My Hardest Ever Ride

Whether you’re a pro or an amateur, we all suffer on the bike. Brace yourselves for some real endurance tests ahead...

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‘I got caught for the first time as a pro’

Ryan Mullen (EF Education First)

My worst day was a toss-up between the World Champs last year or the third week into the Giro. In the Giro I was in a gruppetto of around 60 guys who were chasing down the leaders. It was just a full day of climbing — six hours of hills, basically. It would have been fine but we were chasing down the time cut for the day and if we didn’t make it the whole day would have been for nothing. It was three weeks into the race, so we were all pretty tired and it was just a full day of suffering.

But a worse day for me was at the World Champs time trial [in Innsbruck, Austria] last year. Going into the race I knew that if I had a good day I could make the top 10 and that was my aim. I felt good warming up and my legs felt strong, even though I had been racing the day before.

When I started I was working on settling in but around 6km it all started to go wrong. My heart rate started to drop, then my watts started to drop and then I got caught. It was the first time that had ever happened to me professionally and it was not a good feeling. It was just a bad day all round but it didn’t make any sense because I had been at the team time trial the day before and felt absolutely fine. I took blood tests after to try to find out what happened but nothing came back and I still don’t know what caused it.