It’s all about endurance

Cycling in our country is more recognised as a mode of transport or a medium to lose weight and get fitter. When 30-year-old Naveen John took it up for the latter cause nine years back, little he did know that he would become one of the top riders in the country in less than a decade. It was his addiction to junk food when in college in US (Purdue University) that led Naveen to pick up a cycle and try to get fit and he took an instant liking to riding. What started with a small race as fun grew into a career path in due course.

At the launch of the Chennai-based cycle team Ciclo Team Racing, Naveen along with Arvind Panwar, two-time national champion, shared their views on the sport. 

It is one of those things where I got inspired, captured by the sport, when I was in college in the US. It started as a social activity, but I fell in love with the sport. So much so, I put the rest of my life in a pause, came back to India with a goal in mind — to win the national championships in 2012. But I could win it only in 2014. 

After I won the national championship, I was left trying to figure out what’s next. I am not the first person to win the championship in India and I am not the only sportsman in India. I was thinking about what more can an athlete do in India. We have our limitations. Indian athletes tend to throw out a bucket list of excuses to explain why we don’t move forward. So, I thought about what I can do with my skillset. Fortunately, I had good education, I’ve had the chance to meet some amazing people and I am good at the sport. What I started to do with the support of the people around me is, take the first five steps together out of a total 50 that is there to achieve more in the sport.

I happened to be part of a couple of cycling teams over the past couple of years. We have tried to move Indian cycling forward in small ways. Dreams are typically big. People tend to talk big like about the Tour de France, Olympics etc. But what is lost in many people, not just in cycling but in any sport is that people don’t see the fifty steps that need to be taken to get there. In 2016, I became the first cyclist to be signed by a professional team in Australia. That was an amazing experience. Experiencing the level of the sport outside India was good. And that opportunity kind of led into a meeting that was set up with one of my friends, and then we put down a three-year project, set down some goals.

The team has three parts. A core, made of guys like Arvind and I, between us we’ve won about five to six national titles. We’re going to the Asian championships and we’ve myself in the top five in one discipline there. Arvind has set a top five goal in another discipline. In a tag-line, we are looking beyond national championships. I am putting the work towards it. The second part of the team is the development focus. We have got two riders, one U-19 and one U-23, who were looking for mentors in a very hands-on way. The third is where Ciclo comes in. Ciclo is kind of building a pan-India brand and it’s a great platform leverage talent identification.

We’ve been competing together since I moved here in 2012. In our first race together, he was first and I ended up fourth, and in the last race together I was first and he was second. So it’s healthy competition. We are pretty open about what we want to do about the sport. The World Championships is what we are building our season around. 

I got into the sport a very different way from Arvind. Mine was weight-loss. So in college, I was a heavy kid tipping the scales in 90+ kilos. I started the weightloss journey through running, cycling; got into the competitive sport just because it was fun and eventually after getting some results it changed. 2008 was when I first started riding. It is almost nine years now. It has filled a very different purpose in my life, at least for now. 

As riders, to perform at this level, we need to train between 900-1200 hours a year or we need to put between 25, 000 to 35,000 kms on the road. So, in the past eight years of riding, I’ve got about 2,50,000 kms in my legs. That’s the best in the Indian level now. An average Indian rider doesn’t put 900-1200 hours on the road a year. So, the endurance is built over time. In my first year I did 10,000 kms which is about 400 hours of riding a year, which translates four days of riding a week with two hours every day. Endurance is something that a rider needs to gradually build up. 

In terms of speed, on a flat road, today we can touch 50 kmph easily. If you are going down a descent, say like in Ooty, the highest I’ve touched is 82 to 85 kmph. In Europe you can easily touch 112 to 120 kmph.

Equipment is important, but if you ask me if that’s what is keeping the Indian athletes from the podium, I would flatly say no! That’s the thing we are trying to communicate with team Ciclo. There is a lot of work that Indian riders need to do before we start blaming the system and the lack of equipment. A part of that is of the fact that Indian riders have not been exposed to the level of work that is required to be successful in this sport or even survive in this sport. The reason why Team Ciclo is small to start off with just four guys making it to six by the middle of this year is because, in India, there aren’t many athletes who understand the level of work that is required in this sport.

It’s hard. To be honest, making a career out if this sport is incredibly challenging. For example, Arvind supports himself because he works in the railways. He is part of this team because he wants to achieve something outside of this system. But the system is important here because that’s where his livelihood comes from. But then you have rider like me, who is not part of the system. I am supported by this team only in terms of equipment. Where do I make a living from? So for me, answer to that question is I have to make out a living outside the box. So, I have a small coaching business. I consult on the side, in terms of fitness, cycling events. To me those are kind of sources of supplement to my income. In this sport, no one pays anyone to ride their bikes professionally yet. Cycling is in a place now where if you want to pursue it, you’ve got to figure out ways to make it work. And it’s not where someone is going to take you all the way through to retirement. 

It has to be in Belgium. Belgium is to bike racing what cricket is to India. It is the heartland of bike racing. Anyone in the world goes to Belgium to figure out if they can make it in the sport of cycling. That is the toughest level of racing. In India we may have four or five races during the course of the year. In Belgium, everyday there are twice as stuffs there are in our national championships. In our first race in Belgium, we barely finished. And it took us a lot of work to finish one amateur race there. We are the best in India but things are different there. 

The World Championships is our goal. We want to get there and improve from our performance from last year. I am now placed 55th in the world. I want to try and go to 45. I am being realistic and in doing that.