Foto: ©Sportograf

The 29-year-old Canadian professional cyclist won the Ötztal Cycling Marathon, the ‘unofficial world championship of cycling marathon riders’, for the second time. Not a matter of course, as he had suffered a serious accident with severe brain injuries a year ago.

This year you won the race for the second time after 2022, covering 227 kilometres and an incredible 5500 metres of altitude. Can you give us an insight into your experiences and feelings?

I'm over the moon that it worked out again this year. It was an incredible race, because I didn't really expect to make it to the front, our group, in which nobody really wanted to take the lead, was 20 minutes behind the leaders at one point! The fact that it still worked out after my horror accident and only four months of training is fantastic.  

You talk about your road accident in January 2023, after which you woke up in hospital with serious brain injuries. Can you tell us how you made it from the bottom to the top again?

I finally made it to Europe at the age of 24 to chase my dream as a professional cyclist and got incredibly close to the world tour a few times. When I won the Ötztaler the first time in 2022 I had broken my pelvis earlier that year in a crash which ruined my season but I was healthy and fit again by Sept so winning my home race was a sweet ending to that season. Then at the start of 2023 this accident happened and everything seemed lost and that was basically the end of my cycling career.

I was hit by a car and suffered serious brain injuries and a broken back but at the time the people who hit me let me think I just fell on my own and they saved me because I was unconscious and couldn’t remember anything. A year later I got the full story of what really happened but by then there’s nothing you can do. That led to me not having a team in 2023 and I really suffered with the brain injuries for about 18 months. 

Things got worse because when I woke up in the hospital I found out I didn’t have medical insurance for the last few months when I still should have had it. Now my back is broken, my face is completely smashed up so I can only see 30% out of one eye, my teeth went through the top of my face, I have bleeding on my brain and now I need to figure out how to pay these medical bills and try to find a team so I can keep chasing my dream as a pro cyclist. 

I had always wanted to write a complete guide for younger me trying to make it as a pro cyclist and I’d been writing pieces for the last 3 years. My original plan was to write a training guide to sell online to help cover the medical bills but it ended up being 9 months of writing 4 hours and 12 minutes every single day (I kept track with a timer on my desk) to create a massive 600 page book. 

Also the audio book version has 6 podcasts included in it with Sepp Kuss, Alison Jackson, Jan Maas, Dan Bigham, Mitch Docker and Svein Tuft so you get to hear their advice as well. I just wanted to create the mega training guide for younger me who couldn’t afford coaching but still wanted to chase his cycling dream. 

The book took off and became more succesful than I ever could have imagined and 6 weeks after it was published I had messages from at least 2 riders from almost every single mens and womens world tour team saying how much they loved it. I never even thought I’d speak to these riders because I looked up to them. 

After the book, my podcast started to grow and that continues on. It’s totally free and the point is just to provide free information about cycling and training from the best riders and coaches in the world. You can find it on Spotify by searching “How To Become A Pro Cyclist with Jack Burke”.

At the end of April 2024 I recorded an episode with a Canadian coach I had never heard of named Steve Neal. I just wanted to see what I could learn from him but I was so impressed that by the end of the episode we decided he would coach me for a few months just to see what I thought. I didn’t have a race bike and I had no clue if we’re training for road, gravel, XC MTB or ski Mountaineering but I was just so excited to have someone to work with. Later I got a bike from Scott and now with some new hobbies writing books and podcasts I was so much more relaxed about training. For the first time in my life it was everyone else (my coach and friends) pushing me to try again, but I just enjoyed training because I like it. I thought my racing career was over.  

Can you tell us more about your philosophy? What are the key messages of the book?

• Build a team of mentors who have been where you want to go. Reach out to pros and you would be stunned how often they answer and will give you amazing advice because they were once you. My book and podcast are literally a sum of me doing that for 10+ years.
• Life as a professional cyclist is extremely tough. You will have so much bad luck so you need to design a life you love so you’re willing to stick around long enough for your chances to come around. You can do everything right and get a flat or crash at the wrong time. You need to design a life you love which allows you to also get the best out of yourself as an athlete so you don’t think of it as a sacrifice, instead you view this (hard) life as a privilege to chase your dream. Keep getting up, keep showing up, but that might take 10 years so you need to love it, not only get by on grit. No matter how tough you are, you will never last as long as the guy who just loves the process of trying again.
• Moderation makes average, extreme makes extrodinary. You need to work insanely hard. If you tell people how hard you trained they need to either think your exagerating or you’re completely nuts. Hard work works and there’s always someone who’s even more focussed and wants it more than you. Do more.

