Words: Kenny Pryde
Images: Moving Still Images
Andy Bruce only bought his first bike in 2011. In 2019 he won a Masters world title in the Points race and picked up a brace of silver medals to go with it. Did we mention the Scottish veterans road race title too? Not a bad year.
While few riders get to stand on a UCI World championship podium, there are thousands, literally thousands, who got into cycling the same way as Dunfermline-based Andy Bruce. Which is to say that after a long lay off from sport, including 10 years in a fog of cigarette smoke, heavy metal and beer, Bruce took advantage of the Government Cycle-to-work scheme and bought a bike. That was in 2011.
“I got an Orbea from Sandy Wallace cycles and one of my work mates suggested we should go out for a ride with Kinross CC. So I put the bike in the car, drove 20 miles and my mate wasn't there!” recalls Bruce. Undeterred, Bruce started racing in the club's 10-mile time trials and entered his first ever road race in 2012.
“I went to sign on in my baggy Decathlon jersey and the organiser asked me if I had ever raced before. I told him this was my first and he gave me two pieces of advice. He said, 'Ignore all the shouting and swearing' though he didn't say it would mostly be directed at me! And his second pointer was to 'Focus on what was happening in front of me, not behind and not to the side,' and I made sure I didn't ride into the back of anyone.”
With his previous sporting experience limited to schoolboy rugby and university table tennis, Bruce was unsure how he would cope as an endurance athlete.
“My first goal was to get round the Etape Caledonia in under five hours, which I did. Then at an end of season club hill climb up Cleish Hill, I realised that I was hurting and I still had about four minutes to ride and I thought, 'Ah, this is what I need to deal with!' That was when I realised that the mental side of performance was so important.”
It might be a cliché, but Bruce has never looked back, enthusiastically applying himself to acquiring everything from bunch riding skills and track racing tactical nous to an Elite road race licence.
Bruce has been driven by the desire to see how far he can go, whether as a total novice road racer or track rider. “I was in Mallorca racing in a Masters event in 2017 and Jason (Roberts, Bioracer-Moriarty bikes team-mate) asked me if I was riding the Scottish track championships. I told him I had done my accreditation in 2016, but hadn't been back and never raced. I didn't want to be a danger to everyone around me but Jason told me to enter the individual pursuit, that way I'd only endanger myself! The championships were four weeks away, so I came back and built a track bike, entered the pursuit and Jason beat me in the final – which was fair enough really,” laughed Bruce.
From those track beginnings – including “getting my backside handed to me at the British championships, because, although I was pretty fit, my track skills were nowhere” - Bruce decided that the World Masters pursuit championship was to be his aim for 2019. It almost worked out in Manchester.
“I won the British Masters pursuit title and was on course in the World Masters, but I messed up in the final ride-off, I got my warm-up wrong and rode on an under-inflated front wheel. It was all my fault, they were schoolboy mistakes, but I was disappointed. People were saying 'Well done,' but Sandy Wallace came up to me and he got it right, he said 'Commiserations on your ride,' which was exactly how I felt.”
Bruce had also entered the Scratch and Points races as something of an afterthought, since he was there.
Bruce managed a creditable fifth in the Scratch event having qualified for the final. Cheered up and encouraged by his form, Bruce then qualified smartly for the final of the Points race, rode to his plan (“attack early, get some points at the first sprint, go back to the bunch, recover, go again”) and, with help from club-mate Jason Roberts, ran out the winner. “The screen went black after the last sprint and I didn't know if I had won or what had happened. I didn't want to celebrate and then look like a clown if I had miscalculated, but when the screen came back on, I had won. It was terrific!”
Bruce, who works for a Cisco Systems, somehow manages to fit his training around a lot of travel and is no stranger to the airport outsize baggage drop-off. Having been bitten relatively late by the bike bug, Bruce has thrown himself wholeheartedly into the sport, and he has no doubt that the acquisition of a coach, a training plan and clear goals have had a lot to do with his various veteran and Masters successes.
Given that he is a great believer in structured training and planning goals at the start of the season, had he any ideas for 2020? “Well, I'll take a few weeks off after the Scottish track championships, then get back into it. December and January are always hard, but I've got an eye on the British Masters road race championship. I was second this year (2019), but I wasn't quite at my best, so...”. So we've been warned.
Inspired to give track cycling a try?
The Sir Chris Hoy Velodrome in Glasgow offers a full accreditation programme.
This article was written by Kenny Pryde, a Glaswegian journalist and author who has been writing about cycling since 1987. He edited Winning Magazine and Cycle Sport and has contributed to the Guardian, Scotsman, Herald and - for one week only in 1991 - l'Equipe.
