The Coffee Ride #192, with Reece Homfray: Carlee Taylor made for new role
CARLEE Taylor opens up about life after cycling and finding a job with a 10-year gap on her resume but she has landed on her feet — starting as event manager for the Sunday Mail City-Bay. Her feature interview is in The Coffee Ride this week.
CARLEE Taylor opens up about life after cycling and finding a job with a 10-year gap on her resume but she has landed on her feet — starting as event manager for the Sunday Mail City-Bay. Her feature interview is in The Coffee Ride this week
LIFE AFTER CYCLING TAKING SHAPE FOR CARLEE
CARLEE Taylor knew it would take time to transition from professional cyclist to working 9-5 back in Adelaide but when she started looking for jobs in January there was a 10-year gap on her resume.
Even with a university health science degree, the 29-year-old felt like she was 18 again and leaving school again. Everything was new and exciting but daunting all the same.
“A job is new and motivating and exciting but everyone seems to have a uni degree these days,” she said.
“And I didn’t realise how hard it was going to be getting into the workforce straight after being a professional athlete.
AUSSIE CYCLING FRESHLY BREWED EXCLUSIVE TO ADVERTISER.COM.AU
“You’re going to job interviews and your resume has a 10-year gap on it, and it doesn’t matter how much life experience you have, I didn’t have much work experience
“I think my last job in Adelaide was working in the Beach House around Christmas as a casual and in a bike shop.
“So you’re hoping someone will give you a shot and I was really lucky when it came to Ergo Fitness studio and the boss thought my personality would fit well with running classes there, and now I’m also working full-time as the event manager for the City-Bay which I’ve been doing for the past four weeks.”
The Sunday Mail City-Bay is the state’s biggest annual fun run and while Taylor won’t be pounding the pavement with thousands of others out Anzac Highway on Sunday, September 16, she is keen on getting back into triathlon.
“It’s (Sunday) going to be a pretty big day for me — I think it starts at 3am judging by my operations manual,” Taylor said.
“My initial goal I’ve always had is to do an Ironman because I think it’s so crazy that I want to do it.
“I’ve been enjoying a bit more cross training and running and have done a few half-marathons.
“And I’ve had a few friends bugging me to go back into the triathlon scene because I was an Australian champion before I went into cycling.
“I haven’t thought about racing yet, judging by my first swimming session last week let’s just say I’ve got a while to go.
“But when I do something I give 100 per cent so I want to give myself time to do it at a good level.”
Taylor’s last race before retirement was the women’s Tour Down Under in January but she didn’t go out resenting the sport.
“The next day I was out riding my bike and watching the men’s Tour Down Under, and the week after retiring was one of my biggest weeks on the bike,” she said.
“Last year during the season I had a crash and coming back into racing I was really struggling with feeling comfortable in the peloton and getting my confidence back, and I wasn’t enjoying the racing because I wasn’t me any more.
“I didn’t want to end up hating the sport that I’ve loved my whole life, and I wanted to walk away a bit more on my terms and when I still loved cycling.
“It is still a massive part of my life and I’m glad I can still enjoy it.
“The thing I miss the most is the people, not the racing, and that shows that I walked away at the right time and it was pretty special to finish in a home town race where it all began.”
The talented climber is still training on the bike while enjoying catching up on family time that she’d missed so much of while living and racing in Europe.
“I’ve become addicted to ergo training because I’m more time restricted now working, coaching and personal training, I’m still riding but it’s more on the ergo,” Taylor said.
“It’s just been nice to be home too. My brother became a dad so there are new twins in the family and things like that which for my whole life I haven’t been around for so I’ve missed them.”
One event she has pencilled in is Revolve 24 at the Tailem Bend Motorsport Park next March.
Taylor is an ambassador for the JDRF which is the charity partner for the ride that challenges cyclists to ride as far as they can in 24 hours.
“When you’re training with people who have diabetes and you see how often they have to monitor their insulin levels during a ride, you realise how much harder it must be for them to compete at that high level,” she said.
“So this was a way to give back to the sport and help a good cause.
“I’m going to do the ride in a full women’s team and the ladies in my team are those I coach at Ergo Fitness in Adelaide. I want to enjoy it as well so the team has a mix of recreational riders and serious cyclists.”
RUPERT GUINNESS — OVERLANDER
AUSTRALIAN cycling journalist Rupert Guinness is on tour — not covering bike races but promoting his new book titled Overlander which gives an amazing insight into his IndiPac adventure.
It is one of the best books I’ve read. Insightful, raw, emotional, and takes the reader into his mind and the relationships that made it all possible.
I caught up with Rupe last week where after reading Overlander I had a few points I wanted to ask him about:
There were so many moments in the book when I felt as a reader, a sense of the desperation you must have experienced on the ride. But the moment you realised you’d lost your phone and you were alone, that was heavy?
“A friend of mine raised this recently as well and it’s a good point because it’s day three and you’re still getting used to feeling that accumulative fatigue. Then to lose your iPhone and you know how attached we are to them, but I was without contact with friends and family and my wife, and my maps were on there. It was late in the day so I couldn’t waste time trying to find it and just had to go. And when I think about it now it still makes me feel pretty low.”
