Tizzie Robinson-Gordon journal: stop being surprised by strong women
Cycling has spent a decade opening the front door to new women, and almost none of it rethinking what happens once they are inside. In her second journal entry, Tizzie Robinson-Gordon writes from the interior: the chaingang, the feed zone, and the surprise that never stops.
Tizzie Robinson-Gordon is a consultant, a soigneur with Edinburgh Bike Fitting Race Team, and a racer on the Scottish scene. This is the second of her journal entries for The British Continental.Cycling has spent a decade opening the front door to new women. It has spent almost none of the same decade rethinking what happens once they are inside. In her second entry, Tizzie writes from the interior.
I flagged, at the end of the last of these entries, that I had a diverse portfolio of things I was up to alongside the racing. The consultant job. The soigneur work. The friends who are not cyclists. The pub. The Wednesday nights that are not on a turbo. I framed that, mostly, as a small pre-emptive defence of why I was not further up the results sheet than I was. Rereading it, I think I got the argument the wrong way around.
Between an ankle and then glandular fever this spring, I have raced less than I planned and trained less than I would have liked, and it has not, so far, killed me. It has given me some distance. And distance, it turns out, is a useful thing to bring to a sport that spends quite a lot of its time not looking at itself very clearly.
There is a durable pattern in how the sport reacts to a strong woman, and I would like, for once, to try to describe it clearly. The pattern is surprise
What I have used the distance for is a lot of thinking about the specific and mostly well-meaning way strong women are talked about in this sport. There is a durable pattern in how the sport reacts to a strong woman, and I would like, for once, to try to describe it clearly. The pattern is surprise. It never stops being surprise. Even once you are, by any reasonable measure, good.
Some of the pressure is at least starting to be named. Mary McCarthy, the runner-turned-Instagrammer whose #beattheboys hashtag has become a cultural artefact on our newsfeeds, made a genuinely useful point underneath the noise, which was that the training load required for a woman to be competitive at the top of an endurance sport is a good deal more than most people understand.
Tizzie. Image: supplied
It is not ‘training like a man’, which is what the phrase suggests. It is training like a woman who must reach a male-defined ceiling, from within a female body, using training principles that were, in the first instance, developed on male ones. It is a considerably harder assignment, and an error to describe it any other way.
Some of my close friends have made an annual tradition of doing the Ride to the Sun, which I joined again this year. I found myself early in the night in a 50-rider bunch of men trundling along the road from Carlisle to Moffat at 40km/h, and few hid their surprise as I took my hands off the bars to unwrap a gel, moved smoothly through the bunch, or peeled off my arm warmers without stopping.
It is exhausting, over 10 years, to prove yourself to a room you have been in the whole time
It is the same surprise I get on Saturday mornings, when the guys on the chaingang cheerfully register the fact that I have, once again, held on longer than they expected. It is the same surprise I get from my male friends on my weekly routine of endless Arthur’s Seat laps, when I can out-descend them. It is always meant with warmth. Occasionally it is even flattering. But it is exhausting, over 10 years, to prove yourself to a room you have been in the whole time.
What none of them see, because none of them are meant to, is the effort required to be that good. To sit comfortably in a 50-rider bunch of men at that pace, I had to be as fit as the fittest man in it. To sit smoothly enough to swap layers without slowing, I had to be fitter than that. To hang on to the chaingang for the third hour, I have had to spend Wednesday nights on a turbo in my hallway doing intervals I have set myself and mostly not enjoyed.
Image: Milan Josy/The British Continental
And underneath all of that is a set of physiological facts that get published in exercise science journals and rarely paid attention to. There is a durable 10 to 12 per cent performance gap between elite men and women in endurance events, which is not because women train less hard.
It is because when men and women follow the same year of endurance training, women’s cardiovascular adaptations are, on average, smaller. It is because female endurance athletes lose meaningfully more iron per day than male ones, and between 15 and 35 per cent of us are iron-deficient at any given point, against three to 11 per cent of the men. And it is because only around six per cent of sports science research focuses on women exclusively, which means most of what any of us know about training a body was, in the first instance, researched on a male one.
