and occasional writer blending sports with philosophy and other musings on a weekly basis.

If my work has given you value, and you’d like to help me keep making more of it, you can become a paid subscriber, buy me a coffee, come to an event, follow along on social media, or recommend my work to a friend. Every bit of support genuinely helps more than you know.

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I suppose I am anti-overconsumption in my values, and hate the eternal loop of buy buy buy. I’ll wear things until they’re worn out and then I’ll probably mend it. I I thrift. And when I get stressed, I have this really bad habit of decluttering. And by that I mean parting with everything I own.

My problem is that cycling is a terrible sport in which to be a minimalist.

Some sports allow you to strip things back to their essence. Running, for example, at it’s core, is beautifully unneedy. I am deeply envious of runners for this.

Things I needed last time I went for a run:

• shoes

• maybe a watch?

And as pointed out eloquently here, you don’t always need a fit to go run. You can probably just get away with an old shirt and whatever comfy shorts and maybe a hat too.

On the contrary, things I need to go for a ride:

• helmet

• glasses

• puncture repair kit (full of random fiddly things)

• bike computer

• bibs

• jersey

• cold weather gear if riding in temperatures

• lights

• layers if it’s cold

• nutrition and hydration if it’s long

• and then all the components and accessories and random bits that somehow become essential too

and the list goes on.

• bike (with all the other things, I nearly forgot).

As the world of elite sport becomes more commercialised, it physically pains me to see that people have been convinced they need to spend in order to win, or even, just participate. We’ve seen it already with the commercialisation of running, and undoubtably as cycling has somehow recently become cool, the barriers, and repeated costs to entry, are supposedly only going to keep increasing.

The conflict that plagues me is that malfunctioning equipment on the bike ruins your experience. The number of times in the past I’ve used cheap lights only to find them not charging overnight. Or carried a flimsy rain jacket only to be shivering to my core. A bib that fits poorly by hour three? Saddle sores apparent and tomorrow’s ride ruined. Not to mention you need to consider the tyres, tubes, chain lube, shoes, glasses and whatever else could go wrong.

Alas, equipment is fundamentally integral to what we do. It is incompatible with cycling to be a minimalist. Herein lies my problem.

So, I took up a new philosophy: buy nice and don’t buy twice.

As someone who has spent years and years riding hours and hours and riding hundreds of kilometers a week, I figured it was time to save everyone their money, time, and comfort in the long term and recommend what I actually use. Not because I think everyone needs more stuff, but rather because if you are actually going to buy something anyway, I would rather point you towards the version that will actually do its job, last well, and make your riding better.

As a bonus, I do care a lot about the ethos and people behind the company. So most of what I’ll share on here is also backed by good people with whom I’ve met personally.

I also recently started using Faves, which I gravitated towards because I liked the athlete centrality of it and cleanliness of having all the products I genuinely recommend in one place, instead of things disappearing into stories or being buried in old posts. This is in no way sponsored by them, but it’s a cool new platform to check out. You can find my storefront here.

So, without further ado: let’s get into it.

Helmet

As of this year, I’ve been converted to Smith and never want to go back: they’re amazing on the road, commuting, racing, track, or even just city cruising. In the style of minimalism, if I had to pick one fit-for-purpose, my go-to is the aero helmet. It looks slick, is versatile with anything, and fits my key needs: which in short are going fast in races and looking good in training.

If I were commuting more, riding in the dark, or wanted something less race-y and more stylish, this one would be the go. It still matches with all your black gear, but the reflectors light up at night.

Kit

It’s no lie, I love my Attaquer gear. When I first started working with them, I was overwhelmed by their generosity and also by the quality. And yes, with countless teams I have ridden in a lot of kit before.

It’s genuinely flattering, which, yes, matters, because a bad body dysmorphia day is only exacerbated by tight lycra. Plus, it’s unique and individual enough that you’ll get showered in compliments and everyone will perceive you as cool and niche. Riding around in it in Barcelona especially means condemning yourself to a life of questions and compliments from all.

I managed to get a 20% code for my friends, which I am disproportionately proud of. Unlike some brands that hand out codes to every man and his dog, Attaquer does not really do that, and I pushed for one because I felt like my little community deserved it.

(Link to my discount).

Bibs

My go-tos are in any set in the race kit line, such as these, because they’re fitted enough and very very flattering. Although, for a long day or to mix with commuting or gravel, I’d recommend the Intra, which have additional pockets on the side. I’m putting them through the wringer for this article: I recently tried their cargo bibs on my 300 km ride and they held up. Plus, not needing to dislocate a shoulder to reach into my back pocket is genuinely luxurious.

Jersey

Again, I usually go for the race fit and size up.

I have had multiple compliments on the brown jersey from girls in cafés who do not even ride, which I think is one of the highest possible compliments a cycling jersey can receive.

My favourite of the unique styles is the Orb Knit. I am always answering questions and swatting off people from touching it out of curiosity when I’m wearing it. The reason is that it is made from a stretchy fabric that moulds to you in a way that you’ll only understand when you put one on. It is on the warmer side, so I’d recommend it as a cooler spring/autumn staple.

Nutrition and Hydration

Nutrition is a massive waste point so I’m not a huge fan of riding on heaps of expensive carb mix, gels, and bars unless it’s for racing. But I am a salty gal, and I will cramp like crazy if I don’t hydrate properly. Sodii is a local Adelaide brand, and while I’m not sponsored by them, they’re by far my favourite hydration salts that I have tried. They’re not at all crazy sweet, and scratch the salt craving, and I love that they come in individual sachets because it means that when I’m travelling, I can throw a few in my bag for the plane without getting pulled over at customs for carrying, well, a tub of white powder.

As for sugar, I’m more known to be carrying haribo or a few slices of bocadillos de guayaba which are wrapped in leaves not plastic and do just the job.

If you do want to take gels, however, I will shout out a few people doing cool things that I’ve come across lately. Our team has been using Torque, and their stuff tastes great and sits well in the stomach while racing. On Saturday, I also chatted to a chef in Barcelona who started this brand Pico Fuel. The passionfruit flavour, which contains pulp and seeds and all, genuinely transported me back to nostalgic Australian Christmases spent eating pavlova.

I also like the idea that the founders of OpenFuel presented here for using recyclable materials for gel packaging. I’ll report back!

Bike computer

Bike computers are like phones: you pick a brand and stick with it. But I recently converted to Garmin and I feel like I have spent years missing out. The features were almost overwhelmingly extreme, but having them all, in hindsight, has now slimmed down the need for a lot of other products.

The ability to sync my workouts from TrainingPeaks straight onto it means that I don’t really have the excuse to do my intervals poorly, and having the countdown has actually improved the quality of my training. Similarly, I didn’t think I needed a touchscreen, but it is honestly a quiet luxury. My friend also showed me that I can lock it when I ride in the rain or put it in my sports bra for the track. I've linked the exact model I use here.

Glasses

I am also going to go with Smith for these ones. When I first took these rose glasses out of the box, my whole family and I audibly gasped. They’re a pair for life.

I like the ones with interchangeable lenses too. At the moment, I keep reaching for these for track. It means you can make do with one pair. Minimalist, effective.

Lights

Knog, Knog, Knog. It’s all I’ll say. Not only are the people who run the show there absolutely incredible in helping everyone from grassroots riders through to elite racers, but their stuff is elite. I use the Blinder on dark Barcelona roads because it’s socially acceptable, and basically required, to start group rides at 8pm there. Cars literally part ways for me on the misassumption that I am a motorbike.

I’m going to keep it there as to not overwhelm, even though, of course, the list keeps going. As I mentioned before, I have it all linked on my Faves and I’ll do a little job tidying it up tonight to make sure everything is tucked in nice categories. If you have any of your own recommendations, however, let me know in the comments because we’d all benefit.

Thanks as always for reading. If you’re new here and didn’t know, my name is Maeve and I’m a dual Olympian who usually writes essays combining philosphy, sport and literature — although, I do dabble in posts like these on occasion. So, if you’re looking for something more in-depth or essay like, I’d love for you to subscribe or take a read at some of my recent essays such as this one. On the alternative, if you’re after more recommendations like these I post quick-hits on SPORTYSEXYSMART and you can of course find me on instagram here.

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Now, as the friend who is often coming up with the “creative” ideas, and who thoroughly enjoys the art of for supposedly creating something significant from nothing (which, is not what it seems, and we will get into), I thought it would be compelling to curate my own list. I am in no way claiming any degree of originality intelligence. Rather, I am claiming lived practice, a list divulged from my own experiences. The difference is, however, that I wanted to think more deeply in the context of the exercises, habits, and conditions that allow me to actually exercise original thinking, not merely arrive at it accidentally. Furthermore, to synthesize some examples of thinkers of whom have arrived at original thought through similar routes. My hope is that those of us swamped by the thought processes of others could also begin to feel more creative and, through that, more free. Perhaps to further your own writing, your own curiosities, your work, or simply your own liberation in creativity. Not just in principle, but in actual, tangible practice.

No thought is original.

I should perhaps preface all of this by stating my truthful opinion, which is that there is no such thing as an entirely original thought. In some capacity, one way or another, everything is borrowed. Information is inherited, overheard, misremembered, absorbed and digested. We find inspiration everywhere. This very essay owes its existence to someone else’s idea.

However, there are those who simply regurgitate them, and people who are better at taking these ideas, processing them, applying their own experiences and opinions, and using that to layer meaning onto something that already exists. They stitch ideas together in a way that makes them feel new, or at least newly understood. This is the key. Originality stems not from fabricating something entirely new, but from applying existing ideas in unconventional or novel contexts.

I also wanted to address a comment on the original author’s post, which argued for caution around original thought, particularly when it risks diluting or dismissing pre-existing knowledge. Pre-existing knowledge matters. It is the culmination of decades, sometimes centuries, of research, expertise, experimentation, and collective human effort. Original thinking is not disagreeing for the sake of disagreeing, nor is it rejecting expertise in favour of contrarianism.

Rather, it is taking good, reputable information from various sources, filtering it carefully, and applying it into novel contexts. As famously quoted by Isaac Newton, "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”. Almost every good scientific paper is built on the work that came before it. It cites pre-existing research, responds to it, extends it, complicates it, or applies it somewhere novel.

Humanity owes its most significant scientific breakthroughs to this process of thinking. Darwin did not invent the ideas of inheritance, animal breeding, geology, population growth, or species variation. These ideas already existed. In fact, he explicitly references reading, "for amusement," the work of economist Thomas Robert Malthus on population growth, before applying the concept of populations outgrowing their resources to explain patterns observed in nature.1

Becoming comfortable with formulating an opinion.

The first step is becoming comfortable having an original thought. Humans are deeply social creatures, and decades of psychological research suggest that the need to belong is one of our most fundamental motivations.2 For the majority of human history, collective acceptance has correlated closely to survival, making conformity an understandable default and independent thinking a surprisingly uncomfortable act.

Today, this instinct has taken on an almost comically modern form. Even answering a basic question can bring about a strange fear of judgement, or the feeling that there is a “wrong” or “right” answer. How often do you check the comments on a YouTube video before having even watched it? Read the restaurant reviews before having dined there? We’re wired to scan for the for the the rating, the discourse, the consensus, the reaction or the accepted opinion before even letting ourselves decide how we feel.

The best way to overcome this is to practise forming an opinion in private. Journalling, in my experience, is the perfect medium for this. Writing down your thoughts, your perceptions, how you reacted or felt in response to anything, starting with the small and mundane, and eventually, without pressure, naturally allowing those thoughts to increase in complexity. The beauty of a journal is that it provides a space for listening to your own thoughts without the immediate filter of how they would be perceived by others.

However, even this is hard for many people. Some of us are still writing in our journals as though we are writing for an audience, filtering ourselves as though someone will read it at a later date. Reject that notion. Try to journal through the reality that only your eyes will see it. If it helps, write on paper to be discarded later. This is for your eyes, and your eyes only.

Pushing out of the echo chamber.

As AI creates algorithms that are more complex, sophisticated, and personally curated, pushing out of your immediate ‘echo chamber’ is harder than ever. Yet, to consistently be outputting creatively, it is also more necessary than ever. Unfortunately, existing only within your own sphere means the likelihood that your idea has been “done before” is probably pretty high. If the people around you, whether physically, in your field, or even simply in your online sphere, are consuming the same content as you, chances are they are mixing similar material into their own ideas. Naturally, much of the work that comes out will not be wildly dissimilar.

Of course, pushing out of the echo chamber can look like relocating physically, whether for a short time or a long time. It can also take less drastic measures: intersecting with new social circles, amassing new skills, placing yourself in environments where conversations, values, and ways of thinking are vastly dissimilar from your own. It can also take place in the digital sphere. Interacting with new accounts, seeking out perspectives outside your usual algorithm, or taking time off social media entirely.

Like life, the algorithm often feeds us what is comfortable, familiar, and already known. It gives us more of what we have already shown we like, which means, slowly and almost invisibly, our world shrinks while feeling increasingly infinite. Only by exiting that sphere, can we begin to collect different inputs to create more unique collisions and give ourselves a better chance of thinking in a way that is actually our own.

Apply your skills elsewhere.

The next is to identify where your skills, mindset, interests, or way of seeing the world are a strength, and then apply those somewhere novel. Often, they will be far more appreciated there.

For example, I am an athlete. I am very well trained. But I am also a reasonably good writer, and I take an interest in introspection, philosophy, creativity, and the emotional experience of sport. None of those things are necessarily groundbreaking on their own. There are many athletes. There are many writers. There are many people interested in thinking deeply about life. But the combination of those things, applied together, becomes more interesting.

I listened to a podcast on Diary of a CEO about this very notion. He takes it more in the context of boosting your earning capacity, but I believe it extends to creative appreciation all the same. He used the example of a talented journalist who may feel entirely average in a newsroom full of other talented journalists. But place that same person inside a scientific field, where the experts may be brilliant but unable to communicate clearly, and suddenly that writing skill becomes highly valuable. My dad recently made this exact pivot, moving from journalism in traditional media to a pharmaceutical company, and has benefitted tremendously. Context creates value.

Of course, the prerequisite of this is exiting the echo chamber. Only then can you even begin to see your skills clearly. How can an athlete recognise what is remarkable about their sporting life if they are only ever surrounded by other athletes? How can a writer see the value of their writing if they are only ever surrounded by other writers?

Following this, we can begin to identify what our skills actually are. Give yourself time. Write them down. Think about what comes naturally to you, what people ask you for help with, what you notice that other people miss, what you have lived through, and what you keep returning to without being told.

