Would you prefer feast or famine?

What happens when everything comes all at once

And so, as the seasons change and the leaves fall, we come to the end of the professional cycling calendar for the year. Time to rest, take some time off, and reboot. The cycle completes.

Great stuff. Except, normal life doesn’t work that way. It’s more unpredictable.

I’m living that right now. Which is why I wrote this email at 9pm last night.

 Why?

Well, everyone talks about the “feast and famine” of independent working. And that’s well and truly kicked in. After some months of low-level anxiety over a very dribbly project pipeline, suddenly, my work sink is backing up (does this analogy work? Answers on a postcard…)

It reminds me of my corporate days. I’d have a quiet quarter, which allowed me to get my strategy lined up and the team mapped out against it. Then a restructure would hit. Or a new transformation project. Or a key member of the team would resign. One week before the board paper was due…

Right now, the challenge I have is working across multiple clients, with diverse needs, in different time-zones. 8am calls are the norm, and those late nights doing the detailed work aren’t going away.

If this is me feasting, then I could do with a break between courses to let my “work food” go down. (Honestly these analogies are not improving).

In fact, if I look back at professional cycling for a moment: it doesn’t really work in an ordered way either. The down time only lasts for a few weeks, before the new season training camps kick off. That’s when members of the peloton will be spotted up various mountains all over Europe and beyond – getting ready to go again.

And the season itself? Makes no sense.

There’s a vague arc: early season stage races, classics, grand tours, then wrap up. But the reality is the event calendar is all over the place. Races on random days of the week, running over each other (same day, same week), or just out of sequence.

• Paris-Nice or Tirreno-Adriatico?

• Vuelta a Espana or Tour of Britain?

• Tour of the Basque Country then straight up to Paris-Roubaix the day after?

The upshot for the cyclists is having to choose between races they’ll be good at one week and then waiting months for the next one. For the teams it’s even worse – multiple support vehicles in different countries, with staff pulled thinly across them. Sound familiar?

The cycling calendar isn’t going to change any time soon. So, the key for teams across this patchwork quilt of a season is to balance ambition, race selection, and preparation.

As Luke Rowe, Decathlon’s Welsh Director Sportif (aka “DS”), said in an interview in Cyclist Magazine last year:

We can’t battle 365 days a year, so we need to be more specific, more sniper-like. We need to work as a team.

My version of this is making sure I map my days out against my clients. Or compromising to fit everything in (I had to move a face-to-face meeting to online this week).

What helps me keep focused on what’s important is being clear on what work I’m doing, on which day. And what my deadlines are. Most importantly – what clients expect from me and by when.

I know it’s no different for you.

The ideal is spacing work out across the year. The reality is often it’s suddenly all there. And that can hit you unexpectedly if you haven’t prepared for it.

If you were to act as your own DS, and looked at your calendar for the next month, what would you see?

Could you mark the weeks that are going to pinch and decide which races you’re going to race? Could you channel Luke’s sniper mentality?

You might be feasting, and that’s when you most need to choose.