To sit on the wheel of the men on the road to Moffat, for a woman, is not the same physiological transaction it is for a man. It is not a complaint. It is just physiology.
A man is allowed to be a serious amateur. A woman is either a novelty or a project
The alternative, if I turn up to a more amateur cycling club set-up where I am comfortably one of the strongest riders there, is that I get read the other way. I become unapproachable. A try-hard. A woman who is too into it, who is presumably training too seriously, who has taken this all a bit far.
There is no version of the strong female cyclist on a mixed ride that does not read as unique. Either I am impressively out of place at the top, or I am uncomfortably out of place at the bottom. A man in exactly the same position, doing exactly the same rides at exactly the same level, is read as unremarkable. A man is allowed to be a serious amateur. A woman is either a novelty or a project.
Image: Milan Josy/The British Continental
The same instinct, dialled up, produces the specific and depressingly common comments underneath the social media posts of most female WorldTour riders. Something like ‘the average club guy would beat most of the women’s WorldTour’. Not only is this not really true, it also reveals that women’s professional cycling is still used as the yardstick against which amateur men’s fitness gets measured, and that speaks volumes about how exactly the sport situates women’s ambition.
It is worth saying plainly that this is not a grievance piece. The sport has, over the last decade, invested seriously in getting new women into cycling. Breeze rides, women’s development squads, entry-level crits, come-and-try days, women-only clubs. Some of it has worked. Watching the City of London Nocturne this year highlighted the tremendous growth in women’s racing, and the work of development teams like London Academy has been outstanding. Similar grassroots offerings pop up in pockets elsewhere.
Getting more women into cycling is not the same project as treating the women in cycling as proper cyclists
But my experience across the rest of the country is that at club level, the attitudes have not moved. Where women’s group rides exist, they are, by default, structured around a café. This is not a criticism of café rides, which are lovely, but it is worth naming: the sport’s answer to ‘where do I ride with other women’ is still, in most of the country, ‘come and have a coffee’. The infrastructure is social. The competitive equivalent, for women who want it, mostly does not exist. So those women end up in the men’s bunch by default. The reaction they get for it is surprise. And the cycle continues.
Getting more women into cycling is not the same project as treating the women in cycling as proper cyclists. We have got quite good at the first. We have not started on the second. And the surprise, once again, is what is standing in for actual follow-through.
Image: Milan Josy/The British Continental
And it is worth being honest about what happens in the sport when you are a woman working inside it, which is another version of the same problem. I have spent enough time as the only woman in a UCI feed zone at this point that I have stopped counting. At a weekend of Norwegian UCI races earlier this year, walking into the dining hall of a shared hotel, the routine questions I got were ‘can I get your Instagram?’ or ‘are you single?’, usually before anyone had asked which team I was there with. In this context, I would probably have been holding a crate of bottles or wearing team kit. I was, by any reasonable read of the room, at work.
These experiences can be shrugged off, but at the Tour of Lithuania last year, my sports director found himself negotiating the dismissal of a soigneur from a notable ProTeam, after he had exposed himself in the feed zone. I will never know why he felt it appropriate to do so, but the discomfort that I, along with many female soigneurs, have endured routinely does not make the race reports.
The sport has built a lot of infrastructure to encourage women to enter, and it has built almost none to change what women encounter once they do.
I bring these up because they are what happens at the intersection of two facts: the sport has built a lot of infrastructure to encourage women to enter, and it has built almost none to change what women encounter once they do. The interior of the sport is not, culturally speaking, ready for the women the front door is designed to let in.
I am not trying to be the Carrie Bradshaw of British domestic cycling. But it is hard to overlook the honest balance of what the market will pay for. I would almost certainly make more money out of sexualising my cycling escapades on the internet than I ever would out of trying to be a professional cyclist. So would every strong female amateur reading this. The economic incentives of the sport are, in a specific and gendered way, not on our side. It is worth noticing when you are trying to work out why so many strong women eventually stop trying to be seen as strong.