Practice making meaning.

Original thought is trainable.

Think back to classes in school where you would be handed an essay topic and required to delve into it. When was the last time you thought that deeply about something without being forced to?

The exercise, then, is simple, but not necessarily easy. Choose one word, one phrase, one motif, one symbol, one object, or one idea, and spend time with it. Not minutes, but hours. Days. Let it become a lens through which you move through life, and see what begins to attach itself to it.

This could be for your life, your writing, your work, or a brand, in the way a creative director might begin with a single concept and build a world from it. Maybe you use it. Maybe you do not. It does not need to be perfect or performative. The point is to get used to anchoring onto one thing and filtering other experiences through it.

It is not only great training in original thought, but also a beautiful way of romanticising your life. When you start training it, you start seeing inspiration and ties everywhere. The world starts to get covered in tiny threads of string you can draw between things. Small things become synchronicities. Life becomes art. That is absolutely beautiful and satisfying in itself.

Consume slowly and let your mind wander.

To think originally, the conditions must favour it. Although the current media is often vilified as “brain rot”, the difference between original thinkers and those who merely repeat ideas is not that one consumes other people's thinking and the other does not. It is that one group actually metabolises it. For this reason, an input of inspiration and material is actually a requirement. The problem is with how we consume this media and how we interact with it.

The problem with TikTok, Instagram, and even your Substack Notes feed, is that they offer a constant scroll of information with almost no space to reflect, react, or let anything land. You simply move to the next thing.

I’m not telling you to stop with social media. Cut down a little, perhaps. But think about using it more intently. For example, I use the “saved” folder religiously. When I do find something worth thinking or chewing on, I come back to it periodically and then use that in my creative processes, drafting, or note-taking. It’s not dissimilar to Pintrest: see something, save it, return to it.

Opting for long-form media is another way to ensure your brain has adequate time to process and synthesise ideas. Personally, I prefer podcasts, which I can listen to while training, walking, or running errands.

If I am having a particularly creative day, this is often what happens:

I start a podcast.

They begin discussing a topic.

My mind wanders to how I relate to it, or to some adjacent thought, which then spirals into another, and another, until suddenly I am somewhere entirely different. A thought that did not exist thirty minutes ago has appeared seemingly out of nowhere.

Of course, it did not come from nowhere. It emerged from the collision between what I was listening to and what I already knew, had experienced, or had been thinking about.

I suspect many people interrupt this process because they feel they should be paying attention properly. They pull themselves back onto the track, force themselves to concentrate, and treat wandering as a failure of focus.

Reject this and let your mind wander. You can always replay the section you missed.

Capture correctly, practice patience and reiterate.

Finally, and most importantly, you must have a system for capturing, organising, and compiling these original thoughts. They are fleeting. Perhaps if there is enough interest I will write another whole Substack on how I capture mine, because I can assure you, I have quite the system for ensuring that they do not simply go to die in my Notes app. Often, my creativity is actually just a good filing system for inspiration.

But to start, write them down as soon as you can. And if you cannot write the whole thing, even shorthand will work.

I have literally asked waitresses for paper mid-coffee ride and scribbled the concept of an entire essay on an empty receipt, then ridden home with it folded in my pocket to type up some rough version. Voice memos are underrated. Use them.

but to start, write them down as soon as you can. And if you can’t, even shorthand will work.

I have literally asked waitresses for paper mid-coffee ride and scribbled the concept of a whole essay on an empty receipt, then ridden home with it to type up some rough version. Voice memos are underrated. Use them. Often, my creativity is actually that I have a good filing system for inspiration. If you subscribe, I promise to drop that next week.

Once something has been captured and organised, you can decide what is fully formed and what still needs polishing. Not everything needs to see the light immediately. Sometimes an idea is half-formed, and that is okay. We can be patient with our own minds.

On the other hand, sometimes you can have the courage to put the thought out there anyway and build on it later. It genuinely changed my life to realise I do not have to do everything once. An idea is not a single performance. It is something you can return to, revise, complicate, deepen, or completely rewrite tomorrow night if you need to.

Thank you for reading. My name is Maeve Plouffe, and I’m a dual olympian, double degree holder and occasional writer blending sports with philosophy and other musings on a weekly basis.

If my work has given you value, and you’d like to help me keep making more of it, you can become a paid subscriber, buy me a coffee, come to an event, follow along on social media, or recommend my work to a friend. Every bit of support genuinely helps more than you know.

What remains of the group, I can see in the distance up the next section: fans with airhorns blare them past, and a faint line of team cars sprawls in their wake. I look around to my group of seven. Each of us have remained poker-faced for the last hour in anticipation, trying not to show who will fly and who will drop in the next half hour of this summit. On the TV, they only show the front of the race, the thin and altitude-acclimatised riders who fly up even the steepest of ramps. There’s a misconception that those behind aren’t in the race anymore. But even if we are riding in our own tempos, they are tempos conducted only amongst the inspirational electricity of racing.

Usually, being this far to the back would kill me. Forging a career as a pro cyclist has been possible only through winning things, or at least being up in the pointy end, but here in the Pyrénées, that was never going to be an option. For this reason, when I saw my name on the start list for the Tour of the Pyrénées and Alpes Gresivaudan Classic a week ago, my internal world recoiled. There was no way in hell a rider of 70kg could possibly drag herself over the Tourmalet with the likes of Tour de France champions, let alone the whopping 3600m of vertical gain in a mere 100km demanded of us in the one-day race a few days before. Arguably some of the most mountainous events on the race calendar, they are not just hard without proper preparation, but almost impossible to be anywhere near the race in.

It hurts, knowing I can so easily clock 20-plus hour weeks, months of heavy, soul-crushing exhaustion, and still accept that those efforts do not automatically translate to this kind of thing. When I was added to the start list a week or so ago I panicked, knowing that not even any level of crash dieting or panic climbing could have me keeping up with these mountain specialists in so little time. You see, I’ve spent the Australian summer preparing for track World Cups, smashing protein shakes and VO2 efforts and lifting heavy. I’ve put on the most weight of my life, a concept that I know will serve me in the long run but is hard to adapt to mentally when looking in the mirror. Seeing your body ebb and flow and grow stronger and weaker to mirror the flows of your inputs is part of being an athlete. But it’s never easy, nonetheless. I remind myself I was training for a different output. To change the goalposts now would be a disservice to myself. Even in a race of 120, it’s me against me today. Not even the mountain is my competitor.

Through knowledge and acceptance of this reality comes a certain air of calmness. A heavy pressure off my shoulders, which lets me fly up faster than I ever would have been able to a year ago. I can use this opportunity not only as training, but to race myself. To take advantage of mountain passes that span ten, fifteen, twenty kilometers, where I can uninterruptedly ride my own tempo plus a little more to reveal what personal bests I can hit. In Alpes, the broom wagon trotted behind us after a couple of hours and handed my group a big fat DNF, a card equivalent to social suicide in the pro cycling world. As most of the girls jumped into the white van of shame, my teammate and I let them cut off our numbers and kept pushing on anyway, the descents now trickier with traffic but the summits just as suicidal. We arrived at the top to the remnants of removal trucks and folded-up race banners, and giggled through sheer exhaustion as we sprinted through what remained of the finish line, French race organisers unamused and probably wanting to get home for dinner. That DNF couldn’t tell me that I got there with my biggest elevation gain in a day, nor could it tell me that I’d hit both 60 and 90 minute career-long PRs. Today I’ll finish within the time cut easily, but I’ll for sure exceed my longest ever single climb, 1700m, and I’m on track to smash those 1 hour and 2 hour bests.

260, 272, back down to 254. I watch as the power numbers flicker on my Garmin, my average already well above 250 for this climb. I resist the urge to sprint to that next group, knowing well there’s nothing with a gradient less than 7% in the next 8 or so kilometres, and I’m battling to keep the smallest gear churning at a cadence high enough to still allow me to keep throwing one leg over the other. Breathe in, breathe out. Push harder.

Funnily enough, as the air grows thinner and the gradients more steep I feel more called to the sport than anywhere. I’m suffering but grinning like a little kid as the mountains dwarf me. A cow, bell ringing, trots in front of us, slow and calm behind ragged breath. It’s been my first time spending significant time both here in the Pyrénées and the Alpes, and the mountain air has undoubtedly refreshed my soul. Even though I’m no climber, I’m reminded that I love climbing. The meditative trance these long efforts put you in, one leg over the other for eternity, suffering in rythm with the natural gradients. The mountains gift perspective, not punishment, they shrink your ego, but not ambition. Such grand geological scales makes your suffering feel both massive and tiny simultaneously.

Between these races, we’ve enjoyed time by the lake, sipping Calypsos and basking in the sun. In Belgium, when I’d DNF, I’d somehow equate that to not being worthy of enjoying, of being happy, a kind of twisted and evil self-inflicted assumption that not winning meant you should lock yourself in for every moment you weren’t training. It’s interesting to me, realising that the places where I’ve been told my whole life to race because they suit my athlete profile might actually not suit the profile of my inner being. At the end of the day, the days and weeks and months of travel and hours on the bike accumulate and one day represent just how you’ve spent your life. Wouldn’t it be a shame to lose them to places the world told you that you should be, at the expense of spending them where you feel most alive?

As I summit the crest, a small crowd of French and Spanish fans cheer me. Allez! Ánimo! I crack them a weak smile through my grimace and let them tip icy water over my sweat drenched body. There are a few groups behind me, a few in front, but I know in light of going my own pace on the climb I’ll have the mental sharpness and legs to be able to catch a few more on this descent, and possibly latch onto a few more in the twenty or so kilometre stretch into the finish line. That’s the thing: we’re summiting at different speeds, each different tempos, and soon we’ll descend at speeds just as individual to ourselves. Each athlete here arrived at the start line with the invisible weight of different things: injury, family, selections, contracts, results, body image, homesickness, happiness, heartbreak, fear, expectation. Each woman will carry with them this invisible weight to the top, transforming those pains into power through the pedals. t’s a revolutionary thing for me, perhaps even rebellious, to accept that we’re all on our own trajectories. To accept that we are all suffering in our own ways yet translating them into nearly identical manifestations of physical output, all dragging different invisible things up the same mountain.

Rolling into the finish line, I’m greeted by a sleepy French town, the lake below glittering and humming in the heat. I grab a Coke and wipe the salt and spit from my face and let my heart rate ease as I relax into realisation of the magnitude of what I’m doing. I arrived here thinking the Alps and Pyrénées would tell me that I was not made for that kind of racing. Instead, they showed me that being unsuited to something does not preclude you from being called by it.

I know one thing for sure. That is, I want to forge myself into a better climber. And the only way up is, well… up.

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Welcome, I’m Maeve, a dual Olympian, law and science graduate, and a professional cyclist writing at the intersection of sport, literature and philosophy.

As always, these essays begin somewhere between long days on the bike and are polished over hours spent sat and overthinking at my local cafe or on long transit days between tours.

If they indeed resonate, I’d love to have you closer: become a paid subscriber or shout me a coffee to fuel the next week of work itself; or tag me on instagram when you share it with a friend or to your own profiles along with the thoughts that it stirred up in you.

See you next week!

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Hong Kong has always been one of those cities for me.

I recently returned from my second World Cup of the year there. I have a lot to say about the races, the preparation, the performance and the crashes admist the well rehearsed dance of translating effort into outcome. But after a week or two of letting the memories from the trip settle, what I keep coming back to is not only what happened on the track.

I have written many times that growth, and I suppose healing, reveal themselves in circles, not lines. Not because we somehow miraculously grow by virtue of simply returning, but because sometimes we have to stand in the same place again to notice what has actually changed.

And perhaps the most natural way to explain that is to tell you first about the other versions of me this city has held.

The first time I ever visited Hong Kong, I was about nine, traveling with my entire family: Mum, Dad, and my two little sisters.

The global financial crisis had reared its head and made my dad’s job in Singapore pretty well redundant. At the same time, swine flu was running its course through Asia in a way that, for any kid who grew up there, made Covid feel perhaps already foreshadowed. We needed to leave Singapore, the place we had lived for the last five years, and Hong Kong, my parents decided, would be our last little adventure before finding a new place to go.

My sisters and I, oblivious to the stress our parents must have been under, were simply overjoyed by the excitement of traveling all together. To be somewhere new, somewhere exciting, somewhere with a Disneyland. While we usually travelled local style, squatting at noodle stands and wandering through markets, but this time we got to sleep up amongst the skyscrapers. Even after living in Singapore for the better part of five years, Hong Kong felt impossibly vast. Disneyland was a ghost town as a result of the epidemic, so we sprinted through empty queue ropes to ride Space Mountain as many times as humanly possible.

As an adult now, I can hardly comprehend what our parents were going through. A young family and a home in boxes, each marked in sharpie with BANGKOK, NEW YORK, DARWIN, OTTAWA, ADELAIDE. All viable options of where we might end up. Where they would raise us. Where we would find a new home.

We were in limbo, but instead of making us feel the weight of it, they let us experience the curiosity of it. The local, alive parts of being somewhere unfamiliar. They taught us to wander, try all the new food, look up at buildings too tall to understand, and to believe that uncertainty was just another kind of adventure.

It is perhaps therefore fitting that the next time I touched down in the city wasn’t until I was tasting my first years of adulthood and the subsequent weight of decision making myself. I was freshly nineteen, living out of home, finally earning a little cash for the pleasure of riding bikes, all while studying two degrees. The chance to travel somewhere new and exotic and escape the routine of our now not-so-new life in little Adelaide was, at this point, always welcome.

The city, in this moment, reignited that nostalgia of a childhood spent in Southeast Asia. The market smells I hadn’t experienced in years, the taste of pocari sweat and a city heaving in lunar new year celebrations. It felt as huge and overwhelming as I remembered, but the nostalgia brought with it an air of familiarity.

I remember looking out across from my hotel room window one night, the skyline stretching before me from my vantage point on the 80th floor. The lights held within tiny windows glistened back at me, some holding moving shadows of people and furniture only barely visible. I remember realising that inside each one was an individual person, living their own parallel life that would never cross with mine. Each window a window into their life, but nothing more: the impossibility of ever knowing, or even fully comprehending, everything that they had each experienced, carried, loved, lost, regretted, or hoped for suddenly felt heavy beyond comprehension.

