Hello Voxwomen friends!
As all of you may know, being a professional cyclist means sharing your daily routine, training and even your room with your team mates, most days.
Being a good teammate is the baseline to enjoying your time away from home and loved ones. I am not going to lie – many times I wish I could just train and race and be at home straight after the event, but sharing part of your time with your team is a big part of the success.
Our job is not a normal job. When you race, you are not only putting your body through pain and suffering but also a lot of feelings flow through your mind – joy, confidence, fear, focus. Having teammates around you can trust makes you stronger and allows you to give your very best.
A teammate doesn’t have to be a friend.
I do not have many friends in the cycling world. I think I can only really count them on one hand, but luckily for me, I do have some great teammates.
Tolerance, patience, kindness, bounty, honesty, care and trust are the more important qualities in order to be a good teammate and to be a successful team.
Sharing your post training hours with your roommate (which in our team changes most of the time as it is important to get to know everyone well, and to not have a “favourite”) means you need to follow some simple rules in order for you both to make the best time out of it. Personally I do not have a favourite roommate in my team, I get on well with all of them. But I do not like to talk too much or to sleep all afternoon! I would say I am quite balanced, so it’s also easy for me to modify my behaviour depending on who I am rooming with.
But the rules that I always follow and that I want my roommate to follow are:
- To be clean and tidy
- Respect each other sleeping times
- To be as silent as possible when moving around the room, especially during the night.
During the race, a good team mate is the one that not only helps you through the team tactics, but also someone who can give you a nice word, making you feel trusted, lucky and blessed to be doing a very cool job, despite all the suffering you are maybe going through in that moment.
At the end of this blog, I just want to say “thank you” to all the teammates I have shared and am sharing my cycling career with, for creating some special memories and for building our own present. From each one of them I have learnt something and I hope they could get something from me as well….
To be continued 🙂
Elena