Image: Milan Josy/The British Continental
Here is what I have come to think, after a spring of watching from the outside. Riding smoothly in a men’s bunch is a real skill. Descending as well as your male mates is a real skill. Taking your hands off the bars to eat, drink, or peel a layer at 40km/h in the dark on a road you have never seen before is a real skill. Holding on to the chaingang for the third hour when the boys have started attacking each other is a real skill. All of these are things I can do, and every woman I train with in Edinburgh can do, and the surprise on the men’s faces is not something we need to keep flinching away from.
The frame that measures strong women against men, and that greets us with surprise every time we do something we have been doing for years, is a problem the sport has
The frame that measures strong women against men, and that greets us with surprise every time we do something we have been doing for years, is a problem the sport has, not a problem I have. And it is a problem the sport can, if it wants to, do something about. It does not require more money, or more entry-level initiatives, or more Breeze rides. Those things are working.
What it requires is the men on the chaingang, the soigneurs in the feed zone, the guys with the phones commenting on the Instagram Reels, and the clubs running the café rides as though café is the ceiling of the women’s offer, to notice how they talk about, and organise around, the women who have been doing this for a while. And to try, quietly and without ceremony, to do it differently. That is the follow-through the sport has not done. It is the specific and unglamorous piece of work still outstanding.
Image: Milan Josy/The British Continental
The women I train with in Edinburgh are, by any honest standard, extraordinary. They are as good as, or better than, most of the men they ride with. The reason that reads as surprising is a story the sport is going to have to stop telling.
And this is not to say that it applies to all men. I am in awe of my male friends, who show up for me, lead me out for QOMs, who applaud us and who recommend race tactics.
But for the majority: when we turn up to your chaingang, please stop being surprised. When I hold on longer than you expected, please stop being surprised. When I beat you up a climb, stop joking it’s because I’m lighter than you. When I finish a National B, please stop dismissing the value of the licence points I have just earned.
I am there because I like riding my bike, I am good at it, and I have been doing it for far too long. You do not have to be impressed. You just have to get used to it
I am not there to prove anything to you. I am not there to dick-swing against you. I am there because I like riding my bike, I am good at it, and I have been doing it for far too long. You do not have to be impressed. You just have to get used to it.
The road to Moffat at three in the morning in a bunch of 50 men is a place I know how to be. The top 15 at a National B is a place I know how to be. The feed zone in deepest Lithuania, with a crate of bottles and a full jersey zip and my head above the noise, is a place I have earned my way into. The Saturday chainy, or the centre of the bunch as I sprint to try to earn my second cat, is a place I know how to be. I would like the sport to stop looking startled when it finds me there.
Featured image: Milan Josy/The British Continental
Tizzie Robinson-Gordon is a consultant, a soigneur with Edinburgh Bike Fitting Race Team, and a racer on the Scottish scene. This is the second of her journal entries for The British Continental. Cycling has spent a decade opening the front door to new women. It has spent almost none of the same decade rethinking what happens once they are inside. In her second entry, Tizzie writes from the interior.
I flagged, at the end of the last of these entries, that I had a diverse portfolio of things I was up to alongside the racing. The consultant job. The soigneur work. The friends who are not cyclists. The pub. The Wednesday nights that are not on a turbo. I framed that, mostly, as a small pre-emptive defence of why I was not further up the results sheet than I was. Rereading it, I think I got the argument the wrong way around.
Between an ankle and then glandular fever this spring, I have raced less than I planned and trained less than I would have liked, and it has not, so far, killed me. It has given me some distance. And distance, it turns out, is a useful thing to bring to a sport that spends quite a lot of its time not looking at itself very clearly.
What I have used the distance for is a lot of thinking about the specific and mostly well-meaning way strong women are talked about in this sport. There is a durable pattern in how the sport reacts to a strong woman, and I would like, for once, to try to describe it clearly. The pattern is surprise. It never stops being surprise. Even once you are, by any reasonable measure, good.
Some of the pressure is at least starting to be named. Mary McCarthy, the runner-turned-Instagrammer whose #beattheboys hashtag has become a cultural artefact on our newsfeeds, made a genuinely useful point underneath the noise, which was that the training load required for a woman to be competitive at the top of an endurance sport is a good deal more than most people understand.