I suppose this overwhelm could only be mirrored by the racing that week. It was one of my first times representing Australia on the world stage, and I was in a field of seasoned, experienced professionals. I got practically eaten alive in the Madison, freaked out by wheels flying everywhere at speeds I had barely touched, against women I had only ever seen on TV. Memorably, the team manager couldn’t find me for hours afterwards because I was crying in the changeroom, still caught in the aftershock of fear and overwhelm.

Still, underneath the embarrassment, I felt hungry for more. I wanted to become a more permanent fixture on the national team, something I hadn’t even fathomed before that year. I wanted, one day, to be in this world properly. The dream of racing and being accepted in this field had been well and truly sparked.

So, standing in the same velodrome this time, I couldn’t help but feel a little pang of pride. Like I had finally grown into those shoes.

This time around, in January, I received a message on Instagram asking for some advice. I wouldn’t usually respond to random DMs, but I could tell by the tone of voice and lowercase Gen Z-style spelling, almost intuitively, that it was a young girl behind the account, so I answered back. We chatted a little, and she revealed to me that she was from Hong Kong and a track rider herself.

Around the same time, I chatted to my coach a little bit about what makes me perform well, an ongoing conversation, as always, in elite sport. In races like World Cups, which are important but not paramount, maintaining fitness is important, so I highlighted that I wanted to take a different approach: longer rides leading in, more volume. A far cry from the usual hotel-bed rotting, 30-minute roller sessions, sitting in the nerves we would usually carry in a new city. Which, funnily, is a pre-race routine that is so far from how I would usually spend my life.

We realised quickly that some of my best performances have been after bike packing trips and volume. Heck, before my last amazing performance, the bikes didn’t even arrive in time, so I spent days running — most coaches’ nightmare. I suppose I have only recently started linking putting the fun and joy back into racing as actually performance-enhancing.

So, with this in the back of my mind, and the curiosity to try a new approach, I told myself I would do as much on the road as possible in Hong Kong. Interestingly, cycling on the road in a new city makes even the biggest cities feel manageable, orientated. Rather than seeing the world from a window from A to B, you start to get a sense of where you are in space.

When I did get the call-up, we arranged to meet for a road ride and coffee. When I met her, she was gleaming with her boyfriend, who I had actually got a photo with the last time I was here. I’ll attach them both below. A full circle moment.

Now, a few years ago, I wouldn’t have had the confidence to head out on a road ride. The last time I was here, we didn’t ride once on the roads: for a group of 18-year-olds, signs in Cantonese, cars and buses, and unfamiliar roads felt all too overwhelming. But with the compounding years of solo adventuring across every country, and the knowledge of my newfound local friend, doing so this time was natural. What followed was some of my best training days of the year: long rides of 100-plus kilometres, sweat and Pocari Sweat, passing bus stops lined with mismatched chairs.

But what stayed with me most were the conversations. Churning over cultural differences which influenced the different ways we moved around the same ambition. We were training for the same thing, more or less, but arriving at it through different habits, assumptions, rhythms and rituals. There is something powerful about realising your way is only one way.

We met up with other riders and took lunch at a dai pai dong.

“Are you sure it’s okay for you?” she asked, pointing at a table under cloth shade, plastic stools we would be sharing with a shirtless uncle slurping beef broth.

Of course.

I let them order for me but insisted on an iced Ovaltine to drink.

“Good choice,” they said.

I knew some ball.

They laughed at me in Cantonese as I piled chilli on chilli onto my rice.

“We didn’t expect that from an Australian!”

I suppose my Singaporean upbringing was shining through.

She showed me the local routes, the tropical parks, and the beaches tucked out of the city. We ate frozen pineapple from street vendors and yu daan from next to the hotel.

I led into the race with enough volume in my legs and a certain ease I had never felt before in a foreign country. By having the courage to meet new friends and be open to new experiences, the locals had created a feeling of home for me in a place that couldn’t feel further from Australia.

That feeling of knowingness, of ease, and of competence followed me into the omnium. I rode with experience under my belt, tactics like a mind map in my brain. If they move here, I go here. I think I truly extracted everything out of my legs. And it showed. I was calm in the scratch race, even in an excellent field, and started off with one of my best results of the year. I kept it up: consistent, calm, focused, enjoying it. And despite not having the best legs in the field in this current training block, something that only really showed in the points race, even then I felt I performed well overall. I was satisfied, because I had entered it fully, used what I had, and left nothing untouched.

The day after, we squeezed in a lap of the island through all the neighbourhoods, ate everything she recommended to me, and finished at the best soybean shop on the island, so they told me. I boarded the plane home with a smile and a newfound understanding of what the whole point is.

At the airport pickup, I hopped in the car with Dad, almost expecting a chat about the race.

But he instead turned to me,

“I’m proud of you.

Not just because of how you raced, but because of how you experienced the people and the place while you were there.

That’s how we raised you.”

It is a comment I think I will cherish forever, because it encapsulated exactly what Hong Kong had taught me this third time around: that to perform in a place, maybe you cannot only try to control it, shut it out, and shrink it down to the race. I understand now that sometimes the most disciplined thing an athlete can do is not narrow her world, but expand her capacity to live inside it, absorb it, and still perform.

Maybe, to let a city pulse through you is the best way to perform in it.

And reflecting on these stories, it is evident that in a way, each time I have gone back, Hong Kong has undeniably felt smaller. Not because the city itself has changed. The skyscrapers still reach, and the city still hums with that same dense, humid intensity. But it has become more achievable. More within my palms. Like something I could do, see, work out.

In the racing, this was obvious: unlike last time, when I was battling to finish, I raced in the upper field, coming into the final points race within the medals.

Hong Kong did not become smaller.

The race did not become easier.

I just arrived with more life under my belt.

And perhaps that is what growth is: not forcing the world to shrink around you, but having the courage to meet it back.

Welcome, I’m Maeve, a dual Olympian, law and science graduate, professional cyclist writing at the intersection of sport, literature and philosophy.

As always, these essays begin somewhere between long days on the bike and are polished over hours spent sat and overthinking at my local cafe.

If they indeed resonate, I’d love to have you closer: become a paid subscriber or shout me a coffee to fuel the next week of work itself; or tag me on instagram when you share it with a friend or to your own profiles along with the thoughts that it stirred up in you.

See you next week!

Not quite where I was, yet not quite where I want to be. Too foreign for here, too foreign for home. Too changed for the places that raised me, not yet fluent in the places I might want to belong.

I suppose that’s simply a virtue of being twenty-six. Literally in the thick of it, old enough to have accumulated enough possible lives, yet young enough not to have felt the full pressure of picking and tasting just one. Like Sylvia Plath’s fig tree, my dreams and aspirations fan out like branches before me. In Plath’s image, each fig, a possible life with a wonderful future, beckons and winks and waits to be plucked. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest.

Collecting my law and science degrees this week only reminds me that I could be sitting high-rise looking out through the glass window of a corporate job, or diving down through the glass water of a tropical bay. I could explore, adventure, or sit still. I could pursue writing and live peacefully beneath the bush, where the air stirs with eucalyptus and birdsong is the only backdrop to my thoughts. I could choose a relationship I might love and watch my life bend around his eyes, or one that I might hate and feel my life deteriorate in his grip.

Each decision, I am reminded, opens an infinite path. A career, another. A city, another. A person, another. Every fig beckons a different self.

As past lovers have kids and friends get engaged and have drawers where the scissors always live, I am reminded that many are harvesting their figs. I watch their lives crystallize while mine still runs wet on the edges.

Last year I set conscious intentions for the new year. My life orbits in four-year cycles in cadence with the Olympics, thus peaking at specificity and performance in 2024. The year after is therefore a choice. You can either repeat what already worked, and you’ll probably fly for that year, or you can accept that in another four years time everyone else will have evolved.

So, I chose quantity over quality. I chose races. As many as possible, in as many places as possible. Where I could win and thrive, and equally be dropped and boxed in and spat out and surprised. I trialled strength and altitude and intervals and ultra-endurance. I performed under pressure and played for fun. The goal was to experiment and try and fail. The idea being to accumulate as broad a set of experiences as possible, of which I could later refine from.

It therefore only made sense to extend this goal to life, too. With no contract, no relationship, no mortgage, and nothing to lose, I embraced it as perhaps my last chance at true freedom. My razor was making decisions that would open doors. To say yes.

I started the year living from suitcases and couch-surfing. I moved city and made new friend groups and learnt a language. I asked questions and tried things I liked and didn’t. I bikepacked, tried pottery and journalling, joined a dance class. I was hit by a truck and survived. I rode through tiny villages in Spain and the mountains of Santiago, dived with manta rays in Indonesia and partied along canals in Amsterdam. I delved into creativity. I hit publish on my writing and ran my first events. I volunteered and listened and learned from people with lives as far different to mine as possible.

One day, somewhere in the middle of all this, I sat with my legs dangling from the window of the studio apartment I was renting in an artists’ residency in Amsterdam’s Jordaan district. As the light trickled in and the breeze kissed my legs, bikes whirled over cobbles and past canals beneath me. I felt caught between the beauty of it all and the pride that I was here, alive and exploring, but also the overwhelm of having so many possible lives moving below me at once. The drop from here felt so high.

I suppose I didn’t fully quite comprehend that in casting your net wide, you inherently also accumulate much of which to choose from. You do not only catch opportunity. You catch obligation. Loose threads, half-loves. Jack of all trades, master of none.

And here is where I am now, in that messy middle.

There are a few moments this week that remind me. As I sit in the surf in Coolangatta, barely dropping in, I am reminded of my eighteen year old self living in her van traveling and thinking, I’ll be a good surfer by now. I speak Spanish with a few friends but get lost when the cadence picks up. My journal has half-pasted spreads that I’ll get back to tomorrow, which becomes the next day.

But there are only so many minutes in a day, so many things to master.

Perhaps that’s what differentiates me from Plath. She sits in the crotch of the fig tree, starving, paralysed by the impossibility of choosing just one.

Rather, I’m in motion, devouring them all.

I have big aspirations. I want to make what I do here an ecosystem. One thing feeding into the other.

For that reason, there are many figs I am already eating, and yet so many still hanging just out of reach. Drafts sit in my publication and in my inbox. Messages I never clicked send on and people I never replied to. Projects I am taking on, people I am collaborating with, some half done, some nearing completion, some never started.

Aspiration bleeds into the current.

The figs all look delicious, but my tummy hurts.

But perhaps, through all of this and the messy middle, I know a few things. I at least know that I have the appetite for figs.

Some of my friends prefer oranges, pineapples, grapes. I find them too acidic. They like matching Tupperware and padel on a Tuesday and nice cars with leather seats. Some of them like quiet, manicured-hedge suburbia, but I like places with a pulse. Some of them like tidy boxes of identity, but I like splitting at the seams. As they kick rotten fruit to the ground I am compelled by the urge to pick it up and ferment into a delicious wine to share with my friends on the terraza.

From tasting a lot of fruit and casting my net wide, I know what kind of people make me glow with love, and how I like to spend my days. I know better than ever my strongest virtues and my non-negotiables. What kind of beauty I want to build my life around.

So here I am, in the thick of it, trying to tie the threads together. To anyone else, they might look like nothing more than a ball of tangled wool. Threads crossing, matted, catching, hindering the next.

But in my mind’s eye, I can see the web I am weaving.

Each thread protrudes from the next, interlinked and load-bearing, held in delicate tension. The racing feeds the writing, the writing feeds the conversations, the conversations feed the community, the community feeds the events. Soft spaces of warmth, little cocoons for the people I love, held gently within. Its exact shape is hard to describe, more ecosystem than linear path, but still, I spin. I just need to bear with myself and remember that I cannot finish it all overnight.

How beautiful it is that what I once aspired to is now on my to-do list.

What a privilege it is to be stressed about the things I once dreamed of creating.

How sweet to be sticky-fingered from the figs I once dreamed of devouring.

With fig juice dribbling down my chin, I smile at the bountiful mess I have harvested.

I suppose it’s time to start embracing the messy middle.

Welcome, I’m Maeve, a dual Olympian, law and science graduate, professional cyclist writing at the intersection of sport, literature and philosophy.

Subscribe now

As always, these essays begin somewhere between long days on the bike and are polished over hours spent sat and overthinking at my local cafe.

If they indeed resonate, I’d love to have you closer: become a paid subscriber or shout me a coffee to fuel the next week of work itself; or tag me on instagram when you share it with a friend or to your own profiles with the thoughts that it stirred up in you. I’d love to hear your figs.

But, before you start to panic, don’t worry! This one will continue to exist. If anything, I feel that this will only strengthen the quality of my voice here, for reasons I will soon reveal. I wanted, however, to take a moment to explain this new sidestep.

I love this page, and after living with it for the better part of five months I have thoroughly enjoyed cultivating a voice that is thoughtful, long winded, pensive. Each piece takes me several hours, over several days, or even weeks to think the thoughts, marinate in them, transcribe them, polish them. Then, often for weeks after I am linking them to others, building on them. It’s a labour of love.

The result is pieces that take their time, and (usually) provide things to chew on. It’s become my strange way of drawing constellations between the stars of sport and philosophy, making legible what might, to many, seem like stars too distant, too faint, or too scattered to form any pattern at all.

Perhaps most rewarding has been hearing how readers have not just understood the work, but used it in their own lives. I’ve had people both online and in real life tell me it changed how they saw certain situations, stirred curiosity where habit once sat, or gave them language for experiences they had not yet articulated. Comments like, “this essay made me explore deeper in my final rep,” or, “I started playing with my experience of time after reading this,” mean more than you might think. Some have told me that they have been moved to begin writing themselves; others have used my ideas to prompt their own life audits. The fact that people are not merely reading, but also applying, is something I never set out intending to achieve, and yet doing so has changed my life.

I have realised, perhaps, that this was the whole point all along.

But not everyone has the appetite for long essays. In fact, most people don’t. And I’ve found myself asking: how do I reach them too?

Even when it comes to writing them, when I am on my bike for several hours meditating on what to write, only about half the time these long winded and meaningful and profound things come to me. The other half of the time, I am also just a twenty-six-year-old woman thinking in ways that are, well… considerably less elevated.

I don’t always have the intelligent way to say something. Training efforts and fatigue and racing stress often deteriorate the ability to be profound. But so can joy, peace, silliness, gossip, and talking shit with friends. Sometimes I do not want to talk about cycling at all.

As a result, I have more than a few short, grammatically questionable, digestible recommendations and pieces of social commentary living in my drafts. To be honest with you, I’ve even hit publish on some of my most recent pieces knowing they are useful and relevant, but feeling less satisfied from a literary standpoint.

