Lesson 1: train hard, rest harder.

The year began with some fairly horrendous rainy crit races and some even more horrendous training rides in close-to-zero conditions. I asked myself, was it worth it?. Was this having any effect on my fitness? Why did I seem to be getting slower, not faster? Will I ever regain sensation in the little toe on my right foot?

In the end though, I saw the results. I took a week or so off from training in early February and that gave my body the time it needed to rebuild. And then after that I was flying. Lesson number one, something that will be music to the ears of my fellow #couchpeloton brethren; rest is just as important as training.

I’m paying more attention now to how my body feels, watchful for those telltale signs of disrepair and fatigue creeping in.

Lesson 3: appearances can be deceptive, or ‘stop looking at everyone else and ride your damn bike’.

When you arrive early for a race there is not a lot to do, other than look at the other competitors and try to make yourself feel better (or worse) about what’s to come.

These are some typical thoughts that go through your head as you apprise potential foes, pre-race:

“Crikey, I hope he’s here for the E123 race, he looks fast.”

“I reckon I’m faster than him, he’s got an actual beer belly.”

“Ah, I remember him, he’s the guy who always attacks and never makes it more than 10m off the front.”

“I think he caused that crash I was nearly caught up in last week. Better stay away from his wheel.”

“Shaved legs, pro. Hairy legs, no.”

“That bike must cost nearly eight grand! Bet he’s good.”

What I’ve learned is that these snap judgments are nearly always wrong. The bloke who shows up in a custom skinsuit with an £8k bike and warms up on his Wahoo Kickr in the car park while his wife and kid stare on in a sort of forced-supportive boredom, will undoubtedly get shelled out the back of the cat four race within a couple of laps.

That guy with the beer gut, meanwhile, will spend most of the race on the front of the bunch, dishing out obscene levels of hurt to everyone around him.

The best thing you can do is focus on the wheel in front and just keep pedaling.

Lesson 4: shouting!

I love shouting. I do it all the time: at pro riders on the TV who I think are ‘being lazy’, at van drivers on my commute, in the bath… I just didn’t realise I’d get to do so much of it in bike racing. Rugby, sure, loads of shouting. Pedaling a bike in circles, somehow, way more shouting.

Perhaps it’s the high-stakes nature of the sport – one crash and your lovely carbon bike is turned into a highly carcinogenic bundle of firewood – that makes people so vocal. Maybe there are just a lot of angry men who don’t like their jobs racing cat four. Either way, I’ve seen experienced bike racers prevent crashes with the sheer power of their voice alone. That is like literal Harry Potter magic.

It really doesn’t matter whether you shout, “Line!”, “Woah!”, “Easy!”, or “Wingardium Getoffmylinesir!”, shouting makes everything better.

The event is at the end of the road season and comprises a whole weekend of journalists of various ages and in various states of disrepair competing in an ITT, a TTT (based on nationality) and the centrepiece road race on the final day.

My goal is now to win that road race and be crowned the fastest journalist in the world.

They say aim high, right?