It is not ‘training like a man’, which is what the phrase suggests. It is training like a woman who must reach a male-defined ceiling, from within a female body, using training principles that were, in the first instance, developed on male ones. It is a considerably harder assignment, and an error to describe it any other way.
Some of my close friends have made an annual tradition of doing the Ride to the Sun, which I joined again this year. I found myself early in the night in a 50-rider bunch of men trundling along the road from Carlisle to Moffat at 40km/h, and few hid their surprise as I took my hands off the bars to unwrap a gel, moved smoothly through the bunch, or peeled off my arm warmers without stopping.
It is the same surprise I get on Saturday mornings, when the guys on the chaingang cheerfully register the fact that I have, once again, held on longer than they expected. It is the same surprise I get from my male friends on my weekly routine of endless Arthur’s Seat laps, when I can out-descend them. It is always meant with warmth. Occasionally it is even flattering. But it is exhausting, over 10 years, to prove yourself to a room you have been in the whole time.
What none of them see, because none of them are meant to, is the effort required to be that good. To sit comfortably in a 50-rider bunch of men at that pace, I had to be as fit as the fittest man in it. To sit smoothly enough to swap layers without slowing, I had to be fitter than that. To hang on to the chaingang for the third hour, I have had to spend Wednesday nights on a turbo in my hallway doing intervals I have set myself and mostly not enjoyed.
And underneath all of that is a set of physiological facts that get published in exercise science journals and rarely paid attention to. There is a durable 10 to 12 per cent performance gap between elite men and women in endurance events, which is not because women train less hard.
It is because when men and women follow the same year of endurance training, women’s cardiovascular adaptations are, on average, smaller. It is because female endurance athletes lose meaningfully more iron per day than male ones, and between 15 and 35 per cent of us are iron-deficient at any given point, against three to 11 per cent of the men. And it is because only around six per cent of sports science research focuses on women exclusively, which means most of what any of us know about training a body was, in the first instance, researched on a male one.
To sit on the wheel of the men on the road to Moffat, for a woman, is not the same physiological transaction it is for a man. It is not a complaint. It is just physiology.
The alternative, if I turn up to a more amateur cycling club set-up where I am comfortably one of the strongest riders there, is that I get read the other way. I become unapproachable. A try-hard. A woman who is too into it, who is presumably training too seriously, who has taken this all a bit far.
There is no version of the strong female cyclist on a mixed ride that does not read as unique. Either I am impressively out of place at the top, or I am uncomfortably out of place at the bottom. A man in exactly the same position, doing exactly the same rides at exactly the same level, is read as unremarkable. A man is allowed to be a serious amateur. A woman is either a novelty or a project.
The same instinct, dialled up, produces the specific and depressingly common comments underneath the social media posts of most female WorldTour riders. Something like ‘the average club guy would beat most of the women’s WorldTour’. Not only is this not really true, it also reveals that women’s professional cycling is still used as the yardstick against which amateur men’s fitness gets measured, and that speaks volumes about how exactly the sport situates women’s ambition.
It is worth saying plainly that this is not a grievance piece. The sport has, over the last decade, invested seriously in getting new women into cycling. Breeze rides, women’s development squads, entry-level crits, come-and-try days, women-only clubs. Some of it has worked. Watching the City of London Nocturne this year highlighted the tremendous growth in women’s racing, and the work of development teams like London Academy has been outstanding. Similar grassroots offerings pop up in pockets elsewhere.
But my experience across the rest of the country is that at club level, the attitudes have not moved. Where women’s group rides exist, they are, by default, structured around a café. This is not a criticism of café rides, which are lovely, but it is worth naming: the sport’s answer to ‘where do I ride with other women’ is still, in most of the country, ‘come and have a coffee’. The infrastructure is social. The competitive equivalent, for women who want it, mostly does not exist. So those women end up in the men’s bunch by default. The reaction they get for it is surprise. And the cycle continues.