I thought about publishing those shorter, funnier pieces here. But I realised pretty quickly that doing so would dilute what this space does so well. It would force you, the reader, to sift through one mode of writing to find the other.

I thought on the other hand about making them more beautiful, lengthy, improving the writing. But suddenly, they lost their charm. I also realised that some people, who maybe aren’t avid readers, would connect with them better in this format.

As with many things, I realised the answer was not black and white. Neither voice is more me than the other.

And so rather than trying to make a square fit into a circle, I’ve come to realise that they deserve their own space.

So, low and behold —

SPORTY SEXY SMART.

SPORTY SEXY SMART

By Maeve Plouffe

What’s with the name?

I’ve posted a proper introduction over there, which I’d highly urge you to read, but in short: if the title makes you recoil a little, good. That’s part of the point.

It’s designed as a joking, yet painfully truthful, nod to the pressures and boxes I’ve found myself either unwillingly shoved in, trying to sit in, or doing anything to stay in.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve felt myself chasing some combination of those three things. Trying to become them, balance them, perform them, resist them, and redefine them all at once.

And I know I’m not alone in that.

There is, especially for women, a persistent pressure to correctly calibrate oneself to exude the perfect ratios of athletic and accomplished, beautiful and desirable, intelligent and articulate.

It is founded on some kind of utopian facade: the belief that if we can strike some coveted, unspoken balance, we will somehow transcend. Becoming some superior, complete version of ourselves. There is something almost religious in it. A secular nirvana. When I can run a marathon, lose the next ten pounds, finish my degrees, then I’ll be happy.

SPORTY SEXY SMART

SPORTY SEXY SMART

I recently attempted the excruciating task of distilling my life’s preoccupations into a few words…

Read more

4 months ago · 2 likes · 1 comment · Maeve Plouffe

So Sporty Sexy Smart will be, in my own words, part satire, part critique, part confession. Less polished while being more immediate and unfiltered. A slightly satirical archive of the things I am doing, seeing, noticing, liking, rejecting, recommending, and laughing about as someone who has, for better or worse, spent much of her life in pursuit of being sporty, sexy, and smart.

Who is it for?

For those who train, travel, think, date, work, race, and move. With a sense of humour and a taste for the absurd, the attractive, the athletic… with a touch of aesthetics and overanalysis. Yes, it’s niche. No, it’s not for everyone. Just read the essay and work out whether it’s for you.

I think it’s important to add that I’ll be publishing with an unapologetically girly voice. I think sport, particularly at the elite level, lacks such commentary. I want a place where the sporty girls can read about topics that interest them in a voice that actually sounds familiar. Imagine Carrie Bradshaw had strava? Something like that.

It may feel girly at times, but I assure you that it is for men and women alike. Perhaps you’ll learn a thing or two from the other side. Perhaps you’ll simply relate to more of it than you expected.

What can you expect?

It will be a place for anything I consider sporty, sexy, or smart: recommendations of brands, places, art, books, music, events, habits, cities, and scenes that I feel have either helped or hindered me in those pursuits. Culture, daily life, observations from the road, and notes from being a professional female athlete and textbook academic overachiever travelling the world alone and probably collecting a fair few stories along the way. Things I’d tell my girlfriends or sisters. No gatekeeping.

I also want it to be a space for curation. I genuinely think that as the internet becomes more saturated, curation becomes more valuable. We are surrounded by too much of everything, and I am lucky enough to move through some very interesting corners of sport, travel, fashion, writing, and culture. I meet some very cool, hyper-niche people doing amazing things in fashion, sport, and niche underground subculture spaces — things you will not be seeing on your favourite influencer’s reels.

If you’re overwhelmed but align with the aesthetic, think of this as your one-stop shop.

Ideally, you should come away with a good laugh, better taste, better questions, better recommendations, and either a slightly sportier, sexier, smarter you… or the courage to stop caring so much about any of it.

Posting frequency, and logistics

Here, I’ll keep publishing essays, ideally weekly, as I have been.

Sporty Sexy Smart, on the other hand, will function more like a newsletter. I’m planning to turn off emails for each individual post and use it more as a running collection of shorter entries, categorised loosely as sporty, sexy, or smart. Then, once a week, I’ll send out a roundup compiling everything into one place.

So, what’s the difference?

Here will continue to live my longer essays. Things to put in your saved folder and come back to on long, slow mornings. I want to maintain a high quality and keep giving those pieces the time and effort they deserve.

These will keep coming to your inbox as you wish, and paid essays, along with some more in-depth how-tos, will continue to flow.

Over there, expect more wit, more frequency, a little less polish, and probably a few more grammatical errors. It will be lighter on literary ambition, but not on value.

Of course, there will be some bleed between the two. I am not a robot. What I am thinking deeply about will always shape my taste, and what I am laughing about will probably end up informing the essays too.

So that’s the arrangement: essays here, newsletter there, overlap where necessary, no pretending otherwise. If you like the slower, more thoughtful work, nothing is changing. If you also want the quicker takes, the recommendations, the feminine social commentary, and the satirical field notes from inside the whole sporty-sexy-smart experiment, then I think you’ll like what’s coming.

Since this post is more post than essay, I wanted to take the chance to thank all of you who already subscribe. As I alluded to earlier, writing has shaped my life for years, but taking the recent leap to start publishing it publicly has truly changed my life. It has already facilitated some of the most wholesome and eye-opening interactions with people, including those who have come on my rides and met me in person. It has been the icebreaker for some incredibly profound conversations and stories that I think will stick with me for life.

I have some more profound ones cooking up, and I can’t wait to share what’s been buzzing around my brain once I’ve found a way to do it justice on the page. Some of them I will have paywalled, because I think writing for a more intimate group makes it easier to build up the courage, and because that corner of this feels a little like writing to friends. If you’ve been enjoying the work here and want to support both the essays and everything that’s beginning to grow around them, I’d be so grateful to have you as a paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

See you all for my next essay soon!

Yours in (e)motion,

Maeve xx

7:02 am.

A bead of sweat drips to my lip. With it, I taste the chemical burn of sunscreen melding with salt. Cool outside air catches in my hot chest as I greedily gulp it in.

Pain for breakfast.

I think of all the other things I have had the pleasure of tasting for breakfast. Eggs sunny-side with a wrist-crack of salt in Australia; untoasted bread dusted with hagelslag in Holland. A basket of fresh croissants glossed in butter in Paris only comes close in pleasure to a stack of pancakes drunk in maple syrup whilst hungover at a New York diner.

I’m transported to late, warm mornings leant lazily on the cupboards of a Catalan kitchen, watching fresh tomato bleed as it’s grated onto the crusted face of toast. It feels a lifetime away from the shivering solitude of Iceland where I spent mornings huddled behind my van, too cold to sleep, reheating milk that had frozen solid overnight.

I’ve fueled long rides on nutty buckwheat porridge in Slovakia, and scuba dives with aromatic nasi campur in Indonesia. Each dish a different taste on my tongue; each memory a different imprint in my mind. Each inextricably tied to its place, its people, and the specific hunger it was served up to satisfy.

This morning, my breakfast of pain is far from over. Three repetitions down, and still another remains yet to savour.

Three, two, one. The recovery buzzer counts down.

Here in Australia, the cadence of life favours hitting hard work earlier. Suffering at daybreak feels rhythmic, a protocol served to my body as automatically as my cup of morning coffee. Before the sun beats down and the traffic banks up. Less to think, more to do.

I launch from the seat, driving my legs over the pedals, carving switchback by switchback. Every minute that passes tastes heavier, metallic in my chest. Seconds seem to stretch longer as the minutes remaining dwindle.

In these moments, every cell of my body is burning up the fuel I’ve consumed. As an athlete, I must admit that my choice of breakfast is more often than not influenced more by utility than enjoyment. Glass scales balance a ceramic bowl on my benchtop, oats tumbling in all at once and then sprinkled clinically to precision. Come to think of it, I don’t even really like oats, but I’ll usually wolf down the watered slop in anticipation of the flavour not of the oats themselves, but of the efforts the day demands of me. A few extra squeezes of honey to top off my bowl on a tough one, and perhaps an extra bar tucked into the back pocket as I clip clop in my cleats out the door when I’m not quite sure where the roads will take me.

By this point my legs are screaming, recollecting the pain I’ve tasted in the preceding efforts. Not just those of today, but of the week that’s been. The body keeps score in terms of aches and soreness and fatigue, a tally that often parallels the breakfasts had and breakfasts skipped. Tempted by the ideals of a more slender figure, I’ve many a time tried to avoid the fueling ritual and learnt the hard way, legs empty only an hour up the road.

When I was younger I knew no better; I’d measure a mere quarter cup of oats, only to be met with fatigue by Thursday week. Sat in a hospital gown, I remember the radiologist clicking her tongue as she examined the bone scans that still carry the imprint of those choices. Nowadays, I’m tipping the box of oats heavy-handed, watching as double, triple the weight of grains tumble out and into my bowl.

I carve the last switchback, final seconds approaching. They stretch longer than the whole effort beforehand. An all-out sprint, my body throwing everything. Three, two, one.

The force through my legs subsides, yet my breath is still catching up. The peak of lactate sears, tearing through every muscle. Finally, I taste relief.

As I ease and begin to coast back down, my internal world begins to quieten just as the city starts to wake up. Neighbours in dressing gowns scuffle along driveways to collect their morning papers; groups of young people, tanned and glowing, congregate along sidewalks to share in their caffeine ritual. For my generation of Australians, breakfast is a secular religion; it holds a degree of weight and importance that my Spanish friends find baffling. They cock their heads in confusion when I tell them that here we meet over poached eggs on overpriced sourdough and flat whites swirled over gossip. Over there, important conversations are served over red wine and tapas and the inevitable sobremesa that carries on well past eleven at night. Yet I maintain my position: that a first date over dinner still feels awfully formal compared to crossed legs on the couch over a cappuccino.

The city waking up smells of coffee and freshly baked bread. Like my intervals, I’ll probably have more than one today. I also know that I’ll probably come home to half a pot of bitter black tar percolating on the kitchen bench of my parents’ house, the only thing more Canadian than my father’s accent. It’s a far cry from watching my South American neighbour stir a heaped storm of sugar into his black coffee; our smiles over those saucer-bound cyclones seem syrupy compared to the gales that would whip the windscreen of the team bus in Belgium. There, we would plunge watery coffee through plastic Aeropresses in a heavy silence, pressing cold hands nervously against warm travel mugs in anticipation of the race awaiting us at the end of the road. Pressed like the silicone button of a pod machine; once, then twice, the mechanical whirl the only sound humming into the depths of midnight hours before my final law exam.

As I turn home, I am reminded of coming home from swimming training in my youth. In the wintertime, Mum would have a big pot of porridge stewing on the stove, oats to warm us from the inside out as we got home from the pool. Often I’d be so hungry that I’d pull up a chair immediately, still bather-bottomed. Damp towel wrapped around my waist, spooning a steaming hot serving into my bowl.

On family holidays through the summertime, our bowls would look different. Perhaps my favourite breakfast is contained within a plastic carry-bag toted back from the Parap market on a Saturday morning in Darwin, splitting at the seams with juicy mangoes and jackfruit and a tub of Mary’s spicy laksa. Other mornings, perched on a dew-damp log at a campsite, a variety pack of individual-sized Kellogg’s cereals would be fought over between my sisters and I. We’d bicker between Frosted Flakes and Froot Loops while Dad munched silently on the remnant Sultana Bran.

What is it that underpins every breakfast I’ve described? Perhaps, it’s as simple as hunger. Hunger for the win, for warmth, for home, for company, and for belonging. While the oats weighed meticulously this morning may be burned into my pedals by noon, the people and the places I consumed them with will remain forever imprinted in my memory. Through mornings both fast and slow, near and far, my appetite shifts between craving the chemical sting of exertion,

the buttery, decadent gloss of enjoyment,

and the sweet, slow-cooked syrup of nostalgia.

As I pull open the sliding door of home, my legs ache with the aftertaste of my efforts. The familiar taste of pain for breakfast.

I smile knowing I’ll probably have the same thing tomorrow. And the day after that. Who knows — soon I might even be tasting a win.

Photos: avinashkunjamboo

On Friday, riding alongside a young man on my group ride, I found myself in a rather good conversation about the modern cultural phenomenon of “locking in”.

Well, by conversation, I mean we were laughing at it. Specifically, the algorithmic assault of crypto-pushing, cold-plunging, mouth-taping, looksmaxxing gym bros, extreme cuts, 75 Hard, and whatever other trend is currently being pushed onto our fyp pages under #selfimprovement.

I love to hate them. But scrolling later on, I am met with the slight yet unpleasant heat of self-recognition.

I confess: I have spent the last few months ‘locked in’. By locked in, I mean: daily grinding, sleep tracking, rice weighing, number pushing, breathing through a snorkel for the sake of Vo2 max-ing. Bed time has crept earlier, my social calendar deteriorated, creativity slumped as fatigue has accumulated and the stakes with it.

Does this make me a hypocrite? I may still never pop a gel on a training ride as a matter of principle, but at this rate I am not far off the mouth-tapers. At least they’re glistening in huge brand deals and TikTok fame from it. Me? I’m just pedaling four kilometers ever so slightly faster.

Months like this have crept up behind me, routine steadily strangling all that’s left of spontaneity. Straight off my off-season I stepped into racing, Omnium Nationals into Oceanias into World Cups into Track Nationals. Into testing and more testing and more track and more trials. In these periods, most days are important. Everything is selection. Everything must be optimised.

At the most recent of the lot, Track Nationals, I did pretty fine. A full stack of medals. Good legs in the longer races. Would have liked to go faster in my individual pursuit, of course.

But a few days before it all, driving home from a session, I broke down in tears. It was strange. I do not cry much anymore, and even less so in such big, heaving blocks. I find fatigue to dulls the blade of emotion. So instead of indulging in it, I wiped my mascara smudged eyes, shut the car door and forgot about it.

Well, I forgot about it… until I didn’t.

By day two of Nationals, I was tired. Not physically. Maybe not even mentally, exactly. My race brain was on, I was sharp precisely where it was demanded of me. But I felt like a robot, clicking sequentially the rehearsed preset sequence. Hype up, race, warm down, recover. Repeat.

Lying in bed, caffeinated to my eyeballs, I reminisced the last recent flicker of real messy emotion in my memory. That crying fit on the drive home.

