The Two Hours Before the Ride

There's a moment on a Sunday morning, just before the club ride sets off, where everything feels effortless. Riders are chatting, someone's fiddling with their Garmin, someone else is debating the merits of a particular café on the route. It feels easy. Relaxed. Ready.

What most people don't see is the two hours that made it that way.

I was chatting to my mate Danny recently. Danny is the person who makes our Sunday Club Ride happen - we ride out of Bedford, through some of the quieter lanes of Bedfordshire, and back again. Not just in the "someone has to organise it" sense - there’s much more to it than that. He monitors the weather, chooses the route, scopes out where we'll stop for coffee. He's done all of that before he's even clipped into his pedals.

That invisible effort is what makes it possible for the rest of us to show up and get what we need from the ride.

Preparation, preparation, preparation

What Danny does maps directly onto something I care deeply about with Breakaway, my outdoor coaching offer.

Breakaway is leadership coaching, delivered on bikes. I come to you and before we ride, we take a moment to talk through what's front of mind. What's pressing, what you want to think through, what matters most today. Then we ride. Two to three hours, with a stop built in. Structured thinking on a bike. And at the end, a short debrief that leaves you with your own plan for what comes next.

But before any of that happens, there's prep. Quite a lot of it,.

I've completed my outdoor first aid training and hold a fitness leader qualification with England Athletics. I've scoped out the risks so we can be ready for whatever the day throws at us. But the most important piece is the route.

The right roads or trails matter more than people might expect. Safe. Quiet. Easy to follow. With a great place to stop and check in mid-ride. The UK has some genuinely brilliant cycling country once you know where to look - and finding those routes is part of what I do. When you're investing time in yourself - navigating your own thinking, your own next chapter - the last thing you need is to be worrying about traffic or where you're going. That's my job. I take the heavy lifting on the physical route so you can focus on the thinking that actually matters.

It's what makes it friction-free and focused entirely on you.

The leaders who understand this

You already know this, of course. The senior leaders I work with didn't get where they are by accident. They understand - probably better than most - that the visible success is almost always built on invisible preparation. The thinking done before the meeting. The conversations had before the announcement. The groundwork laid before anyone else has noticed there's a problem.

They put in the prep so they can make the impact. But that effort is often unseen. Rarely acknowledged. And sometimes, it wears you down.

That's the bit that doesn't make it into the meeting notes.

Without Danny, we'd just be wandering

Back to Danny for a moment - because I think this is worth sitting with.

Without him, our Sunday ride would be a group of enthusiastic cyclists with no plan, arguing about which road to take and which café does the best flat white in Bedfordshire. (That last debate will always happen anyway, for the record. Wherever we stop.) With Danny, we have confidence in the route. We trust the plan. We can focus on enjoying the ride itself.

That's what good preparation does. It creates the conditions for other people to do their best work - or in this case, their best thinking.

Think about when you are at your best. When you are the Danny. Those around you may see the outcome, but how often do they see the cost of getting there?

And more importantly - who sees it? Who holds space for you to think, plan, and prepare for what's next?

That's what Breakaway is for

If you're a senior leader who's used to being the person who does the prep for everyone else, Breakaway is designed with you in mind. It's a space to think out loud, on the move, with someone who gets the weight you're carrying - and who has done the work to make sure the session itself is seamless.

Based in Bedford and working with leaders across Bedfordshire and well beyond, I built Breakaway because I believe some of the best thinking happens away from a desk, away from a screen, and away from the noise of the day.

The real work happens on the bike. But everything before it matters too.

If you're curious about what a Breakaway session looks like, message me and I'll send across the details. We're launching in May, with a small number of founder client spaces available at a preferential rate before then.

I'm Mark Taggart, a leadership coach and HR consultant based in Bedford. I work with senior leaders, teams, and HR professionals who are ready for honest conversations about how they lead and drive growth.