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By Ben Delaney
Photo: Casey B. Gibson
American Tom Danielson will be starting his second season with Garmin next year, but he’s looking at it as a fresh start. After a frustrating year that started with a broken shoulder and little fitness, the former Discovery Channel rider and Tour de Georgia champion is eager to get cracking with off-season training this winter. He sat down with VeloNews during team camp to talk about Belgian racing, rehabbing a shoulder and battling with his own brain.
VeloNews: What’s new, Tom?
Tom Danielson: I wanted to do something different with my cross training so I ended up building a motocross track in my front yard. It’s very technical, but it’s not dangerous. It’s more technique, with a lot of turns and whoops — those repetitive small bumps really hammer you. And there’s a few jumps, but they’re table tops, so if you mess up it’s not a problem. It’s great therapy for my shoulder (which was broken in the 2007 Vuelta a España). The position is the opposite of a typical road position.
VN: Plus you have to use so much more of your body to manipulate the bike.
TD: Yeah, and it helps build core strength and coordination, too.
VN: How do you feel about the Tour de Georgia going away?
TD: I’m really disappointed. I loved that race. I guess the economy’s bad and whatever. It was the first of all the American races that went to the next level. To bring in the big European teams. To have the big names. To have epic, longer style stages with real mountains. A hard, long time trial. And an American race where you saw an immense fan base. I didn’t do Tour DuPont, but Georgia was the first one I saw of that caliber.
VN: It seems you struggled to come back from the broken shoulder.
TD: It was really frustrating. The best way I can put it is that I know how to start training November 15, work hard all off season, show up a certain weight, with certain fitness, and show up to certain races to prepare for other races. I know how to do that well. I learned quickly this year that I don’t know how miss a whole off-season, deal with all these elements — I went though personal challenges as well — and be thrown into the competition four months behind everyone else. I didn’t have confidence.
I kept thinking, ‘I know I’m not as well prepared as I could or should be.’ In retrospect, if I had just relaxed I probably could have done a little bit better. Instead, I could see that I was heavier. I could see that I was going slower. I could see that I was getting beat by guys normally I wouldn’t get beat by. It just snowballed until about August when I decided that I didn’t care anymore. I decided to go back to the drawing board and not pay any attention to the checks and balances. And that’s when things starting working again for me. So, it feels great to be back and training again in the off-season.
VN: When you were going through this, how much did you use team doctor Prentice Steffen or Jonathan Vaughters as a sounding board?
TD: I should have used them more than I did. I felt a little bit out of place with the team, and my infrastructure. It took some time to trust everyone around me. The attitude is different on this team than other teams. I could have benefited a lot more had I just came out and said, ‘Hey, I’m dealing with these problems.’ Instead I just tried to deal with them on my own. As a result, everyone was kind of confused, wondering, OK, where is Tom? Why is he not going better? Is he over his injury? It’s worked out a lot better since I just exploded. Now I talk with JV everyday. That’s how this team works best. When you communicate all the time.
VN: Do you have your schedule yet?
TD: The plan is Tour of California, Tour of Murcia, Castilla y Leon, Pays Basque, Giro d’Italia and Tour de France. It’s really important for me to have a good first half of the year. It’s obviously important to the team, but it’s critical for myself. I would really like to get bike to my winning ways and get some results. Then do some checks and balances and see where I’m out. Then go to the Giro first of all to finish, get the grand tour in my legs, and try for a result, obviously.
VN: So hopefully the Giro will be a Tour training camp for you?
TD: You can see pretty much everyone that did it this year was successful in the Tour. You can see all the guys who are lining up for the Giro next year.
VN: It should be a great race, even if the big names are ostensibly using it for training.
TD: We know the Giro. They don’t make easy courses. It’s all about the show. Italians love the show. It’s always stressful. There are mountains everywhere. Even in the flat stages, there are little hills everywhere.
VN: I think it’s fantastic. An uphill gravel time trial? How great is that?
TD:Yeah, you guys love it. When you’re racing …
VN: And the transfers can be a bit long.
TD: If you can just turn your brain off, it’s fine. If you don’t analyze the transfers, if you don’t realize how ridiculous the stage is that you’re doing, as long as the brain’s off, you’re fine.
VN: How often does that philosophy apply?
TD: All the time in cycling, I think. Your brain can be your best friend or your enemy. If you can break it down to, ‘I must kill everyone,’ or ‘I must destroy,’ then you’re fine. But if you start thinking, ‘Do I really need to be doing this? It’s raining out. The road is slippery. People are crashing everywhere. It’s cold. My whole body hurts.’ That’s when it’s negative, and the desk job seems quite good. But if you can use your mind to make your body like a motorcycle — you just turn the throttle and go — if you can make it like that, you’re fine. That’s normally how it is in training, you take out the elements of stress and performance, and you enjoy it. That’s the key to racing.
VN: Early this season Vaughters was talking about throwing you into hard, one-day, windy, crappy gutterball races. The idea was to improve your ability to fight for position.
TD: Luckily I got to do that at the end of the year. Because we didn’t have a European schedule during the Tour, I did a lot of American racing, which was short and fast and punchy. That was cool, because I hadn’t done that in many years. Then I went and did a lot of flat racing. The Tour of Missouri, which this year was quite European — windy, rainy, cold, fast, rolling. Normally I wouldn’t do well at that type of race, but I ended up okay (he finished fifth overall). Then I went to Europe and did the fall Belgium races.
VN: How did you like those?
TD: Let’s just say I have a lot more respect for those guys than I did before. It’s really unbelievable how they can make so much bad weather in one place. If they had a day of Belgium weather here in America, they would cancel the race for sure. I thought a few times that they had gone through before the race and dropped poop on the road just to add an element. I couldn’t believe how much poop was on the road. It just didn’t make sense how they could get all of that poop on the road, and keep it on the road, for us to race on.
VN: It defies physics.
TD: It was a special experience. Being so cold, scared out of my mind, no brakes working, bike sliding all over poop on the road, and turning direction every five minutes, with wind like that hurricane in Missouri. Remember that hurricane in Missouri? That was every day in Belgium. I can safely say that I improved as a bike racer. I was able to make all the front splits in crosswinds. I ended up top 15 in a windy race in France. I couldn’t have done that in my Discovery days. So yeah, I ended up doing those type of races later than he wanted, but I’m glad that I did it. It helped me as a bike racer. I don’t have fears of that type of racing anymore, and my positioning improved tenfold.