I knew what I needed to do.

I wrote it all down.

I let myself sink into it. Feel it properly. I tasted it through colourful words and music, visceral and without argument, not processing the logic, just the emotion. How long had it been since I had done that? Since I had let myself feel something without reason?

I should probably interject here to say that I think I will publish what came of that unravelling. It has taken me a few weeks to arrive at that decision, partly because it makes me nervous to publish something far more personal, written in the raw of it and certainly not for an audience in mind. To keep the two stories from collapsing into one another, I’ll let the fuller, more private unraveling live there. Here, I’ll continue with the more logical and rational version of what I found from it.

The next day, as you do, I needed a long ride to process it all. I knew it was probably not the most optimal thing to do the morning before a race, but I did not care. I indulged in a few hours of tempo to clear the mind.

By hour three I was feeling a bit better and pulled over to take a photo of a giant banana vending machine that I found humorously planted on the side of the road. As one does. To my dismay, my phone would not turn on. A black screen stared back at me.

I think this would have invoked a great deal of stress in many, but as someone who has broken and / or lost her phone numerous times before, it admittedly did not feel wholly unprecedented. I did a quick mental audit of whether it was possible to live without a phone for a week until I got back to Adelaide. The only downside was not being able to show people the banana vending machine. And, maybe… maps, whatsapp, alarm clock, music, wallet, and a few other things.

Oh well.

I raced the next few days with no warm-up music. Rode a bit too long both mornings. Did not upload any power data.

Both races went tenfold better.

At this point the spiral of anti-optimisation and free will began to gather some momentum.

The days went on and my Oura ring was certainly dead and I had not logged my food in MyFitnessPal in days. When racing was done, I hitched a ride to the airport, asked around for a payphone, picked up a hire car, and then spent an embarrassing amount of time running circles around Brisbane CBD trying to navigate to my friend’s hotel with no maps.

We drove straight down the motorway to Wet’n’Wild and immediately began sprinting up staircases for the sole purpose of hurling ourselves down waterslides and screaming on floaty tubes. We packed stupid baby-sized water pistols and ate hot chippies.

At the crack of dawn the next day I traced my way to the top of Currumbin Valley from memory. Tropical rain poured down, and instead of packing a rain jacket I let it soak me, heavy and warm. I sat a few minutes in silence in the rainforest, then rolled back in the door with soggy socks and a grin stretched wide.

We frolicked in waterfalls and rope-swung off rocks. Pulled up at a café with journals and watercolours. Wrote and wrote and wrote good things.

I visited friends and we discussed business. Proper business, too. I ticked off meetings and conversations I had been meaning to reach for for ages, simply over chats with friends. No Zoom, no agendas.

On my flight home I stared at the airplane seat in front of me and by this point, felt no boredom. The next day, I hosted a group ride with a massive turnout. Hundreds of kilometres flew by with ease. I met people whose stories touched me deeply and reminded me why I do all of this. Some even went to the trouble to tell me they read my Substack. All of it just made my heart feel stupidly, gloriously full.

I went to a friend’s going-away party and we sat on beanbags overlooking the skyline in vintage tees and hiking boots. Instead of going to bed, I stayed, chatting and smiling until late. On four hours’ sleep I rolled out the door and into the hardest session of my week, one I did not think I would get through, let alone sleep-deprived and underfueled. Here we go, I thought.

And the funny thing?

I rode better than ever. 50kmph for an hour was my fastest ever time on the swap-off, and I charged full steam to Greenhill road and launched myself for two twenty minute over/under efforts at top quality after. I came home with twenty-, thirty-, and sixty-minute power PBs for the year. One of the best training rides of my life. I felt incredible.

Far out.

I still believe in discipline. As I wrote here, it’s absolutely necessary. I simply owe too much to it not to.

But maybe there comes a point where locking in becomes its own toxicity, a socially acceptable form of procrastination. We can use chasing something “bigger” to avoid real human connection, softness, depth, and spontaneity. These things we paint as requiring less discipline, but actually indeed require a different level of energy, of profoundness, and demand a different yet equally legitimate form of effort.

So tell me: how many grams of protein are there in a good cry, swimming in the rainforest and a meaningful conversation between friends?

Thank you so much for reading. A few of my chats on the bike this week inspired me to launch a women’s-only social, light and fun skills ride at my local Pilates studio in the city this weekend. You can register here.

Everything I write and every event I run is made possible by the people who read, subscribe, share, and show up. If my work has meant something to you, and you’d like to help me keep making more of it, you can become a paid subscriber, buy me a coffee, come to an event, follow along on social media, or recommend my work to a friend. Every bit of support genuinely helps more than you know.

This is the earlier version, which starts as pretty much an excerpt from my diary.

I think for the first time I am going to lock it as a paid essay, because it is perhaps the most deeply personal and experimental piece I have published thus far. I have also added a lot of photos and videos to try and paint the picture where words may fall short.

As I wrote here, making a post paid is not intended as a money grab, but rather a way of keeping my private thoughts a little more private, and therefore allowing myself to be more honest, unfiltered and less guarded. Even though Substack already feels to me like a more intimate space, I am aware that anyone can still arrive here from any corner of the internet. A small lock on this piece gives me the peace of mind that it will be read by those it is actually meant for, and by those it may genuinely help or appreciate what I am trying to convey.

To write about feelings that do not yet have words is a difficult task. But perhaps I owe it to myself to try.

I am driving home from somewhere on shitty Findon Road. It is that strange hour stretched thin towards sunset, the last daylight suspended before dark when the city begins to glitter but the sky is still holding onto its last light. Speckles of soft pink spill delicately against the hard grey skeleton of gunmetal stobie poles and telephone wires, street lamps starkly fluorescent against sunset’s last glow.

I cannot remember where I had been. I only remember that just as the sky is splitting open for its final light, a certain song comes through the car aux. In that moment something in me splits open too. It hits me, catches in my throat so sharply I almost choke.

It was the soundtrack to last summer, the song to which I fell in love with Barcelona.

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Perhaps you are torn between quitting your job, breaking off a relationship, moving cities or countries. Maybe you are underperforming in your sport, or wake each day a little less certain about the degree you are tired of but so tantalizingly close to completing. Being at a crossroads can look like a life matted in misfortune: a streak of bad luck, the feeling of dragging your heels through the mud, the subtle friction of a life that has fallen out of alignment.

If it is true that what is truly ours will never pass us by, is this friction a divine sign to loosen our grip and let it go? To trust that what is ours will not ask to be forced into being?

But then comes the other voice. The one telling us to push through. Success is just around the corner.

You have likely seen the image before, the one of the man turning around just before reaching the diamonds. You’ve chipped away for this long. Who are you to give up now?

We do not have a crystal ball. We do not know what the future will hold. Nor do we know whether something feels hard because it is not destined for us, or if it is because the most worthwhile things demand the greatest sacrifices.

So how do we know when to push through, and when to let go?

That is what this essay is for. For anyone on the cusp of a difficult decision, trying to judge whether the resistance before them is acting in their favour or to their detriment.

My hope is that by the end, you’ll be left with a steadier sense of what deserves your devotion, and what needs to be released.

I perhaps should preface all of this by stating the fact that I have found myself at these same crossroads many times before.

I am naturally inclined to possess a degree of dogged determination, a trait that has kept me pushing year on year, even in the absence of getting anything in return. This tendency of mine has been mirrored in some of my previous writing.

It has often served me well. In university, I persisted through two degrees over eight years, across countries, time zones and major life changes. The relief and pride of finally graduating has been immense.

In sport, I have pushed through injury, underperformance, and doubt, all the way to national records, World Cup wins, and Olympic teams. And to experiences I never would have unlocked if it wasn’t for sport. Most of those came after some of the most horrendous setbacks of my life.

Pushing through has therefore, in many ways, been the making of me.

But it has also cost me. In my youth I have stayed in relationships embarrassingly longer than I should have, forgiving lies and cheating on the basis that I have already invested so much. I have clung to identities, environments, people, and teams I had already outgrown, simply because I felt I had poured so much of myself into becoming one with them.

And between us, even in the parts of my life most readily labelled a success, I sometimes wonder whether letting go sooner would not have been failure, but might have opened other doors.

Existing in the grey

The first thing to accept is that not all decisions need to be made with full certainty or clarity, nor do they need to be black and white.

Sometimes it is best to exist in the grey.

As a society, we are obsessed with labelling, boxing and organising things. We love a good New Year’s resolution and a job title on LinkedIn and a degree and a relationship status and a country of residence. People grow attached to these containers. But what are they actually serving?

By virtue of placing life into boxes, we become conditioned to think that what we are chasing must fit neatly into one, too.

But often, that’s not the case.

What we want isn’t a different job title or new best 10k time. We’re chasing the feeling that we associate with the kind of person who would have that title.

We want to be business owners because we crave the autonomy and perceived freedom of not answering to a boss. We want to improve that marathon time because we imagine it will make us feel fit, healthy, capable, alive.

We want the relationship, the city, the career, not only for what they are in themselves, but for the version of ourselves we believe they will allow us to become.

And when we realise that what we are really searching for is less the title itself and more the feeling beneath it, it becomes clear that getting there rarely requires a dramatic switch or a complete reinvention. More often, we can begin to build pieces of that feeling where we already are: starting something on the side, changing a habit, gathering enough evidence until it is time to leap.

I remember, several years back, having such a streak of bad luck that I became plagued by the question of whether I was doing it right. Whether hitting my head against the wall, over and over, against the odds, was actually not resilience at all, but a sign that this simply was not for me.

One day I was at my local cafe and there happened to be a tarot card reader there. I know, cut the judgement, I am writing this essay so you do not have to. I do not believe in fortunes, per se, but I do think these things can force you to turn inward.

As he laid out the cards in front of me, he gave shape to something I perhaps already knew, but did not yet have the words for.

“I see two pathways,” he said.

One was the way I was already riding, pushing through the mud. There was still success at the end of it.

The other, he said, was more unconventional. A shift, not a whole new path. Merely a pivot. Everything I had learned up until then on my current path, he said, would serve me there.

That is the crux of it. Is the thing you want pivotable? Could you use the skills you already have, the lessons you have already learned, and translate them into a different form?

Instead of quitting university entirely, could you take a gap year and explore what sits in the middle? Could you explore a side hustle without necessarily quitting your 9 to 5? Could you change the shape of the path without abandoning the deeper thing you were trying to reach through it?

Perhaps that is the advice here: before you let the whole dream go, ask whether you are truly done with it, or just done with the way in which you are currently chasing it.

And if you do pivot, trust that very little is wasted. Skills carry. Lessons carry. You are often far more prepared than you think.

When to let go.

On the other hand, there are other times when it is simply time to quit.

But often, that asks more courage of us than staying.

Have you heard of the Sunk Cost Fallacy? Neither had I, until I realised how well it explains why we humans are so set on continuing to endure things no longer meant for us. It is defined as the tendency to continue a behaviour or endeavour because of what has already been invested — time, money, effort — even when the costs now outweigh any likely benefit.

Put simply, I’ve already given so much, I may as well keep going.

While it belongs more to the world of economics, where it is used to describe investor behaviour, the principle extends quite easily into the rest of life.

Let’s start small, and then build.

Eating the food at a restaurant you do not like, just because you paid for it.

Finishing a book you do not enjoy because you have already invested time in the first few chapters.

Remaining in a failing relationship because you feel you have already put too much into it to leave.

See the pattern?

It stretches all the way upward, even underpinning arguments justifying continuing war because otherwise lives will have been sacrificed in vain.

All of these are faulty assumptions, a fallacy, because the only thing you are likely to get from continuing is more wasted time, more wasted energy, more wasted life. And yet we are still more likely to persist once we have invested in something, even when the evidence suggests it is no longer the best decision.

So, no, you are not simply too weak to “quit”. You have just unknowingly been battling against basic human psychology.

When to continue

And then, of course, there are times when we really do just need to push through.

Not everything that feels hard is wrong. I have seen plenty of recent pushback against “grind” culture, where the shift seems to be towards romanticizing softness, slowness, and anti-hustle.

But the truth is, to create many good things requires some degree of sacrifice.

And ironically, many of the people preaching a “slow life” probably earned their current lifestyle through a very hard and fast chapter of hustling first.

Grit undeniably matters. Difficult goals rarely come down to talent alone. More often, they ask for talent to be applied consistently and deliberately over time. People practice for long hours to sharpen their skill, and then work for long hours again to turn that skill into real progress.

There is additionally a degree of pride, accomplishment, and dignity in holding on through difficulty.

In my own life, I did not get to two Olympics, finish two degrees, make wonderful friends or build a beautiful life that I am grateful and proud of by living in a comfortable or cushy routine. I cannot lie and say I love six-hour rides in the rain, broken bones, awful working conditions, or being under the thumb of truly horrible people. It has all required physical pain, mental pain, monotony, discipline, followed by an almost insane willingness to keep putting yourself back in those very same situations that caused the pain in the first place. So, why would I say it is all worth it?

Perhaps what feels important here is this: if the end result were pulled from me, if I never reached it, would the journey itself still be admirable?

If I never win again, I think I would still be doing what I am doing.

And that, maybe, is one of the clearest questions to ask when deciding whether to continue:

Will I have learnt what I needed to, about myself or the world?

Was the goal only to win, or also to experience?

Would I have helped people, or left something better than I found it?

Would I still respect the person this path asked me to become?

If those are a yes, keep pushing.

I write essays for the introspective on the philosophy of everyday life, shaped through my experience as an Olympic athlete. Subscribing means these essays and lessons land in your inbox, and if you’d like to support me further, you can become a paid subscriber or buy me a coffee for when I sit down to write the next one.

On Instagram I see plenty of these day-in-the-life glimpses from road cyclists and runners. But what does anyone know about what routines are required to go to two Olympics on the track? It’s a sport that somehow demands that its athletes combine the endurance demands of road cycling, the power of a gym lifter, and the precision and science of motorsport. How you train for that, structure your days around it, and somehow make all three coexist is worth a look.

I’m also a firm believer that you can learn a lot about someone through their routines, and considering many of you have been reading my work for several months now, I think you’ve more than earnt a backstage pass. I suppose that I’ve also said before that how you spend your days is how you spend your life, so consider this an honest audit for myself, too.

So here you have it: how I truthfully my day as an Olympic track cyclist. Time-stamped and unfiltered.