Getting more women into cycling is not the same project as treating the women in cycling as proper cyclists. We have got quite good at the first. We have not started on the second. And the surprise, once again, is what is standing in for actual follow-through.
And it is worth being honest about what happens in the sport when you are a woman working inside it, which is another version of the same problem. I have spent enough time as the only woman in a UCI feed zone at this point that I have stopped counting. At a weekend of Norwegian UCI races earlier this year, walking into the dining hall of a shared hotel, the routine questions I got were ‘can I get your Instagram?’ or ‘are you single?’, usually before anyone had asked which team I was there with. In this context, I would probably have been holding a crate of bottles or wearing team kit. I was, by any reasonable read of the room, at work.
These experiences can be shrugged off, but at the Tour of Lithuania last year, my sports director found himself negotiating the dismissal of a soigneur from a notable ProTeam, after he had exposed himself in the feed zone. I will never know why he felt it appropriate to do so, but the discomfort that I, along with many female soigneurs, have endured routinely does not make the race reports.
I bring these up because they are what happens at the intersection of two facts: the sport has built a lot of infrastructure to encourage women to enter, and it has built almost none to change what women encounter once they do. The interior of the sport is not, culturally speaking, ready for the women the front door is designed to let in.
I am not trying to be the Carrie Bradshaw of British domestic cycling. But it is hard to overlook the honest balance of what the market will pay for. I would almost certainly make more money out of sexualising my cycling escapades on the internet than I ever would out of trying to be a professional cyclist. So would every strong female amateur reading this. The economic incentives of the sport are, in a specific and gendered way, not on our side. It is worth noticing when you are trying to work out why so many strong women eventually stop trying to be seen as strong.
Here is what I have come to think, after a spring of watching from the outside. Riding smoothly in a men’s bunch is a real skill. Descending as well as your male mates is a real skill. Taking your hands off the bars to eat, drink, or peel a layer at 40km/h in the dark on a road you have never seen before is a real skill. Holding on to the chaingang for the third hour when the boys have started attacking each other is a real skill. All of these are things I can do, and every woman I train with in Edinburgh can do, and the surprise on the men’s faces is not something we need to keep flinching away from.
The frame that measures strong women against men, and that greets us with surprise every time we do something we have been doing for years, is a problem the sport has, not a problem I have. And it is a problem the sport can, if it wants to, do something about. It does not require more money, or more entry-level initiatives, or more Breeze rides. Those things are working.
What it requires is the men on the chaingang, the soigneurs in the feed zone, the guys with the phones commenting on the Instagram Reels, and the clubs running the café rides as though café is the ceiling of the women’s offer, to notice how they talk about, and organise around, the women who have been doing this for a while. And to try, quietly and without ceremony, to do it differently. That is the follow-through the sport has not done. It is the specific and unglamorous piece of work still outstanding.
The women I train with in Edinburgh are, by any honest standard, extraordinary. They are as good as, or better than, most of the men they ride with. The reason that reads as surprising is a story the sport is going to have to stop telling.
And this is not to say that it applies to all men. I am in awe of my male friends, who show up for me, lead me out for QOMs, who applaud us and who recommend race tactics.
But for the majority: when we turn up to your chaingang, please stop being surprised. When I hold on longer than you expected, please stop being surprised. When I beat you up a climb, stop joking it’s because I’m lighter than you. When I finish a National B, please stop dismissing the value of the licence points I have just earned.
I am not there to prove anything to you. I am not there to dick-swing against you. I am there because I like riding my bike, I am good at it, and I have been doing it for far too long. You do not have to be impressed. You just have to get used to it.
The road to Moffat at three in the morning in a bunch of 50 men is a place I know how to be. The top 15 at a National B is a place I know how to be. The feed zone in deepest Lithuania, with a crate of bottles and a full jersey zip and my head above the noise, is a place I have earned my way into. The Saturday chainy, or the centre of the bunch as I sprint to try to earn my second cat, is a place I know how to be. I would like the sport to stop looking startled when it finds me there.
Featured image: Milan Josy/The British Continental
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