And when you were trying to fix your puncture on the side of the road alone and being attacked by march flies?
“I wasn’t thinking rationally because of the heat and then the bloody march flies, and I didn’t realise at the time but people were writing back to me on Facebook telling me I could use my spare tyres which I thought were the wrong size. I was really beating myself up, that was a really shitty, bad day, and it came after a bad day anyway, actually there were quite a few bad days come to think of it.”
I was amazed at your diet. I thought you’d be eating lean meat, fresh fruit and veggies and instead it was pies, burgers, chocolate, soft drink?
“It was disgusting. It was a matter of getting as much sugar and everything that I’d spent years trying to cut out, into me. Suddenly everything you think is good nutrition for day to day living you throw out the door and eat everything you shouldn’t eat from chocolate bars and chips to soft drink and Coke — and I never usually drink Coke — but I may eat a meat pie at the local footy and that’s it. But this was everything and in no particular order either, I may eat a chocolate bar while I’m waiting for my hamburger to be cooked. I actually lost my sense of taste on the ride, I couldn’t tell the difference between a chocolate bar and a hamburger at the end.”
What was more difficult to ride in — the heat or the cold?
“I would suggest the cold. I didn’t mind the rain but that’s different to cold. I’d say the cold in the morning — and it was beautiful but there were some freezing moments — my hands were shaking and I felt stiff. Sometimes I had to stop and do some push-ups to generate warmth in me. The windchill factor makes a difference too. Heat you can manage with water on your face and clothes but the cold goes right to the core and you can’t just have a cup of tea. You’ve got 200km to make it to the nearest servo.”
You said your favourite time of the day was just before sunrise, and then weeks after when you were at the Giro d’Italia you felt this urge to run alone in the dark in the early morning?
“Yeah, it was the solitude of it all that I loved. It was an escape and I just wanted to keep experiencing that feeling. So when I wasn’t riding I wanted to run and I found at the Giro the best time to do that and still get that feeling was in the early mornings. It’s so peaceful you know.”
Will you put a map of Australia with your route on the wall at home?
“It’s a good idea. It does reinforce the journey doesn’t it. That PDF I should blow up and put on the wall because I still stop and look at it myself and think ‘holy shit that’s crazy’. But the guy who did it this year kept going and just went around Australia — on a fixed gear bike. Joseph Kendrick. After Sydney he went on to Cairns and thought ‘oh what the hell I might as well go a bit further’ and he did 15,500km and is only just back in England now.”
Did I read somewhere that you’re eyeing off another ultra endurance ride?
“I’m thinking all sorts of things. Possibly doing this bikingman series in Taiwan in October which is 1200km, but I’ll do the Revolve24 again at Tailem Bend and try to get a qualifying ride for the Race Across America. You have to do 614km in 24 hours, this year I did 586km and that was like on Mars with all the sand and everything flying around.”
QUICK SPIN ...
NO GERRO FAREWELL
THE Tour Down Under is hopeful of honouring four-time winner Simon Gerrans at next year’s race after the Aussie veteran announced his retirement from professional cycling.
Gerrans would be the perfect guest at the annual legend’s night dinner but at this stage it’s unclear whether he will be in Australia at the time of the event.
It’s also unlikely that he will line up at the national championships in a farewell race in front of a home crowd, and will instead bow out from the sport quietly in Europe. He and his team BMC are yet to decide what his final race will be.
REMEMBER THE NAME
A STAR was born in Switzerland last month when NSW cyclist Tom Cornish won gold in the 1km time trial at the junior world championships.
But more impressive was his time of 1min 00.4890secs which was a junior world record — at the age of 18.
To put that into perspective, Australia’s greatest 1km time triallist Matthew Glaetzer won gold at this year’s Commonwealth Games in a time of 59.340secs — at the prime age of 25.
Cornish started cycling when he was six after following his brother into the sport via their local club Southern Cross in Sydney.
He has won seven national titles — six on the track and one on the road — and until recently was still juggling sprint and endurance racing which saw him win the under-17 national road race title.
But he has since shifted his focus to track sprinting and hopes to make his mark at the elite level in the next few years.
DENNIS TO RIDE TDU
FORMER winner Rohan Dennis is expected to open his new season with a new team at the Tour Down Under in January.
Dennis will leave BMC for Bahrain-Merida in 2019 and is all but certain to be on the start line of his home race in Adelaide.
The 28-year-old who won the TDU in 2015 is currently riding the Vuelta a Espana alongside fellow Aussie Richie Porte who is also on the move from BMC to Trek Segafredo next year. Another Australian on the roster, former national champion, Miles Scotson is yet to confirm where he will be riding in 2019 but is in talks with multiple teams.
PODIUM PERFORMANCE ACADEMY
CYCLING Australia is putting the finishing touches to its new podium performance academy which aims to produce the next wave of Olympic athletes.
Selection is currently being finalised and CA is set to appoint a coach to be based in Adelaide and run a feeder program for the national track sprint and endurance programs.
Australia’s track cyclists are preparing for the Oceania Championships to be held at the Adelaide SuperDrome from October 10-13.