BOOK REVIEW Cycle Road Racing by Tom Newman

Tom's book is homemade, like this image

Cycle Road Racing by Tom Newman, The Crowood Press, 2013
ISBN 9781847974341, £12.99

This book is interesting evidence for the cycling boom that defines England in 2013 (and this review written early on the morning of the day that will see Chris Froome win the Tour de France, the second Briton in as many years after Bradley Wiggins' victory in 2012).

In other words, what we have here is a tiny independent publisher, Crowood, trying to cash in on that boom by rushing out a series of 'how to' manuals for beginners. They have already published other titles in their series on cycle sportives and BMX, to name two. There is another one that combines beginner advice on road racing with time trialling.

This particular volume by established coach Tom Newman is supposed to be a more advanced guide, as revealed by the author who, at the end, fantasizes that even elite and professional riders will have 'gleaned some useful tips that they take on.'

But the advice is often tick-box stuff aimed entirely, one must presume, at the novice. Here's the entry on eyewear under the 'Equipment and Clothing' section:

'Eyewear Glasses provide protection from both UV rays and grit thrown up from the road. Better-quality glasses come with straight ear pieces so they can be placed into your helmet slots when not required when out riding.' (p24)

This falls right into the category of purposeless advice, blending as it does the obvious with the borderline inaccurate. There are extremely few, if any, instances when you can be safely riding with your inverted glasses sticking out of your helmet. It's what you do when you're finished, to swank around, or the odd pro on a very hot climb at low speeds. But I did not see Froome or Contador doing this on any climb during this year's Tour. 

Nonetheless, the book is a summary of plenty of wisdom by an experienced coach and died-in-the-wool club rider. Newman is very good at saying: the fashion might be this, but actually the time-hallowed advice is that, and sometimes the time-hallowed advice wins the day. You don't get this tone of voice in magazines, where the object is to breathlessly chase the latest product in a thinly disguised attempt to curry favour with potential advertisers.

In particular, if you are a rider wanting to hire a coach at £30-80 a month, it makes the book look cheap at £12.99 because many of the coach's training plans are divulged. You just need to motivate yourself and follow the schedule, always the hardest bit. The schedules are good ones, and distil lots of basic good sense. In particular, it was a relief to read that you really have to decide what it is you want to do and then do it. You can't be good at long distance time trialling one minute, a crit the next, and a hill climb the day after, exactly in the same sense that Tour de France riders lose a lot of grand tour form the minute they start doing lucrative fish and chip races for small town Belgian promoters. Focus on just one branch of the sport and do it, consistently. Across a whole season there is plenty of chance to switch focus from road racing to hill climbing, and then to cross racing - just as any traditional club calendar would anyway. This sort of structure is being rapidly blurred by the sudden boom in everything, anytime - summer cross series, urban hill climbs in July, winter road racing. As a newcomer, it can be totally bewildering.

As books go, however, this one is no thing of beauty. Production values are low. All the photography is homemade, and looks like it. There is a particularly funny picture on p24, of the author's baggy skinsuit hanging dankly against a cupboard, edging away into dark shadow. Another gripe is the shameless plugging of Quest-branded bikes, a never-heard-of no-brand based near the author in north-west London. Literary values are nil, and errors are conspicuous, such as the misspelling of names (Contrador!).

Some of these defects are endearing, and a reminder that amateur cycling has always been a grassroots affair, not to say a shambles. Look beyond it if you can.

However, the main criticism is that the advice given here is so uneven. For example, the advice on turbo trainers is really just the author's own view, without any effort on his part to look a bit further and see what the wider picture looks like. He says that magnetic trainers and electronic trainers are the best, and cautiously avoids mentioning any particular brands, and thus the vital fact that magnet trainers are cheap and noisy entry level affairs, while a top Watt Bike costs thousands. Why fail to even mention fluid trainers such as Cycle Ops, the one that most of us actually use and in fact one of the best selling turbo trainers of all time? In this instance as in some others, the author is not even providing a good service to beginners, who could glean more by going onto internet forums and by asking their fellow club members.

The section on women's training reads terribly. Clearly an afterthought, the author does that thing where he tries to exonerate himself in the first sentence by reminding us that women are very good at cycling, and some even better than men! Then we get one paragraph on why the menstrual cycle messes it all up and we don't know why, but it's a hormone thing. And then the author returns to his main theme again. This is nothing short of a disgrace, but I'm sure the author didn't even realise, and there was no editor to cast a critical eye over at Crowood. But that is how it reads and it IS disgraceful. He would have been better not to have mentioned women at all.

A comparably bad section is where on the discussion of power meters the author reproduces, verbatim, a long and self-serving press release from Garmin on their Vector pedals. He even thanks Garmin for the permission to reproduce the press release! Here as elsewhere we find that suddenly, from no mention of any brand we are back to extremely partisan support for a very few brands. The last chapter is essentially Garmin by Garmin, with Strava thrown into the mix.

Weird, but I ended the 'book' thinking that it is further evidence for the demise of the book. Not as long as a magazine (at 127 pages) nor as svelte as a 'bookazine', and not detailed enough to be a serious treatment of any particular subject, it is an uneven instance of a marginal genre. If this was an app, I'd be recommending it just for the training schedules, which are (possibly) worthy of the (steep) Kindle price of £7.99.

Verdict: Of some use to complete beginners, but only as a starting point. The training schedules may interest riders wanting more structure in their training, towards their first race or a particular goal.