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Every morning in Africa
by Ben Greenwood | 06/09/09

Every morning in Africa, an antelope wakes up. It knows it must outrun the fastest lion, or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest antelope, or it will starve. It doesn’t matter whether you’re the lion or an antelope – when the sun comes up, you’d better be running.

I’m neither an antelope nor a lion, and I’m pretty sure I couldn’t outrun either. What I am is a cyclist, for me riding isn’t a matter of life or death; I’m not going to get eaten if I go too slow nor will I go hungry if I can’t catch up. For me the only outcomes are to win or to lose; to be a hero or a nobody. But yet every day I know I must ride, it’s not a choice it’s a necessity. A lazy lion won’t survive, a lazy cyclist won’t win.

A professional cyclist deals in two currencies, motivation and form. The two are inextricably linked, good form produces good motivation, bad form and you’re already checking how far you have to ride to the feed before you can abandon. Both are something of a mystery. Form, while often searched for, is normally only found for short periods of time, generally when the form is there it sticks around just long enough before cruelly abandoning ship in search of someone else.

Motivation is more like the British weather, unpredictable, changeable, and not always around on the days when it’s meant to be. When the sun is shining and the legs are good it’s easy to put in the big attack in the race or do the extra hour in training, but these aren’t the days when a rider really wins a race.

The days when it’s pouring with rain, when you feel crap and would rather be tucked up in bed rather than getting blown off your bike in a blizzard. These are the days where you’re checking your wallet for some motivation, a wodge of form is no good, that won’t get you out the door. You search under the sofa, in the pockets of your jeans, anywhere you can think of to find that motivation you’re sure you saw yesterday. Without it a day on the sofa watching daytime TV awaits you.

The trouble is that you can’t buy motivation; you can’t swap it for a ‘shiny’ like you did with your football stickers when you were at school. It has to come from within, even though a strong cup of coffee or a bag of Tesco’s finest cookies can sometimes give you a slight morale boost, they are a cheap fix. Motivation must come from within; you have to really want to win, to be the best, if you don’t believe in yourself then who will?

As an afterthought, do animals have days when they lack motivation? Do lions and antelopes sometimes wake up, look at the weather and think, I’ll have a lie in today? Surely cavemen didn’t have days when they couldn’t be bothered, as they had to eat. Maybe modernisation is the real killer of motivation; too many distractions, too much given on a plate. Necessity it seems, is where it’s at.

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