The Laura Trott

Effect

I felt a bit guilty about hauling Olympic gold

medallist Laura Trott OBE along to a wet and

miserable airfield in the middle of the night,

but I needn’t have worried, though. Laura is

a tough competitor.

ORN prematurely with a collapsed

lung, Laura has suffered from asthma

all of her life and also has a problem

with acid reflux. The reflux condition causes

her to vomit after heavy exercise – the poor

lass throws up after most training sessions

and races even without the lactate overload

that Rhona and Sarah explained to me at

Loughbrough Uni. Despite all of that, Laura

never seems to stop smiling and giggling. She’s

a lovely lass and, at just 21 years old, she has

won more cycle races than you can shake a

stick at, as well as two gold medals in the

B

2012 Olympics.

Laura is, of course, an expert in slipstreaming.

Riding with her team-mates they tuck in

behind one another, letting the leader create

the slipstream that allows the others to use

up to 30% less energy. The team each takes

a turn as leader and they thunder round the

velodrome. It was an aerodrome rather than

a velodrome where Laura put me through my

paces – Humberside Airport to be precise. They

kindly agreed to let us use the runway at night

once it was closed to air traffic and we could

have a good, long, straight run to see what

speed we could reach. Wearing skin-tight lycra

and feeling less manly than I have ever done in

my entire life, I tried a few high-speed runs on

my own bike with Laura urging me on, yelling

encouragement from the back of a truck driving

56  Britain’s Fastest Bike

Above: The wet and windy conditions were far from

perfect but I had an airport runway and Laura Trott

all to myself.

alongside. In the conditions, I couldn’t get

much above 30 mph. Then we tried it together,

with me slipstreaming behind Laura. Even in

the awful weather that we had that night I got

up to 36 mph – a 20% increase in speed.

Laura later paid me a visit at home to help

out with fitness training. I thought I had been

working hard but she had me doing interval

training on a stationary bike, running on

rollers. She timed me riding for 20 seconds

hard followed by 20 seconds flat out, and we

did that six times. By the end I was ready to

drop and that was when Laura admitted that

after most training sessions she has pushed

herself so hard that she’s sick, her reflux

condition and the anaerobic effect combining

to produce an unpleasant result.

Right: Even with Laura’s

encouragement, I couldn’t get

above 30 mph on my own.