5:00: My alarm buzzes at an hour I ambitiously set the night before. During summer I like to wake around this time to catch the sunrise over the beach, but I have evidently forgotten that my stretch in Australia has far surpassed it’s normal length and that we are now technically in Autumn. The mornings are drawing themselves out in darkness, and the week has been cold and unpleasant anyway, so I shamelessly choose more sleep over the prospect of a mediocre sunrise and shut it off.

7:03: I’m slapped in the face by the sun rising straight into my eyes through my window. I sleep with my blinds open for this very purpose — waking up to the sun feels natural. I’m not in my childhood bedroom, but that of my sister, and it is admittedly a bit strange to move out of home so young but periodically come back in. I do prefer having my own space in Barcelona, but with more age I also appreciate stretches of family life too.

7:07: slapped again, but this time by Willow, my 10-month-old golden retriever puppy. I’ve barely made it into the hall when BANG into my shins as she hurls herself at me. We volunteer train guide dogs for the Royal Society of the Blind, so the house is basically a revolving door of puppies.

7:12: breakfast assemblage. Two slices of toast, a bit of butter, vegemite, honey. I go back in and grab some extra fruit and granola after opening TrainingPeaks and realising how many hours I’ll be on the bike today.

I drain the last cup of black coffee from the percolator and into my mug. At this hour I’m the last one topping up my cup, everyone in my house is usually well awake before 6. Mum works two jobs, and my sister about three while also balancing uni, which makes my cadence this morning seem quite leisurely in comparison. I think by now my family understands how hard I work, and that mine is a 24/7 job rather than a 9 to 5, because I’m never switched off, but it is the sort of thing people around you have to learn to recognise and appreciate.

7:30: to avoid my third slap of the day and the one I dislike the most (opening social media), I delay it as long as possible and instead have breakfast listening to this DJ set / curation that I’ve had saved in my watch later from a band I like in spain. It makes me remember that I love being led into other genres and styles and fashion and language, and the (increasing) importance of leaning a little bit outside your usual algorithmic online echo chamber to consume culture that does not simply mirror us back to ourselves. On a side note, I feel like the internet is pivoting more towards long-form, collaborative efforts and individual uniqueness, niche aesthetics and experimentation rather than polished perfection and reliving the requirement to always appeal to the masses.

Through bites of toast I try to summon the energy to answer a few WhatsApps, a task I find disproportionately draining and overwhelming for someone who loves her friends. With so many of them in Europe though, I usually wake up to quite a few, so I think it may just be the volume. I hope I am not the only one.

Today is a slow morning which I am grateful for. I don’t have anywhere to be until 10. I quickly mathematic how long everything will take and therefore what time i need to commence things and when i need to leave which puts my mind at instant ease.

7:45: I start working on a few personal things which involve sending some photos videos and content in batches to my existing partners and sponsors and then brainstorming some events and other activations. I prefer to keep things real, narrative focused and actually genuine which takes a lot more time than simply posting online but I hope it resonates with people.

Now that I’m not studying anymore, I have a lot more creative energy to put into brands, partners, and ideas, which has actually been really fun. I’m also quietly on the lookout for a very small number of good-fit sponsors for the upcoming season, anything across sport, travel, lifestyle, tech, finance, or fashion, but ideally brands that care about story, personality, and doing things a little differently. So if anyone reading knows someone who might align, or if you resonate yourself, flick me a message. I figure if we’re meeting on Substack, we’re probably already a bit more aligned than most.

8:17: Over coffee number two I pick up a call from a friend I’m working on a new project with. Damn, we are excited! I love this stuff. We riff off creative ideas and sparks for a while and both hang up feeling even more inspired.

I don’t want to give too much away before it takes any life but since I love my Substack people, I will tell you now that you should follow Pain Sports.

Or, message me if you have anything creative ambitions at the intersection of sport and culture. I want to help!!

I type a little bit on substack, each essay takes several hours to complete and I have 42 drafts. None will be finished today.

9:20: Ok, now to the physical part of my work. Frame bag packed and strapped: skinsuit, banana bread, banana, bottles. Kit on, sunnies in the helmet. Today I’m opting for these because I’ll need the dark lenses on the road and the clear for track.

9:40: Out the door and into the bike lane, speeding past drivers stagnant bumper to bumper.

!!! Good morning to everyone except people who speed past you, brake in front of you, and then turn left into a side street. !!!!

9:54: I arrive at the South Australian Sports Institute. It’s a marvelous building. Sky-high ceilings and windows, and levels upon levels of spaces housing top technology and Australia’s brightest athletes and scientists, feel inspiring. I glide my hands over sensors to automatically open the swinging glass doors like I’m in some kind of sci-fi movie, then pass through the bike lockers, kitchens, the gym of any athlete’s dreams, the recovery centres, up the lifts and to the lab.

As I pass, I get a good glimpse of the pain machine I was strapped into for VO2 testing yesterday.

10:04: Height, weight, skinfolds in eight or so spots. It sounds intrusive to some, but I’m here by choice. A good periodic fat pinching by a trained professional keeps the fueling strong and body dysmorphia at bay. It has been challenging seeing my body change over the years, especially in this higher-intensity, strength-heavy block. Between fluctuations in water, glycogen, inflammation, racing, and creatine, scales can only tell you much.

10:35: I leave with little pen marks over the fat-pinching spots and swipe my key card to get my bike out of the locker room. I load the route I prepared earlier onto my garmin and familiarize myself with my session details.

11:55: I’ve pretty well immediately managed to veer off the route I had so carefully created on Strava, so my Garmin is screaming at me. I really only made a route because I planned to go to a climb I don’t know so well today, through neighborhoods I don’t love riding through. But it’s the closest to the track, and my idea is to do my three ten-minute tempo intervals as laps of Ansteys Hill and around the back, then ride to the track.

12:03: First lap up Ansteys. It starts steep, flattens out, and then you’re at the top before you know it. I’m trying to keep it pretty low intensity, 240 to 250 watts, but I’m a bit over that. I loop over the top and fly down the adjacent descent. I miss the turn-off and awkwardly U-turn to arrive back on the side street that leads to the bottom of the climb.

12:31: Second lap up Ansteys. I feel good, so I decide to give it some gas. I spot a radioactive-coloured Mountain Dew bottle lying in the scrub ditch and feel both disgusted and intrigued by the colour palette. Mental note saved for some of the creative stuff I was on the phone about this morning. I look down at my watts and my prescribed 240 is more like 300, so I back it off a bit. 280.

12:50-ish: Final lap up Ansteys. Regretting pushing the last lap a little now. Two cyclists pass me riding a reasonable tempo, so I ask if I can sit on and follow their pace to the top.

I can’t seem to embed the strava activity. But here, in case you want to also do three reps of Ansteys.

1:06: I arrive at the track, an hour before I’m due to start warm-up. I ignore the no bikes inside sign and roll down the ramp to the centre. I greet my coach and physio, then proceed to walk in my socks back up the slidy blue concrete ramp. In the kitchen I fumble with the espresso machine and and make myself a coffee which I pair with a packet of rice. A glamorous lunch.

1:32: I swipe into the mechanics room and unrack my Factor from where she’s hanging by the frame. She looks beautiful, as always. A quick scan of the gear chart tells me what combination of chainrings and cogs I need to collect from the trolley. I opt for 110 inches today, and 103 for warm-up. I retrieve my tools, chain whip, 4mm alen key, and 6mm for the wheels, and start fixing the chainring. I’ll keep that consistent today and just change the cog to avoid extra hassle.

The cones in the back wheel are a bit shit, so I spend longer than I’d like wrestling with the chain tension.

Finally I fix the compressor to the double disc, one side and then the other, and am met with a satisfying pssshhh as I pull it off the valve letting me know I’ve hit 220-ish psi.

1:57: Changed into my skinsuit, carbon shoes on, aero helmet fastened, sitting in a plastic chair in the pits. After a quick briefing on the warm up we unrack our bikes and set off around the track.

2:00: We spend ten-ish minutes swapping turns behind the motorbike, then we split into groups and half of us swing up while it stays down and we take turns lapping each group with it. Sounds complicated, but it makes sense out there. I think people outside of track cycling see us do these motopace efforts and freak out about how close we sit behind it. Yeah, it is true. But like the fact we don’t have brakes, you get used to it. We finish quite sweaty and slowly come off the track.

2:45: Effort one. They roll the start gate onto the track and I lock my bike in — eight laps from a standing start at IP pace. I maybe underestimated this session and am humbled quite quickly. I go out a bit slow, see my split, try to correct, then come around again way too fast. Fuck. I’m pretty well crawling by lap six.

3:00: Scientists are here to put an aero probe on my bike. They fasten it and do a bit of software stuff while I wait around.

3:15: Do the same again, but I aim to go a bit slower as to not overpace. Except I am also just more tired so i am actually just going slower with the same effort.

Afterwards the scientists are moving things around a bit more so I sit down and run through the data of my Vo2 and critical power testing this week. Maybe I should write a bit about how we do this. The data is interesting and I’ve made some solid improvements. Full steam ahead to the next World Cup.

3:45: Effort three, this time a flying 2km. The motorbike leads me in and, in the absence of a gate start to load the legs, I am far faster.

4:10: I thought I was done, but we go again. The legs are getting a bit stingy now, and energy is flatlining. I start almost eager to finish and am way too fast on schedule, so I die off in the last few laps.

I jump off, unpack my bike, swig a protein shake and commence the ride home.

5:00: As I set off on the forty five minutes or so, my friend calls me from the Netherlands. We chat through one ear of my corded headphones which improves my mood despite being on adelaides’ shittest road (grand junction). I miss her and europe life a lot. after a day of pursuit pace and aero probes its nice to pedal without looking at power.

5:41: Phone goes flat a few minutes from home. She will forgive me.

5:50: Home, quick shower, changed, smash down a protein shake.

6:25: Walk to my massage, the long way, via the river. I could ride my city bike, but I find doing something slower actually helps me not always be in such a rush. In my line of work I feel like everything is always a sequence of things to optimise, so walking, though inefficient, feels like a small refusal of that.

7:00: Sports massage with tender legs. My massage therapist and I always have interesting conversations. Today: how differences in language (he speaks Czech and German) shapes individual experiences and cultural norms.

My main critique: Australians say ‘how are you’ as a greeting, not a question. In other countries, at least from my experience living in places like the Netherlands, it is much more of an actual inquiry which obligates a real response. We end up discussing how Australians can be some of the friendliest people while still remaining oddly hard to know on a deeper level.

8:03: I start walking home. It’s sort of weird that it’s dark already by eight these days. The night is clear though, and I can see Mars, which is cool. My usual compatibility test is whether someone can list the planets in order. Minimum viable level of nerdiness.

8:35: I sit on the couch with my parents for a little bit and try to eat something for dinner, but I get weird sometimes when I’m not craving anything in particular, because food kind of becomes overwhelming. I pick at some leftovers, scroll through my data from the day, and scratch Willow.

9:02: I’m in bed before 9. I put on a Mexican TV show that I’ve been watching in a somewhat brainless attempt not to lose my level of Spanish while I’m here in Australia.

Tomorrow is a rest day. Well, gym plus a short ride. A rest compared to a whole day of exercising today.

I learn from this morning and turn off that 5am alarm.

There you have it. How I spend my day as an Olympic track cyclist. As a lesser-known sport, I hope this gave a bit of insight into how I shape my hours.

For context, I have spent this week feeling slightly unprofound and uninspired. My mind has been racing a million miles an hour, but in the broad, chatty, wildly productivity way rather than the thoughtful one. Usually my long road rides and stretches alone are where my thinking gets done, but in the lulls between high-pressure track races, the days have instead been filled with VO2 max testing, intensity, group rides, and international calls. All of which has left very little time to marinate in my own thoughts and meditate on words, which is inconvenient when you are trying to be a person who writes things worth reading.

Then I read somewhere not to treat life as a barrier to writing, but rather as its inspiration, and decided to stop waiting to become thoughtful and simply write what I lived.

As always, I squeeze this writing in where I can so if you appreciate it you can subscribe or buy me a coffee here. I am super proud that I got out two publications this week(!!) .

As I said earlier, I am also on the lookout for a few commercial sponsors as I move towards my next big set of championships. If you, or someone you know would be a good fit for working together, drop me a message here and I’ll get in touch.

Also if you liked this time stamped style, let me know. Additionally, essay suggestions for the coming weeks are welcome! I have some creative projects upcoming which I think you won’t want to miss, and a bit of an ambitious idea for this substack. Stay tuned.

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To write is to taste life twice.*

I cut and pasted these words from vintage national geographic clippings and newspaper scraps and pieced them across the opening spread of my journal. Now, each time I return to press ink to paper I’m reminded exactly of why I write.

What does it mean, to taste life twice?

When you love your life, when you try to suck the marrow from every part of it, sometimes you become so full you cannot properly savour every bite. Summers arrive saturated and sticky as syrup, split open with smiles, sunsets oozing gold, light dripping down your wrists like honey. A life abundant with beauty and nature and movement and connection spins like a carousel at an amusement park. Painted horses prancing through burnt sugar air, each bright and delicious thing circling past before offering the chance to taste what came before it.

I am grateful, deeply, that my trouble is one of abundance, of loving life too much. But I never quite know when the music will cut, lurching the ride to a halt. Adrenaline blurs each song, each lap, each perfect moment into one. Stop the world, I want to get off.

And so, in quiet corners, pressing ink to paper feels like reliving it. Only this time, I can hold the moment still by its warm throat. Savouring it.

Because of this practice, I think I can now live more presently, in the thick of things. I no longer have to mourn the end of a perfect moment before it has even passed. Like grieving the way the sun will set on a perfect day before the horizon has had the chance to swallow it. I know now that even a few blissful seconds can be stretched thin as caramel into pages if I feel compelled enough.

That is the other miracle of writing. It does not only relive. It preserves. Memories put to words will wait patiently, folded into the pages of a journal somewhere, for the day, years later, when you stumble upon them again. Writing preserves how we felt, what we feared, what we longed for. It gives permanence to the fleeting. It keeps alive the moments that might otherwise have dissolved in the heat of living. I’ve often found that through the act of being written down at all, even the most ordinary moments can begin glowing at the edges.

And the beauty of stumbling upon those pages later is that you do not simply taste the moment again as it was. You taste it beneath a layer of everything you have learned since. That is the gift you give yourself. When I reread what I have written, I see it through the lens of who I am now. This might bring to my attention a new layer to the interaction, a tenderness I did not yet have for myself, or a meaning or significance only uncovered by time.

