It was really neat to see how many different layers unraveled. I would have to describe it, if you could visually see a ball of yarn, you take the one strand and you start pulling it. You figure you’re just going to get through it. There just seems to be more and more and more and more.

Barbra: So where did you start?

Lori-Ann: I think one of the cool starting points is, I gave Karl a big box that had 18 years of my training diaries. Every year that I’ve been cycling, I've had a diary. Some were a little bit smaller than others. Then as we started getting into 2000, 2001, 2002, they started becoming really big volumes because I was writing down different things. Karl had all of those to go through, believe it or not. That was where he started his questioning, his interrogation, his cross-examination from. It just unraveled and just kept going from there until we were done.

Barbra: It sounds like Karl was the perfect person to write it with you because he’s a friend, he knows you, he writes in his spare time and as a criminal lawyer, he’s trained in digging for information.

Lori-Ann: Exactly. But do you know what the best part was? About five years ago, somebody had said, You’ll probably want to get somebody to ghostwrite or help you write your story.

The more I thought about it, the more I thought, It’s not just anybody that could write a cycling story. The reason for that is, How do you explain motorpacing? That means, you have a motorcycle in front of you, I’m on my bicycle, and my bicycle has one gear and absolutely no brakes. My front wheel is about one inch away from the rear wheel of the motorbike.

Here you’re going along and you’re starting off at 30 kilometers, 40 kilometers, 50 kilometers, and you’re going around the very top rail of the Velodromes. Then when the motorcycle hits it full gas, there’s a gap that opens up.

So the motorcycle has jumped from 50 to about 57, 60 kilometers an hour in a span of maybe 40 meters. I have got to accelerate out of the saddle and jump to catch the motorbike and not ram into it but control the speed fast enough or slow enough to get to that inch away from the rear of the motorcycle.

So it’s not everybody who has experienced motor pacing. Karl is also a cyclist as well, so he knows about motor pacing. He knows about doing the jumps, about doing the accelerations. He may not have been a sprinter, per se, because he’s done all the other events, but he knows what it feels like.

How do you explain when you’re going into turn one and turn two in the Velodrome that your cheeks actually tend to go back because of the G force and the amount of force and speed that you’re going into a 42-degree banked corner. It’s not everybody that gets to experience that. With Karl’s experience, he knew what it felt like. He’d been there; he’d done that. So he was able to really describe all the emotions and all the feelings. It was exciting.

Barbra: It sounds like he was just perfect. I’ve got a dumb question to ask you, Lori-Ann. Why don’t those bikes have any brakes?

Lori-Ann: It’s the traditional, original bicycle. Like way back in the early 1900’s, because I think one of the first bicycles happened to be the pennyfarthings, which is the huge front heel and the little wheel on the back.

Racing bikes are the traditional bicycle. You have one gear. It’s the adult version of a tricycle Everybody has ridden one of those in their lifetime. You put your feet on the pedals and if you want to go fast, you have to turn the pedals. Well, if you want to slow down or stop, you have to slow down your pedaling so your legs aren’t going around so fast. That is the purest form of cycling.

But when you’re on a banked oval track, if you’re going to slow or coast, which is stop pedaling, your bike rear-end wheel is probably going to slip because there’s no power being transferred from your pedals to the rear wheel.

So in cycling lingo, we have what we call a fixed gear. So it’s direct drive from your pedals to your rear wheel. Every time you turn one revolution, it’s going to your rear wheel and it’s going and propelling you forward. That is actually one of the effects of what keeps you upright when you’re on a 42-degree banking.

Barbra: I see. Lori-Ann, as I hear you talk about your book, I realize I have to get it for my husband. He’s an amateur cyclist and he loves reading about athletes. So your book is called, “One Gear, No Breaks,” which is a great title, by the way. Where could I purchase it?

Lori-Ann: You can go to any bookstore and online bookstores like Amazon has it too. The hardest part lately has been keeping them on the shelves and in the stores.

Barbra: Sounds like it’s been very popular.

Lori-Ann: It has. We launched it in the spring of 2006. Karl and I, we did a ten-city book tour across Canada that was sponsored by EPCOR, which was fantastic.

So we got to go out in the different communities. Some of the communities I hadn’t been to for a long time like Peterborough, Hamilton, Montreal. That is where I had originally started cycling. We went out to Vancouver, Victoria, Calgary, Edmonton, and Toronto.