What would you say are the three most important tips for amateur cyclists?

• 2.
  Eat more when you train so that you have energy during training and don't have to stuff yourself with energy afterwards. If you eat more on the bike, you can train harder and you recover so much quicker. Every amateur cyclist I ride with, when I ask them how much they ate on a 5 hour ride, almost every time they needed to eat 3-6 times as many carbs and yet they can’t figure out why they’re so slow in the last hour.
• 4.
  Ride a lot around your FTP threshold. This is what’s always worked for me. I train a ton around my first and second lactate thresholds. Now I train less and have much less time to train around my normal work at the computer so when I go, I’m never messing around any more. My volume is much lower than when I was a full time pro but I’m focussed on being in the right zone from start to finish. When my new coach started making me do this it would drive me insane because I would have 5 hours with intervals the entire time and never any free riding time. I use to have lots of free riding time as a pro, then I only rode 8-12 hours a week to clear my head from work for a year. Once we started training properly 4 months before the 2024 Ötztaler this was killing me to stare at a computer for 5 hours every single day. But it works.
• 6.
  Increase your training volume on the bike and just focus on that until you can train for 20 hours. Stretching, heat sessions, altitude, strength training, core, massage guns or recovery toys. All those are great but only after you get the basics right. You should not focus on that until you get your nutrition and sleep right and don’t sacrifice training time for these special things until you’re hitting at least 20 hours per week on the bike. The little things are great but if riding volume is less than 20 hours per week, I think you would get much fitter from just doing the basics better first. I always dumb my training down so a 5th grader could understand it. When it’s that simple, it’s mentally easier to train hard consistently. 

Is there an insider tip from the areas of training, equipment, nutrition or recovery that you can tell us?

I have four tips:

• 2.
  If you want to lose weight, here is the easiest hack that no one gets right. multiply your current weight in Kilos by 2.2 and eat that many grams of protein per day. If you’re 70 kilos that means 154 grams of protein per day. If you hit that, take it easy on the fat and have enough carbs during training. I promise you will lose weight and be stronger but no does it. Everyone overeats on fats, gets almost no protein in and normally doesn’t eat enough carbs during training. Just do this for 6 weeks and I promise you will be leaner and stronger. 
• 4.
  If you do strength training in the gym, do not ride after, you should do your cycling session beforehand. The head coach for the German Olympic team gave me this tip years ago. For years I always did long rides after the gym but never made much progress in the gym. After making this change I went from maybe 3-5 sets at 60-80 kilos squats to 100 reps (10 sets of 10) at 100 kilos squats and the power and force I had on the bike, just how good I felt on the bike after was insane. I was 71 kilos at the time for reference but now am more like 66-68kg.
• 6.
  It’s so hard to remember to eat enough in a race. Say you want to eat 90 grams of carbs per hour. Use the lap timer on your computer to keep track of this. Just reset the lap timer every hour so you only need to remember to hit 90 grams each hour then it resets. You’ll lose track if you’re trying to do math in the 5th hour of a race and remember what you’ve eaten so just reset each hour. Felix Großschartner gave me this tip in the podcast we did and it’s such a good one.
• 8.
  When it comes to fuelling in training I think most people get it wrong so here are 2 tips. 
  • 2.
    When it comes to how much to eat during training this number changes more off the bike then on the bike. For example, in training I’m pretty much always eating ~60 grams per hour. It doesn’t change too much but what changes more is how much I eat for breakfast that day or how much I had for dinner the night before. How much you eat changes based on the training but the bigger changes come in the two meals you eat before (dinner the day before and breakfast) whereas during the session the amount normally is pretty consistent. 
  • 4.
    What you eat changes more in training. I do it like this. “Go fast” and “Go Slow” nutrition for training. Go fast nutrition is things like Haribo or just pure sugar from the grocery store in my bottles (you save a ton of money and I like the taste better of just normal table sugar in your bottles compared to the fancy drink mixes. Save that stuff for race day but you don’t need it for training). I use go fast nutrition for my intense training sessions. Go slow nutrition is things like granola bars which have more slow release carbs and a bit of protein. I like the little Corny bars from the grocery store because each is about 17 grams of carbs with 6 grams of protein. If you have 3 per hour on an endurance day, that’s perfect and also they’re so cheap. The mistake people make is always having “Go Fast” fuel on their long slow rides. You’ll always be hungry and overeat even though you’re not going that hard. Having the go slow nutrition will keep you from overeating and also makes hitting the protein goal for the day so much easier.