Seth Dunwoody may be signed to the Bahrain Victorious Development Team, for U23 riders, this year but the 18-year-old will also be eligible to ride for the World Tour team at times, under UCI rules.
Before he pins on numbers and gets stuck into action, he spoke to stickybottle about his winter training, the first winter he was free of school commitments, with cycling getting his full attention.
Dunwoody, who won four UCI-ranked races in Europe last year, including two Nations Cup events, also lived with his coach, Stephen Gallagher, an Irish coach of international renown who works with top riders and is head of performance at Canyon/SRAM women's World Tour Team. Dunwoody focused on getting big volume miles done, even before his team training camps, in a bid to be ready to transition from the juniors to the pro game.
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"Obviously I'm not in school this year so that changed, not even just my training but, my whole lifestyle," he said. "The training just looks a lot more different. It's no longer squeezing it in on the turbo in the evenings anymore, it's the main part of the day."
From Hamiltonsbawn in Co Armagh, Dunwoody decamped to the much sunnier climbs of Western Australia for much of the Irish winter and said it was an incredible experience.
"My last race of last season was in October which was Chrono des Nations and I won that. And then I went straight out to Australia to live with my coach, Stephen, out in Perth. I went and stayed with him for seven weeks which was amazing. I obviously brought the bike with me and got plenty of miles in there.
"The lifestyle and the way the cycling scene is in Perth is brilliant. The sheer amount of people out at five and six o'clock in the morning, is huge. There's group rides starting every hour between five and nine o'clock with different levels. You'll have hundreds of people on the bike paths training for hours before work every morning, it's crazy."
Dunwoody said he threw himself into the scene, got a lot of good quality work done and a met a lot of new people, though joked the climate "softened me up a bit for coming home to Ireland". By spending so much time with Gallagher, Dunwoody said he not only got hands on guidance, but learned a lot about why he was doing the training set out for him.
"You think technology is great for getting coached," he said of communicating with a coach via phone, email and training platforms. "But if you live with your coach, it's just brilliant. If we were going out… maybe we had something planned or we had a late night Stephen would just change the training on the spot and just adapt."
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Dunwoody continued: "Living with Stephen, and him explaining the training sessions… the way you go about it, in terms of gym work, the way it's strategically placed throughout the week. That's what you're never told over the phone and you always just follow a plan. But when I was living with Stephen, he's chatting over the dinner table explaining it; it makes the training seam a lot more strategic, it's great."
However, Dunwoody said the winter was still about the basics of cycling during the off-season; getting the miles in with the upcoming challenges in mind.
"It was about getting that sheer time on the bike that was needed, to set the foundations for U23," he said. "I needed that. And even if I was at home, I would have just needed to get loads of miles in."
However, after returning home in December, Dunwoody said he picked up a couple of bouts of illnesses, from viruses doing the rounds. That meant his training was interrupted, but he at least had a big base already completed.
"I basically came home for a team camp in December, that was my first one, and I had a small sickness after that which wasn't ideal," he said. "But me and Stephen kind of knew it was inevitable. And because I started my winter training what somewhat early, I had the miles behind me so I didn't have to panic. I wasn't rushing back to get the miles in."
Dunwoody undertook another team camp in January, this time with his Bahrain Victorious U23 team combined with the World Tour squad.
"It was absolutely brilliant," he said. "The professionalism you see around you is crazy, you kind of feel like you're forced to step up to that level. There's no sit down where people tell you what to do and how to be professional, it's just expected of you at that point. You're there because you're a good cyclist so you're just expected to be professional. I'm still learning a lot of small stuff."
Asked if cycling now felt different because it was a full-time pursuit in a pro team environment, Dunwoody said he was taking things incrementally.
"I'm still living at home at the moment in Ireland. So I have my family around me and obviously I'm not isolated in a different country by myself. I'm keeping it normal, and it keeps that pressure away. I still go out in the bike every day, I love riding my bike, I love training.
"I love that sense of completion whenever you finish your training session, you know that feeling. The training itself doesn't feel any different to be honest. But I think once the season starts, and I'll be traveling a lot more, then it will kick in - ' okay this is intense, this is going to be the future hopefully'."