So it was really fantastic to be able to connect with a lot of the people I hadn’t seen before or hadn’t seen for quite a while or before going to the Olympics and just chat about writing the book.

Barbra: Oh, fun. You mentioned in passing something about a video that was being made at the same time.

Lori-Ann: Yes. It was made by Karl’s younger brother, Chris Wilberg, who is a documentary film maker. At the same time Karl and I were writing the book, Chris and I were filming the documentary, “One Gear, No Breaks”of the same title.

What happened was Chris had broken his leg in a downhill mountain biking accident. It was actually Karl who suggested to Chris to follow me post-Olympics to the World Championship of 2005.

Chris wasn’t really going to be moving too far, with a broken leg. He lives in North Vancouver. I was training one week out of every month for four months in Burnaby, which is just outside of Vancouver. So the timing and the location worked out perfect. I was in Vancouver, Chris was in Vancouver, so the Gods were upon us there.

The best part about track cycling is, I literally go around and around in circles. So Chris needed only one good leg and he could spin around on that and capture me with his camcorder there. It was really neat because not only did he get to see my progression with the cycling, I also go to see his as well.

It was quite ironic because the relationship that I have with Karl, when we wrote the book, was total trust, total openness, total honesty right from the start. There was nothing that was ever withheld. The amazing thing was, with Chris, it was the exact same thing. It was comfortable, it was open, it was honest.

Sometimes he was literally an inch or two away from my face, getting that close, right in there, right there in the moment, and I never saw him. There was that camaraderie already. Certain people have that effect. You can work with people like that.

I feel like I have hit the pot of gold again with the book with Karl, the documentary with Chris. So Chris followed me around for four and a half months through a lot of highs and a lot of lows.

In the documentary, you get to see what it looks like post-Olympics when you win a gold medal, when you try to go after another championship jersey. Sometimes you find out that winning doesn’t necessarily mean standing on the podium. There are other ways of winning that we don’t always think of and it’s really showcased in his documentary.

Barbra: I can’t wait to see it. I’ve actually seen a little snip of it because I went on the video website last night and there’s a really great trailer.

Lori-Ann: Awesome. It was incredible. When Chris had put that together, I was just like, Wow, that 60 seconds of pure up and down and speed and spills and what does it take, what does it show. It’s not your typical sport video at all.

The website for that is, OneGearNoBreaks.com, and it’s B-R-E-A-K-S. It’s not like the brakes on a car or bicycle. It’s a bit of a play on words. That’s where the title for the documentary came from and the book also was taken from.

Sometimes you get breaks in life that really catapult you forward. Sometimes a break will set you back. But it’s really, I think, about the journey. Sometimes you don’t know where you’re going until you get there.

Barbra: So well said. I didn’t even notice that when I was on the website and looking at the video and at your book that it was a play on words, which makes it so much richer.

Lori-Ann: A lot of people miss that. It’s quite ironic. Then it kind of hits them later and they look at it and go, Hold on a second. That’s not the brakes on a bike. Everybody knows a track bicycle has one gear and no brakes.

Barbra: The play on words about getting breaks in life, good breaks, bad breaks, but also I guess it makes me think about breaks in terms of bones!

Lori-Ann: Exactly.

Barbra: It’s such an exciting sport.

Lori-Ann: It is. And we’re always riding so close. Sometimes we’re knocking elbows, sometimes we’re knocking heads, sometimes the bikes collide. Then sometimes you’re riding so close there’s maybe a hair or two that actually separates you and your competitor.

Barbra: How did you come up with that title, Lori-Ann?

Lori-Ann: It was actually Chris Wilberg. I think it was just seeing what I do, seeing where things go, seeing the industry, the sport. Chris is also an accomplished cyclist and sportsman himself.

Barbra: Lori-Ann, it has been a pleasure and an honor to speak with you today. Thank you very much.

Lori-Ann: Thanks so much for having me.

This concludes my three part interview with Lori-Ann Muenzer.
Read Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

For more information about Lori-Ann Muenzers motivational speaker company please go to PureMomentum.ca. To purchase the documentary please go to OneGearNoBreaks.com and to purchase the book of the same title you can go to Amazon or your favorite independent bookseller.

Note added April 23, 2007: This article has been featured in the following blog carnivals:
Creative Growth; Careers in Middle Age; Life, HHappiness and Meaning; Carnival of Sportsand
Baby Boomer Blogs. My thanks to all the Carnival Hosts who selected this article.