Tom Danielson: the interview: part 3

By Daniel McMahon

In the third part of my chat with Garmin-Slipstream’s Tom Danielson, the rider from East Lyme, Connecticut, talks about his penchant for a good cuppa joe, overcoming depression, deconstructing negative press, and why Damiano Cunego can’t get no respect.

Daniel McMahon: I was checking out your Twitter account recently. You definitely like your coffee. How’s all the caffeine affect your riding and sleep?

Tom Danielson: Yeah, I just really like coffee. I like the caffeine, but at the same time I just really like the taste and the warmth of it. I just like everything about it. In fact, I’m drinking it right now. [Laughs]

DM: Me, too!

TD: It kind of goes hand in hand with the cycling culture, you know. You meet at the coffee shop, you have coffee, it gets you going. A lot of cyclists like coffee, for whatever reason. Personally I don’t have a problem with caffeine; I can pretty much drink coffee before I go to bed and still go to bed. If I drink too much without eating something I feel crappy later on. If I drink coffee instead of water, you know, obviously, my bike performance goes down quite a bit, so everything in moderation. It’s not like I have 10 cups of coffee before I go out and ride. [Laughs]

DM: You have your own coffee as well.

TD: Yeah, it’s a business with a guy called [Carl] Rand, who owns Durango Coffee Company. He’s a super-passionate coffee expert, and it only made sense to sort of align myself with the best coffee I knew of, so I always had his beans when I was in Durango, or I would bring them over to Europe with me. He has his own warehouse and he travels around the world finding new beans and new ways to roast coffee.

A lot of people confuse it though. It’s not me buying somebody else’s beans and just sticking them in a container and selling them. It’s not me trying to roast my own beans in my house either. I have a passion for coffee and Carl has a passion for coffee beyond mine and a knowledge that’s unbelievable. I figured, Heck, it’d be great for us to have some fun and team up and kind of share some of the great coffees. He’s always changing the roasts and trying to improve things and finding new beans and new locations. I think now he’s in even Costa Rica trying some new stuff. He does a great job with it and I hope it does well.

I hope that as my career grows I can do a bit more with it. I think a fun project would be to own a coffee shop here in Colorado. There’s a ton of coffee shops and a ton of good ones but some niche area would be just a lot of fun to just open up a shop—or a bike shop with coffee. I’d definitely say it’s the first thing I look forward to when I come back here—that coffee shop experience. We don’t really have that in Europe. They have great coffee in Europe but different—they really don’t have that sort of couch, chill out, watch it rain outside, you know? Get things done, read the paper, just waste time.

DM: Switching gears, let’s talk about the injuries you have behind you now. You suffered from a slipped disc. Having one myself, I know how painful they can be. Is it still a problem?

TD: No. I was able to address the issue and take care of it. It was one of those things that sort of put me back where I was while I was coming from behind. Basically, I was in a bad crash in the Vuelta, where I shattered my shoulder. I herniated a disc in my back. That was a really big road to recovery. I missed so much time off the bike, and when I came back I was on a new team, in a new environment, and unable to perform at the level that I was at when I left to take care of my injury. That was a challenging experience. To have pain, to be constantly rehabbing myself, then to see yourself perform so far below the level that you feel you’re capable of performing was crazy hard for me.

That was more challenging. The pain was one thing, but to go to a race and to show up and be in the wrong place where you’re not supposed to be. Even when you know why you’re there, as an athlete it’s so hard to accept. And what happened to me is, I went into depression. That sort of became another injury, where I got depressed and I got on this depression medication to try to resolve it. But anyone who knows anything about depression knows it’s something that’s really hard to overcome. So here I am with the injury, depression, and riding like crap. It’s sort of this vicious cycle that was really hard to overcome and took me the better part of a year to get over those things. More than that—a year and a half.

DM: Do you do any psychological training or meditation?

TD: Oh yeah. For me, my mind is one of my most powerful assets and it’s one of my most powerful … you know, my head is so strong that if I don’t constantly direct it in the right direction it has the ability to head in the wrong direction. Which is true of anybody, but with me in particular, if I’m not, you know … I can do great things with it and at the same time if I don’t use it properly I can do bad things with it.

I’ve been using a sports psychologist who I really like and I’ve done a lot of work. And it’s really made the difference for me. It’s like having the good infrastructure as well—not just the sports psychologist, but having your loved ones, your friends, your family around you just constantly positively reinforcing things—values—stressing things that are important to you and that, in turn, allows you to perform at the level you should be.

