The flying postman

and postman elite time triallist

By day — well, from around 6am to 1pm — Richard Bussell delivers letters. A postal service employee, Bussell rises with the birds and busies himself with breakfast — usually a bowl of porridge and a cup or two of coffee — before cycling the 10 miles from his home in Stourbridge to the sorting office in Kidderminster, Worcestershire.

Upon arrival, after donning his work attire and stowing his cycling kit in a locker, he’ll prep his route, or ‘walk’, and spend the subsequent three or four hours padding the pavements and pathways of the Black Country, earning an honest and wholesome crust. By night, however, and sometimes of a lunchtime too, it is not unusual to find the postal worker aboard his Cervélo P2 pedalling at speeds beyond the reach of mere mortals — well, faster than anyone who isn’t capable of topping the national time trial podium.

Bussell, as well as holding down fulltime employment, possesses the strength in both mind and body to ride toe-to-toe, cleat-to-cleat, with the best cyclists on the elite circuit — many of whom are full-time professionals. So how is he able to combine the two? How can someone ride to the pinnacle of domestic time trialling without dedicating a work-free training schedule to the cause?

“I try to concentrate on the big events. I do the occasional local race but it gets a bit stressful racing every weekend,” the current National 10 champion reveals of his work/race balancing act.

Although the big events he refers to are reasonably sporadic and by no means litter the calendar, Bussell trains for between 10 and 20 hours a week, time that he obviously has to shoehorn around his duties as a postman.

“Usually in the summer I go for rides after work, but come winter I find it really hard to go out after work, so I tend to wake up extremely early and go out in the dark,” he says. “I do have a training partner, so it helps having someone else to go out with. I find that if I do my training in the morning before work, I don’t have to think about it and I can go home and just relax.”

Pre-work training usually means taking in a 55-mile loop of lumpy West Midlands terrain, and often leaves the RST Sport/aero Coach rider fatigued before he heads out on foot with a heavy postbag — this is the toughest aspect of combining work and racing, Bussell says.

“Recovery is the hardest part. I don’t mind so much the cycling to work and back, that’s just spinning the legs. It’s the walking up and down hills with heavy bags that doesn’t give you any chance to recover. No matter how easy you take it, you are tired at the end of the day.”

It’s safe to conclude that although Bussell’s job as a postal worker allows him a fair measure of free time, the nature of the work itself — which for the most part demands physical exertion — makes his achievements, often beating full-time athletes, all the more impressive.