Of course, I write all of this as though life is always beautiful, as though every moment is one you would want to taste again. Yet many of us only pick up the pen when life feels heavy. Somehow, spilling ink, spilling words, makes life feel lighter. Admittedly, moments themselves cannot be rewritten, and pain cannot be unfelt. But we can keep writing until the moment is made sense of, until the wound is no longer bleeding and raw to the touch. We write to transform pain from a formless feeling into something examinable, something legible, something with edges. We write because we cannot help rehearsing what should have been said, done, or known. We write until confusion begins to arrange itself into meaning. I can retaste the pain, yes, but I can retaste my response just as well.

When I reopen my journals, scattered with the good and the bad and the ordinary, I am grateful for the gift I have given myself. To write is to taste life twice: first in the living, before the sun has set, while everything is still warm and wild on the tongue, and then again in the stillness, in the aftertaste of hindsight, when the moment has been preserved long enough to properly savour.

* I know now that this is not the exact original quote, but it invokes in me the same feeling nonetheless.

Every so often, you encounter something that resonates with such an intense specificity that you need to take a moment to reread it. You find yourself subconsciously stretching words beyond their original edges, stitching your own story between the authors’ lines to articulate what you couldn’t quite say before.

This quote was one of those things.

Winners forget they’re in a race, 

They just love to run. 

I thought about the areas of my life in which I just love to run. By that, I mean the things that I return to for the love of them. And by love, I mean pure love. Love of the game. Unreciprocated love, sometimes. Love irrespective of attention, earnings or even a pat on the back.

I think there are two questions that decide whether you truly love to run:

Would I still do this if nobody ever saw it?
Would I still do this if I was really bad at it?

My first love was not cycling. It was endurance sport.

Cycling only later became the form in which I felt I could best express myself. Like an artist dabbling in acrylics, ceramics, and finally settling on textiles, I threw my body from a young age at swimming, surf life saving, athletics, netball, lacrosse, triathlon and wherever else I could get a toe on the line.

When I started swimming at age eleven or so, my parents had a rule: we would only go to training if I woke them up. A sure sign it was not them, but me, choosing this path. Without fail I’d shake my dad awake at 4:00am and off we would go, the car winding through the black blanket of Western-Adelaide suburbia in a path I could still trace by heart.

I can still taste the chemical, sterile stench of chlorine that would coat my skin long after I’d dried off. The hum of fluorescent lights seared my eyes. Plastic lane ropes sliced at my fingers. Yet I’d run back to it day after day, diving in again earlier and earlier and signing up for races that were longer and longer. On the one morning per week where the pool would shut I kept the alarm on my clock radio set regardless. I’d roll out of bed and jog through the same black of the night to the local park, then sprint the two kilometers home as hard as I could. As I passed the water bubbler in three final exhausted strides I’d fumble to press the plastic button on my baby G-Shock, the grey display clocking some kind of split. Content with my efforts, I’d skip home still sweating and immediately rush to reach the chart that I had hand drawn and blue-tacked to my wall, ready to pencil in this week’s time.

Isn’t it funny how that spreadsheet drawn in pencil would later evolve into Excel, Strava, and eventually TrainingPeaks as I progressed from club races to national championships and eventually multiple Olympics. Through those years and well into my late teens, I never thought I could be paid to do sport. I just kept doing it. For most of my cycling career I’ve lived below the poverty line as defined here in Australia, technically speaking, but I felt so rich in so many other ways.

Equally, none of it was ever really motivated by winning, trophies, or even eyes on me. Those dark Wednesday mornings were an early expression of the same philosophy that has carried me through my whole career. That is, that if you locked me in a dark room with no spectators, no coaches, no one at all, just my bike, a turbo, and a power meter, and told me to ride a flat-out four minutes, I’d not only do it, I’d ride to the point of throwing up.

There are other areas of life where I can say, wholeheartedly, that I just love to run.

My first memory as a child is pouncing barefoot along the rock pools at Bulli Beach in New South Wales, Australia, eyes glued to the crevices beneath me. I’d crouch and poke and prod at the still water gathered in the intertidal pools, mesmerized by the strange little metropolis of life there: soft sponge and trembling jelly textures beside hard shells and sharp edges, swaying anemones anchored against barnacled rock, slick scaly fish slipping between stone. Each thing occupied its place with its own texture, rhythm, and peculiar kind of beauty. After each beach day, I’d fling myself onto my bed and rummage through the pages of my Australian Encyclopedia of Animals. I couldn’t read, but I would study the pictures and the maps of distribution, trying to locate the creatures I had seen for myself.

So when it came time to choose a university degree, it should have been obvious what I loved to run in, and therefore what I should study. Yet I still enrolled in a generic Bachelor of Science and Law, told by people around me that I should do something I could build a career in. I can’t say I regret the decision, because at eighteen you are mostly just making the best choice you can with the knowledge you have. But it was undoubtedly a lesson in having the courage to follow the path of passion.

Two years later, I kept the law but transferred my basic science degree into marine biology. To my surprise, our first lesson in Concepts of Ecology II was precisely what I had been doing at five years old: species identification for intertidal communities. With little effort, I aced that class. Throughout the rest of my degree, I maintained a GPA close to high distinctions.

This fascination with the natural world was matched only by a love of photographing it. On my eighth birthday I was given a Canon PowerShot point-and-shoot, and my poor parents probably didn’t anticipate just how much the thing would cost them in printing. I could fill an SD card in an hour. In grade school I entered competitions with close-up photographs of barnacles on a jetty pylon, which probably tells you everything you need to know about the kind of child I was.

As equipment became more expensive and photography more commonplace with the rise of social media, I’ve kept shooting, but mostly keep the results to myself. Off the top of my head I can think of maybe one exception — in the middle of winter in Whyalla, I sat on the ocean floor in hypothermia-inducing water, tiny GoPro in hand and a borrowed flash, waiting for the perfect shot of a giant cuttlefish interaction. I did win an award for that image, and it was used in a few news publications, although I haven’t entered any competitions since. I dabbled in film until I broke my film camera in sub-zero temperatures in Iceland. My Olympus mirrorless, bought for me on my eighteenth birthday, has followed me around since, even if I can’t really afford to upgrade it.

A love of photography, I think, naturally follows a love of curiosities. A love of travel. It’s why, when I am living out of a suitcase in Europe for half the year, I actually do love it. That appetite was probably seeded early. My father was a travel journalist, and my mother was well travelled and curious in her own right. Between them, we were raised to venture far, notice beauty, engage with culture, and ask questions. When we travelled through Asia as kids, my mum made us all keep scrapbooks, pasting in maps and photos and tickets and drawings and little scraps of language. I learnt later that she kept similar notebooks during her twenties spent living in Indonesia. Apparently, the Tik Tok girls are calling this Junk Journaling now. Anyways, I’ve simply never stopped. My friends gasp when they flick through my journals and find pages swollen with receipts, boarding passes, wrappers, notes, and pressed fragments of places I have been. It’s so much effort, they say. I could never commit. Yet it has never felt like an effort to me. It brings me so much joy.

That same feeling captured me by surprise when I began learning Spanish. It became another area of life in which I realised, almost accidentally, that I love to run. And because I loved it, I picked it up at a pace that shocked a lot of people around me. Unlike my friends, who begrudgingly log on each day to preserve their Duolingo streaks, I genuinely crave Spanish input. Last year I had a loose goal of being able to make friends who don’t speak English, and in achieving it, I unexpectedly changed my life. I could write a whole article on what this passion has brought me. It became a way to escape my own limiting beliefs in English, to try on a different personality, and to challenge the way I perceive the world, and the extent to which language shapes that, in ways I never knew before.

And finally, with that same reverence for communication, I love to write. It’s why I’m on here, publishing weekly, spending hours on my little essays regardless of whether only a few eyes make it this far. I love feeling an essay take shape. Building it. Feeling the crest of the argument, the crescendo, the loop back to the beginning. Cutting and polishing it. It is an art of putting thought to words and shaping it into something another person can feel.

In writing all of this, I realised there was a part of the quote I had perhaps overlooked at first: Winners.

While I don’t consider myself a winner, because I have lost far more times than I have won, I realize so plainly, that when you love to run, you usually run well.

Perhaps it is because the effort, while still there, feels less like a disciplined decision and more like devotion. When you love to run, you still hurt, you still tire, you still doubt. But you return anyway. Not because you were told to. Not because anyone is watching. But because you’re in love with the running itself. And while winning is never guaranteed, it may just follow more organically from there.

So please, if you do anything this year, find what you love to run in.

For the love of the game.

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I write for the love of it, just as I race. But if you’d like to support the work, help keep it alive, and get a little more in return, you can subscribe below or buy me a coffee here.

World Cup, that is.

Yet as years at the top accumulate, the third, fifth and seventh start to blur.

And now I am here, on the cusp of my ninth.

World Cups are funny. They are sometimes very significant and sometimes very much dwarfed by World Championships and Olympics. Sport does not exactly encourage reminiscing, it’s by nature obsessed with what’s next. As a result, I don’t think I’ve ever actually sat down and gone through them properly in order.

Maybe that’s a shame, because there’s certainly something in looking back. What worked and what didn’t. How nerves got into your legs under pressure. How you responded to feedback. What the older riders gave you, and what you might owe the younger ones now.

So, here you have it. A fun little mash-up of memories from pulling on the green and gold around the world. I’ll throw in some context in the form of long-buried throwback photos plus some cringe Instagram posts too… after all, I know you’re all going to dig them up anyway. No judgement pretty please, I’m being vulnerable here.

Also, please don’t expect a literary masterpiece. If you want some nicely polished essays, you can find them here. For now, I’m cooked from official training and I’ve got a pre-race hit-out soon.

2018, Paris.

October 2018, Paris. Back when World Cups were actually raced in a reasonable month. Funny to think that years later I’d be racing my second Olympics on those same boards. Safe to say no one in the velodrome was contemplating that possibility. Certainly not me.

I got the call-up late, not as a result of talent but more by default, as one of the only people in the country with enough UCI points to start in the bunch events. And, trust me, I was aware of it. These women were world-class athletes. I was, quite frankly, out of my depth.

I was only there for the points race, but once in training they let me sub into an effort. Me and my little red Cervelo were suddenly in the wheels of my idols. I didn’t quite have the guts to tell them this was probably the fastest I’d ever been on a bike. I hit the front. Goooo. A few pedal strokes in and I already hear:

SWING

Not even half a lap and I had already dropped the pace. F….ck.

Anyways, as for the racing itself, I was really only there for a token points race which no one except me particularly cared about. I had zero experience and, apparently, zero understanding of physics, because I’d sprint, then sit on the black line and wait for everyone to come whacking past with all the speed generated from the banking. Minus a million points for the fact that Paris is one of the highest tracks in the world, which means if you’re sitting on the black line you get double-ambushed by anyone flying around up the top. I came tenth.

WC count: 1, medal tally: 0.

2019, Hong Kong.

Less than a year later, I’m part of the Australian academy for young emerging riders and we’re on our first development trip to Hong Kong. My roommate had spent the night puking her guts out, poor thing, and didn’t look too good on the rollers, so we chopped and changed line-ups even harder than we chopped and changed lines on that weirdly engineered track.

The women’s madison was in its first year of being introduced, so it was basically in it’s peak teething period. Thirty-something top-tier riders, no precedent, and not a huge amount of collective clarity about what carnage was about to unfold. In the first few laps, one of the GOATs of women’s track cycling, Kirsten Wild, came right onto my hip, leaned down, and I think I nearly peed myself I was so scared. Within 0.2 of a second I’d let her push me onto the black where I was sucked into the vortext of the peloton, spat straight out the back. Meanwhile, all around us riders were crashing, then reappearing riding 30kmph on the blue band while the peloton whacked past at 50. It was carnage. Chaos.

I was so overstimulated that after the race the team manager couldn’t find me for three hours.

I was crying in the changeroom.

Regardless, we ate a lot of cool food. I discovered the word sonder and properly felt it while looking out from my bedroom over all the tiny lights in Hong Kong’s high towers. And I adopted Pig because it was the Year of the Pig, memorably. Pig got in trouble for acquiring an Australian team jersey and always sitting in the team manager’s chair.

WC count: 2, medal tally: 0

2019, Cambridge.

My first real trot with the big girls was in Cambridge. I was on a phenomenal streak of form, and we were getting dangerously close to Tokyo. After literally smashing my way into training sessions with the senior team, they took me there as a bit of a test. After all, anyone can train well, but how would she race?

I was so nervous I couldn’t eat. You’re just here as a reserve, the head coach reminded me. But I felt like there was more pressure on me than anyone. A) I had no experience in a team of world champions. B) this team of established older female riders probably didn’t want this annoying little 20-year-old there, which, fair enough. And C) if I made a single mistake, in my mind, that was my Olympic dream done.

Somehow, though, I was absolutely flying. Freshly twenty and equally stubborn and naive as to what was physically reasonable, I did some stupid five laps on the front or something. Which more or less locked me into all three rounds.

I look back on it now and still don’t know how the f**k I did that, but alright. We were smooth, fast, worked together amazingly, and set a ripping time. I was riding with my idols. It was magic.

WC count: 3, medal tally: 1 silver.

2019, Brisbane.

A mere month later we were in Brisbane, ready to ride again. We had an amazing ride again, but God it was hard. A new national record. Three rounds in a day.

We won gold, but here’s a slightly intimate truth about that race.

I recall being upset because for some reason I didn’t think I had ridden as well as I could have. I probably did 3.5 laps instead of 4 or something equally tiny and trivial, on the third ride of the day, which is still objectively very good for a literal kid. Anyways. There is a moment after winning gold on home soil where everyone rides up towards the stands, to hug and greet their families. My boyfriend at the time was there heckling, but I refused to ride up there because I was sucking in air while wiping tears from my eyes. I remember him getting really mad that I had just won a gold medal at a World Cup, with the literal world champions, heading into an Olympic year, and yet somehow I was still crying.

But now that I’m older, I see it more clearly. I wasn’t motivated by the medal. I was motivated by doing the best job I could for the girls in the team. It meant everything to me. Up until then I’d gone from nobody to suddenly being on a trajectory to the Olympics. To stay on it, I couldn’t afford to slip a single session, half a millisecond, or the slightest error for months on end. That built and built into this insanely high standard that I was holding myself to. The gold final, in hindsight, marked the peak of all that pressure. No wonder I was crying.

Once it settled in though, I was filled with gratitude. We did it.

