Off Season Travels and Adventures
This past year I made my debut as a professional road cyclist racing for Team TIBCO. It was a whirlwind year full of new experiences, places, and people and more often than not it still seems totally surreal. I feel as though I have packed 10 years of living into the last 12 months, which gives me a difficult to describe sense of overwhelming gratitude and barely surmountable exhaustion. While I would not trade the past year for anything, it does feel larger than life. It was time for a break and so, after World Championships in Ponferrada, I packed up my bike and put it away for the first time since I started training in January of 2013. Aside from a few days here and there that were rest or travel days, and a week of recovery after getting hit by a car, I had not had a day without a bike in 21 months. For almost two years my life had been 100% devoted to racing bikes. There was no balance; just bikes. That was all about to change: six weeks completely free – no bike, no fixed address, no responsibility. Six weeks to reflect, regroup, reconnect and relax.
The first three weeks would be spent traveling all over Western Europe: Switzerland, Germany, France, the Netherlands and Belgium. Never in one place for more than a few nights and living off of the smallest budget possible, I crammed as much living into those 3 weeks as humanly possible, becoming an expert in European public transit in the process. Of course none of this would have been possible without all the amazing friends and family that helped me out along the way. Thank you!
The adventures started in north eastern Switzerland with a short stay at my team mate Paddy’s house. Both exhausted from the last block of racing, we reveled in the chance to be totally lazy: sleeping in, letting her mom cook for us, hiking in sunshine drenched hills overlooking the mountains to the south, and soaking in the salt water at the local water park. I also invested in some running shoes and hit the trails and roads on a daily basis. After thousands of hours hunched over a race bike, it felt amazing to be upright, able to stretch my legs beyond the 170mm reach of my crank arm. The feeling of freedom and onset of the famous endorphin induced “runner’s high” quickly reminded me of what makes running so addicting. Within just a few days, my legs were churning out the miles as if I had never quit running in the first place and it felt good: no plan, no data, no time splits. Just running for the sake of running.
Next up was a train ride to the Black Forest to visit my family before hopping another train to Ulm to run the Einstein half marathon. What a race! The energy of the crowd was amazing: thousands of participants being cheered on by an equally sizable crowd of spectators. The course wound through the country side before twisting through Neu Ulm and finally finishing in front of the famous Ulmer Muenster. Breathtaking landscape and architecture as a backdrop to thousands of runners; it was incredible. The free beer at the finish line made it even better.
Over the following two weeks I hopped around all over Germany reconnecting with friends that I had not seen in years. Growing up in a military family, we moved a lot and this was the first time that I had really made an effort to go back to the scattered cities that I grew up in. From Memmingen, where I went to elementary school, to the castle in Heidelberg that my senior prom was held at, the next couple weeks were a like a flashback through my childhood and adolescence. While the transient lifestyle I grew up with definitely had its hardships, this trip also made me realize the countless places I could call home as a result and I felt very blessed.
Of course I made sure to balance out all that reminiscing with some new experiences along the way. The Geiger museum in Gruyeres, Switzerland, Oktoberfest in Munich, Germany, and a tour on the canals of Amsterdam were just some of the highlights. Far too soon it was time to head back to North America but I definitely have some more Euro travels on my bucket list. Anyone want to check out Poland or Croatia next year?
Back in North America but not quite ready to get back to training, I took a few more weeks of personal time. Starting with a quick stop in Ottawa to surprise my sister on her 18th birthday and continuing down to Florida and California to soak up the sun, my month of traveling North America was just as incredible as the Euro trip. This world is so full of surprise and wonder and adventure! Perhaps my favorite memory will be of snorkeling with my best friend, Heather, in Crystal River, Florida. The water was pristine and rich with flora and fauna, most famous of which were the manatee that gather there in swarms every winter to feed, escape the cold and raise their young. As an endangered species, the manatee are protected by a number of strictly enforced laws that prohibit human interference but we were lucky enough to come across an exceptionally curious and friendly manatee. Initiating contact with a manatee is forbidden but this animal was coming up to us, bumping us and using his lips and flippers to examine, grab and otherwise play with us. There we were in the water with a thousand pound wild animal breathing right in our faces! It was an experience so incredible it is impossible to put into words.
Having experienced the beauty and adventure of nature in Florida, I switched gears a bit in Los Angeles and took some time to explore the urban jungle instead. Hollywood to Beverly Hills to Santa Monica; from the California Science Center to my first American Football game at the USC Coliseum, to the live taping of a television show, it was pretty cool to see all of these iconic sites in real life. As a pro athlete with Olympic aspirations myself, standing in the Olympic stadium at a university that has produced more gold medal athletes than most countries was especially inspirational.
Finally, after dozens of cities, eleven countries and two continents, it was time to go back to Victoria and get back to training. The time away had given me the chance to reflect on the past two years and to think about the direction I wanted my career and life to take. The biggest thing that I concluded in the countless hours I spent running and thinking was that I needed balance. My life could not be just bikes anymore. To be a happy and well-rounded person, which would undoubtedly also make me a better athlete, I needed to be challenged academically, personally and socially in addition to the physical challenge and growth that bike racing provides. After taking weeks to explore and evaluate different options, I decided that the best way to accomplish this balance, while still being able to dedicate the time required for training, was to go back to school. As I type this blog post I am already sitting on a plane bound to Ottawa, Ontario, where I will be based for the next couple of years while I complete several coaching, nutrition, performance and business courses. My hope is that I will find the academic and intellectual challenge I crave in these courses, and that I can use that new found knowledge to become involved in the fitness community in a different way: through coaching recreational and amateur athletes. Of course the majority of my time with still be dedicated to racing bikes and it has been really good to get back to training, but my future as a bike racer will definitely be more balanced. After all, there’s more to life than riding bikes really, really fast.
ANIKA (the beast) TODD 