DM: You seem to be one of the more contemplative riders in the peleton.

TD: Yeah, I mean … I think too much, for sure. You need to know exactly how to align your head in the right direction. I feel it’s a lot harder to be … great. You know what I’m saying? Like, the easy road is to be medium. Or to just go with the flow. To be negative. That’s the easy way to do things. It’s easier to go into a race and just finish in the group. It’s easier to say, I don’t feel well today. The challenge is putting it all together, eliminating the fear of whatever, and just going and allowing yourself to be what you are. I think that’s a lot harder than people think. To go out there and apply yourself 110 percent. It takes a lot of brainpower to actually do that. It’s a very vulnerable position to be in.

You go out and give it everything you have and you know how disappointed you will be if you just give everything you have and it wasn’t good enough. You know that if I do that the risk is high, that I’ll come out disappointed with myself. You never know if you’re going to win or not. It’s sort of innate to be, like, Well, if I don’t go 100 percent and give 80 percent, then I know if I get beat that if I had that 20 extra percent I could’ve maybe beaten those guys, know what I’m saying? A lot of people typically fall into that sort of If I give 80 percent and it’s not good enough, then, okay, I know I had extra to give. As opposed to giving everything you have and falling on your face. That’s harder to deal with.

As athletes, I think that’s one thing that we need to work on. Some people do it naturally; some people don’t think at all [and give] 100 percent all the time, and that’s a great, great trait to have. But I’d say the majority of the population could definitely use some of that sort of mental guidance to be able to put 100 percent of you out there and just go with it.

DM: After your stage win in the 2006 Vuelta, you talked about how you had been able to deal with and overcome any negative talk in the press and elsewhere about you. Is dealing with criticism something you constantly have to work at, or did you just decide at some point to push it all out of the way?

TD: You know, I kind of go back and forth, for sure. When I think about what’s important … I mentioned my family; I think that’s just one way of dealing with it. It’s why that infrastructure is important to have, that core group of family and friends and people who believe in you and support you no matter what. I can say that my wife and my coach—and I’d like to say JV [Jonathan Vaughters]—believe in me 100 percent no matter what the piece of paper at the end of the day says. No matter whatever or whoever said what on the Internet or in print. That’s the most important thing to have. To have those people, that core group of people, 100 percent believing in you all the time, and you see that as an individual you have the ability to push yourself harder. And I had that unconditional support no matter what, and that gives you confidence to push it to another level.

Some of the mistakes I made in the past—and definitely you can say after 2006—is letting it get to me so much. The press and the people and the fans—they love cycling, and it’s part of the sport and part of athletics in general for everybody to have their opinion. You’ll be in the airport and you’ll see a football game on the TV and the quarterback will throw a pass and it gets intercepted and you’ll hear 85 percent of the people who are watching the football game go, Oh, that guy’s shit! He’s the worst quarterback ever! They need to trade him immediately. He’s horrible. As an athlete, you hear that and you’re like, Holy cow! These guys are assholes, you know? They have no idea how hard it was to throw that pass that was intercepted. So your initial reaction is to get upset and offended and whatever.

The older and more experience you get the more you realize that’s fun for everybody; that’s why people like to watch the sport. They can give their opinions, they can be fans. And people take the press and they say, Oh, this guy wrote this. Well, okay, fine, maybe it’s not fair they’re writing about you and this and that, but they are writing about you. They have a passion for the sport; they have an opinion because they follow the sport because they like it. As a professional athlete it’s my job to be out there performing, getting fans, keeping fans, making fans, and having people make these comments whether they’re good or bad. And I really can’t judge them myself based on what other people say because they’re just following the sport—they’re not actually in the sport.

So the best way to deal with it is just kind of your own judgment. You know, Okay, I didn’t perform as well as I wanted to. Look at a guy like Cunego. The guy wins two Vuelta stages and has had results up the ying-yang and people still say, He’s not any good because he didn’t win the Worlds! or He didn’t win Lombardia for the fourth time! or whatever. You know, it’s like, you’re always going to be criticized, and if you let it get to you you’re just wasting your time. That’s what I’ve learned over the years.

Read the fourth and final part of the Tom Danielson interview here. Check out the beginning of the interview here.

To view more of Mitch Clinton’s photos, visit ClintonPhoto.com.

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