I love this picture of the girls and I. Now I realise how symbolic it was that they put me, the absolute nobody, in the middle of the podium between their rainbow bands. Instead of pushing me out, they welcomed me in. I think it will always be one of my favourite photos of my career.

WC count: 4, medal tally: 1 silver, 1 gold.

2022, Milton.

Covid hit, so the next one after the Olympics was Milton. I had one of the best summers of road racing of my life and had recently become the third woman in history to crack the 3:20 barrier. After so long locked up in Australia, things were finally looking good.

My coach thought I deserved a shot at the omnium. I was ecstatic. I wanted to be a bunch racer after dedicating so much of myself to pursuiting. But a few weeks before, I suffered a horrible concussion. I couldn’t read. The neuropsych said I was better off not doing the omnium, being the most hyper-stimulating event possible. Sad, but fair.

They had an IP though, and after setting that time I thought, okay, why not. IPing is a lot less mentally fatiguing. Physically it’s horrendous, but you switch your brain off to endure that. So I did that, and won gold. We got a medal in the TP as well.

I’m half Canadian, yet I hadn’t seen my grandpa since 2008. The chance to race here also meant the chance to come to Canada. As I came around, my grandpa waved his cane and cheered. It was a beautiful moment and one that I will always remember.

Milton is a town slightly devoid of soul, so it was hard to find much interesting to do off the bike, other than go to Niagara Falls with my sister and grandpa afterwards. Still to this day I laugh, because why was this the most underwhelming tourist attraction ever known to man? I’m an idiot, because I thought it would be situated in a forest or something, not a Vegas-style strip. Anyways, here’s us in ponchos, getting absolutely slammed by waterfall spray.

WC count: 5, medal tally: 2 silver, 2 gold.

And that’s where I’ll leave Part One.

But Maeve, you said you’ve been to eight?

Yes, indeed. I can assure you, the remaining stories of Jakarta, Adelaide, Konya and soon-to-be Perth are when things flipped a bit. They’re worth sticking around for.

But, alas, it’s nearing time for my pre-race roller hit out, and quite frankly I’ve got to shut my laptop screen to pick up my afternoon agenda of rewatching elimination races and consuming carbs.

If you’d like to watch me race tonight, it’s being streamed. If you’d like to support me, subscribe here, follow me on Instagram, and leave a comment or something (it’s cool, it drives people here), or just share this around.

Thanks for reading this little mash-up. It’s a different style to my usual essays, lighter and more fun, so if you liked it, tell me.

As always, I’m doing this simply for the love of it. But if you feel like subscribing or buying me a coffee, or a few, it genuinely goes a long way and is a little bit of evidence to me that people resonate with my work. Plus, I will absolutely use it to buy a market coffee while I write the next one :)

What aspect of this life do you feel the most profound connection to?

That is, what element affects you most deeply, influences you most, and sits either within or beyond your mastery?

I’ll go first.

In this phase of my life, it is undoubtedly time.

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As a professional cyclist, time is the epicenter of what I dedicate myself to professionally. At its most stripped-back, my profession could be boiled down to the deceptively simple pursuit of getting from A to B in the least amount of time possible.

Track cycling, in particular, requires an extraordinarily sensitive calibration to time. And because time, in the simplest mathematical sense, is just distance divided by speed, I have become highly sensitive to distance and speed too. They are inseparable. To become good at one is to become intimate with the others.

In a team pursuit, we are not afforded the luxury of Garmins on our headstems to relay live speed stats. Every fifteen seconds or so, as we loop around for a lap, our coach leans in with a board to give us a rough split:

15.3

15.4

Fuck.

A tenth.

Truth be told, that tiny drop would likely get me in trouble.

The idea of being intrinsically sensitized to a 0.1-second change in a 15-second lap is probably unimaginable to some, and perhaps even unbelievable to those that rarely practice anything of the sort. Try it yourself: set a timer on your phone and see whether you can blindly estimate to that level of precision. Inconceivable, right? Yet for someone who has spent years training to that level of calibration, the loss or gain of even a kilometer per hour over a few tens of meters is perceptible. That is the craft. At an event as dialed as the Olympics, such margins cease to be insignificant and become completely decisive.

And perhaps that gives some indication of how intimate my relationship with time has become. Because in doing so, one eventually realises just how fluid and pliable it truly is.

Our perceptions of it, at least. You see, humans lack a dedicated sensory organ for time. We do not encounter it directly, in the way we do sight or smell, as something primarily delivered to consciousness. Instead, we infer it. Assemble it. Time arrives indirectly mediated through complex and interacting neural systems concerned with motion, attention, memory, emotion, and internal bodily rhythms. Time, accordingly, is never simply received first hand. It is interpreted.

And because it is interpreted, it is unstable. Our experience of time is not fixed, but distributed, elastic, and deeply contingent on context. Like putty in your fingers it can be stretched, compressed, distorted, warped. A second can swell whilst an hour can collapse.

What is perhaps stranger still is that the systems through which we assemble time are entangled with those through which we experience emotions. Fear, joy, anxiety, sadness, novelty, salience: they all intertwine to alter the taste, the texture, the perception of duration. For this reason, a moment charged with feeling rarely moves at its ordinary pace. It thickens. Thins. And it will never feel quite the same for you as it does to the person standing beside you.

Once you begin to notice this, or study it closely enough, you do more than simply observe the difference. You begin to play with it. To test its edges. To experiment with how it bends and warps around discomfort, repetition, anticipation, novelty. To taste the difference between resisting an experience and surrendering to it fully. Time begins to reveal itself as something that oscillates.

I will give an example of a simple exercise that I routinely use to play with time. Almost daily, a five minute plank. Not because I feel my core needs it. But as anyone who has ever planked knows, time seems to stretch when you’re planking. Pinned in one position, narrowed to a single task, stripped of distraction: everything conspires to lengthen the moment.

When something is acutely uncomfortable, or requires an element of suffering, the most effective way to make it pass faster is to attach your mind to anything else. Salience is what stretches time, and suffering is nothing if not salient: sharp, immediate, difficult to ignore. Distraction blunts that salience. As I have written before, bargaining with the past or rehearsing the future often feels safer than staying present. But it comes at a cost: focus erodes, and so does the quality of the experience.

Recently in pilates, I was deep into the final repetitions of a lift, each three-second hold stretching as I pulsed back and forth slowly through lactate burning. My instructor said something I think I will remember forever.

Experience it.

There was something almost absurd about that instruction. Experience it. Don’t escape. Don’t negotiate with it. Don’t distract yourself from the pain. Just remain inside it.

And yet, ironically, the things that shave off those tiny fractions are usually the things that require the heaviest investments of time. Milliseconds are shed through hours, days, weeks, months of repetition.

This is where time changes character again.

At the microscale, progress demands acute sensitivity. On the macroscale, however, survival often demands something else entirely. If you allow every hour to fully lengthen, if you chew each repetition deeply and taste all of it, the pain becomes too great. And if not the pain, then the boredom. Here, novelty is the enemy. The work asks for repetition so relentless that to feel each moment too sharply would make it almost unbearable.

People often ask how I can ride for five, six, seven hours without becoming bored. Heck, I have even done close to ten once. The same rhythmic pedal strokes, spinning over a familiar ribbon of tarmac, the same body turning over the same task, hour upon hour, alone with your own mind.

The answer is that this, too, is a skill.

And like the plank, it must be practised. Let me give an equivalent exercise.

When was the last time you were truly bored? No phone. No conversation. No music. At my peak “fitness”, I have reached the point where I could sit through a fourteen-hour long-haul flight with no phone, no films, no simple distractions. I call it fitness because that is exactly what it is: a trainable capacity to tolerate that kind of emptiness and enter some kind of state of meditative existence.

What you begin to notice is that, unlike a plank, which requires you to remain inside the sharpness of time and feel its full weight, long stretches of boredom require you to loosen your grip. They ask you to stop interrogating each minute. To let the edges soften. To let the sand of time slip through open fingers.

The benefit of this is that it allows us to do extraordinary amounts of work almost automatically. In doing so, we become capable of accumulating the repetitions required to improve: the hard, the sticky, the unsexy, the unnovel. The long rides, the same lifts, the thousands of small acts through which improvement compounds. It allows us to tolerate the dull ache of repetition without flinching. We often misname that discipline. But it’s not a conscious effort.

I suppose the real risk lies in knowing how, or whether, to shift between these two experiences of time.

Sometimes we fall too far into the latter. We build a monastic routine, submit ourselves to repetition, and then blink as hours, days, weeks, even months slip. At other times, life becomes so saturated with chaos, salience, and novelty that any monotonous or repetitive work begins to drag under its own weight. Time passes slowly, heavily, and with such texture that we often emerge from it not enriched, but burnt out. Fatigued by the sheer density of our own experience.

And perhaps that is what mastery of time really is, or at least mastery of our perception of it. Not quite controlling it exactly, but learning to harness the emotions so inextricably linked to it, so that we can shift between its different modalities in a way that feels somewhat intentional. Realising that there is a skill in itself, a kind of wisdom, in knowing when to sharpen yourself enough to feel a fraction of a second, and when to soften enough to survive the long blur required to earn it. Respecting the art of sitting not only with discomfort, but with boredom too.

There is power in realising that our perception of time can be compressed, stretched, dilated, distorted. To master it is to move from a life lived at the mercy of time to one in which you have learned to shape your experience of it.

In truth, to say I’m at ease being single is an understatement. It’s a conscious choice, and one that I interestingly don’t feel leaves me lacking love in the slightest. I love it, I cherish it, I feel it deeply, and I see it all around me.

As a self-confessed hopeless romantic, love, in my experience, generally brings with it an urge to write. Consequently, I’ve sent more than a few love letters over the year. Addressed to: platonic friends, family, people I admire, someone simply because the moment demanded to be preserved, and, of course, unapologetically, to the occasional romantic interest. For me, it’s a way of capturing exactly how I feel in a given moment without any risk that the sentiment will be jumbled by nerves when I try to do justice to the words speaking them out loud. I’ve additionally found it to be an almost guaranteed method of coaxing a smile as eyes skim the page. It’s a craft that’s real, authentic, and quietly addictive once you’ve sent a few.

Unlike a text message, which by design facilitates and therefore inherently expects a prompt response, a love letter does not. That’s the beautiful thing about it: by nature, it doesn’t demand reciprocation. Of course, you can write me one back, and I’d love nothing more. But generally speaking, once it’s placed in the receiver’s hands, a love letter is simply read, then tucked away, folded into a wallet, kept in a box of treasures, thrown out or whatnot.

The act of writing a letter is therefore its own kind of giving, a way of appreciating someone by immortalizing what’s true in a single moment. And so perhaps the action of writing a love letter presents the perfect metaphor for what I have learnt and practiced in love in recent years: to give it without requiring it back.

Let me explain. I can spend a morning watching a beautiful sunrise and feel full of love as I witness its colours dance over the ocean. When I return the next morning, it may be grey. That doesn’t make me love yesterday’s memory any less. It also doesn’t mean I won’t be back tomorrow.

I’m filled with love for those around me, a kind that flows in abundance from sources that only reveal themselves when you’re open to them. Since channelling more energy into my friendships, I’ve been rewarded with cups overflowing with joy, conversation, and company, and I’ve come to recognize the quiet pride of watching different friends become friends with each other. The unconditional kind flows from my family, built out of “so, what’s on for you today?” over pots of burnt coffee, pavlova Christmases at home, cheering in the stands. It reveals itself in the street: a scribbled love note on a street pole, dancing on the sidewalk, hands locked during a commute, my coffee order memorized. Love reveals itself to those who notice it.

I realize, though, that there remains one area in my life where I contradict everything I’ve said here, in its entirety. Where I do expect love to be reciprocated.

In my sport.

Training day in, day out. Pushing: more power, more discipline, more sacrifice, more pain. As I recently wrote, it’s human nature to bargain with our suffering. If I give this much, I should receive that. If I train like this, I should hit these times, power numbers, placings.

It’s tempting logic because it almost works. In most parts of life, effort and outcome have a relatively linear relationship. You study and you pass, you show up and improve. Only very high at the top does this linear relationship blur. Injury, emotion, selection, headwind, crashes and illness all enter the equation. Such fine margins mean that the difference between a mere watt can be life-changing.

And when I don’t achieve it, but I’ve done the work, I don’t just feel disappointed. I feel angry at myself. Almost cheated. I expect to reach the time and the power PB and the race win for the amount of investment.

So is the issue that I’m confusing devotion with entitlement?

And is it okay, even necessary, to put in all the work and expect nothing in return?

Not in a defeatist way. In a freeing way. Giving everything in a session and a race to honor the feeling, the craft, to be alive and chasing something.

To be clear, I am not romanticizing deteriorating pressure — quite the opposite. There is merit in seriousness, in standards. Everything worth doing is going to be work. Pressure is basically inevitable in elite sport, a byproduct of sponsors and teams and organizations and limits of both time and resources. It demands a willingness to hurt, a willingness to risk failing publicly, and a willingness to uphold a standard; day in, day out. Even when it would perhaps be easier to live life cautiously and casually and call it balance.

If anything, this pressure makes giving 110% even more difficult, because when you truly do, the consequence of failure twists the knife in your self-esteem. I know many incredibly talented athletes, businesspeople and even friends who subconsciously never give their all for this reason. They train and execute at 99% subconsciously, always keeping a few percent left to blame in the event of underperformance: better sleep, a cleaner diet, more discipline. Not complete self-sabotage, but a micro-version of it.

Why? Because when you truly, wholeheartedly give everything to something or someone and you still don’t win, it’s a brutally vulnerable experience. Heart-wrenching. Akin to sending a thousand love letters in anticipation of response and never receiving back a single one.

I understand this because I’ve lived on the flipside: a huge stretch of my career spent giving 110%, only to be met with disappointment.

It was an intense exercise, loving something so hard that it didn’t love me back. And for that reason I know that putting your whole being into something with little to no return requires more than mere faith that it will work out. It requires an understanding that even if it doesn’t, you still love it anyway.

Because if the only version of love you allow yourself to give is the kind that loves you back, is it really love? Or is it merely an investment?

So, write some love letters to your sport. Like you’d watch a sunrise and then go do your training session: take it all in, whether you’re met with grey skies or colour, and come back tomorrow anyway. Like a first date spent simply getting to know someone, turn down the unknown road, or try the new training strategy, even if it turns out to be a dead end. Love like you love your friends: generously, full gas, without keeping score. Love without the aim of reciprocation.