Lydia Boylan in action last summer in the inaugural Prudential RideLondon Grand Prix around St James’s Park in central London. She has given up her engineering job and gone full time.
By Caroline Martinez
Irish road international and national track champion, Lydia Boylan gets her international racing season underway in Belgium tomorrow at the 120km Le Samyn des Dames with most of the best riders in the world having turned full time with Team Velosport Montegrappa.
The squad will focus on all of the major British races and several UCI European tours, including the Women's Tour of Britain in May, if it secures an invitation.
It will compete in three Belgian races over the next two months, starting tomorrow with Le Samyn des Dames and followed in quick succession with Omloop het Hageland and La Flèche Wallonne.
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“We’re an 'Elite' British and Italian backed team,” the 500m elite national track champion said of her new squad made up of four English riders, three Scots and herself.
“The big aim for the team is to get one of the domestic team spots at the Tour of Britain”.
Boylan left her job as a structural engineer to dedicate herself to cycling. She has secured a part time job tutoring in architecture in Nottingham, where her partner had already relocated from London.
The new post involves just one day teaching per week, affording her the opportunity to earn some money and dedicate the bulk of her time to her training and racing goals.
They include gaining selection for the Commonwealth Games on the Northern Ireland team, for whom she has declared.
“I wasn't really enjoying my work anymore,” she says of the motivation to give up her job in favour of full time biking.
“Maybe it was a bit of a quarter life crisis; asking myself do I really want to be an engineer anymore? In my head that's how I justify it logically.”
She also felt she was “reasonably good” at cycling and wanted to push her involvement in the sport to see how good she could be.
“The Rás na mBan last year, with such a strong Irish team, really gave me the confidence that I could ride at a good level,” she said of helping Irish team mate Olivia Dillon to overall victory.
“It was really fantastic to be part of a strong team and I felt I contributed to the team winning.”
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In 2014 she also hopes to take part in the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow. She qualifies to represent Ulster thanks to her mother, a Derry native. She has already met the other squad members at Ulster’s team training camps in Glasgow and is hoping to further impress the selection panel.
“The squad for the Commonwealth Games is not picked until the end of May. So nothing is certain. But thankfully I’ve met the selection criteria through my track results and times.”
Aside from making it onto Ryan Connor’s Northern Ireland team for Glasgow; having finished 4th in the national road race championships twice, getting into the medals this year is also high on her agenda.
In a bid to help her develop, the 26-year-old was invited by Cycling Ireland head coach Brian Nugent over the winter to train with Ireland’s leading female track rider Caroline Ryan in Mallorca.
“Brian invited me out to get a look into what kind of training Caroline was doing leading up to World Cups and World Champs,” she said.
“Obviously I was at a completely different stage in my training to Caroline, who was race fit. I was still just working on my winter endurance.
“But we got a lot of decent training in together and I got very lucky with the weather. I would obviously jump at the chance to compete for Ireland (on the track) at an international level.”
Lydia Boylan on her way to winning the 500 metre TT title at the National Track Championships in Dublin last August (Photo: Paul Atkinson)
As well as assisting the triumphant Irish team at Rás na mBan, Boylan points to her participation in the Lotto Belisol Tour in Belgium in August as a highlight.
There she rubbed shoulders with world class cyclists such as Ellen van Dijk, Evelyn Stevens and Trixi Worrack.
“I didn't feature at the head of the race but it was the first glimpse of really having the level of fitness it takes to race stage races in Europe. Racing up the Muur was just incredible.”
In the UK, where she rode for most of the season, she said she was happy with her performances overall but was disappointed a win eluded her.
“I had a lot of 4th place finishes. At the beginning of last season I thought of it as a development year with very specific targets like the road nationals so I thought of every other race as training.
“I think I‘ve learnt from that and I’ll definitely go into all of the races I ride more competitively this season.”
Boylan is not the only Irish rider in Le Samyn des Dames tomorrow, Wednesday; with national road race champion Mel Spath lining out for her new Team Rytger squad as well as Michelle Geoghegan of Endura Lady Force.
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