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Ted King

Far From Typical

By InnerVoice

April 6^th, 2018

I’m in a bike race!

Picture this scenario: you have a team director screaming at you in the radio. He’s so worked up he’s frothing at the mouth, shouting a foreign language riddled with swears. The temperature is hovering in the high 30s, it’s raining, and you’re being peppered with some soggy, muddy mess flung in your face while pedaling as hard as humanly possible with 175 of your best friends. The road is eight feet wide. If you move six inches to the left, you’re hit with a headwind and are spat out the back. If you move six inches to the right, you’ll be waist deep in a Belgian canal. Everyone is fighting to be in the front ten positions which results in a square-peg, round-hole scenario — it just doesn’t fit. Sure, it’s not always like that, but these are the challenging moments.

Cycling is a funny sport characterized by so much failure. Depending on the day and the race, you have 150 or 200 cyclists in the race, but just one winner on the day. On top of that, there’s generally just one designated leader on each team, so 90 or more percent of the peloton is a workhorse domestique. When a leader wins, the entire team wins, but when a leader doesn’t win — which is the vast majority of the time — the team doesn’t win. My point is, there is plenty of time to stew in negativity.

You know that fans are cheering, family is glued to the TV, your bosses are hovering nearby, and they’re all hanging on to know what’s going to happen at the finish line. I don’t mean to downplay the energy nor be hyperbolic, but win or lose, I’m in a bike race! It’s not saving the world from hunger nor curing a disease; I’m just living out my dream. I would ride inspired in those moments, even if they’re oftentimes really tough.

Liquid Gold

My journey with UnTapped is much more of a What is than What was. About a decade into my career I realized that I found myself cringing every time I had to take a gel. Sure, it’s mandatory to consume fast acting carbohydrates on the bike, but it had long ago become a chore.

I was the only New Englander on the ProTour, so I had earned a reputation as being a lover of all things maple. I probably have Twitter to thank for that in a pre-Instagram era. I would literally step off the team bus before a big race and generous fans from North America would hand me a bottle of maple syrup. Liquid gold! Maybe they were just smiling because their suitcase was immediately a few pounds lighter. In any event, it was always extremely gracious and very heartfelt. Another component to this journey: I would return home to New Hampshire to visit family and friends and during rides I started taking nips of maple syrup and really feel surprisingly energized on the bike. The taste is ethereal and I knew there had to be something to it. After my first cursory internet search of the three word phrase ‘maple syrup nutrition’ I realized I was onto something. I teamed up with the Cochran family of alpine ski fame, and a good friend of mine, Andrew Gardner, and we launched UnTapped with a successful crowdfunding campaign while I raced the 2014 Tour de France.

By no means is a college degree a guarantee in cycling or elsewhere, but there aren’t a lot of ProTour cyclists with a college degree. I was excited to eventually step away from cycling and start something a little more thought-provoking. I was always drawn to business — no lie, if you read my sixth grade yearbook, I say that I want to be a professional athlete and entrepreneur. I never would have guessed that these two areas would actually come together with cycling and maple syrup.

“UnTapped was jump-started by a crowdfunding project while I raced the Tour de France. That’s about as large a stage as I could have asked for, so we used the platform that I’d created as a professional cyclist to get the ball rolling, to gain awareness and momentum. It’s provided me a platform to say, “Here, seriously try this. It works for me and I know it’ll work for you.”

I still love Cycling

My start in cycling was far from typical. Most European pros are racing a bike within ten years of being able to walk; cycling is part of European culture and ingrained in them from a young age. Meanwhile, I was playing hockey, soccer, and alpine skiing through my teens, then went to a quintessential, small liberal arts school in Vermont where I just assumed my sports career would draw to a close. My older brother, Robbie, was a prolific collegiate cyclist so the way younger brothers chase their older siblings around, and I decided to start adopting his hand-me-down bikes, chased him around, and gave it a go. I balanced a degree in both economics and math with the pursuit of professional cycling, which instilled a strong sense of discipline. My late start in the sport also likely ended up being a blessing, as it didn’t give me time to burn out. Throughout my entire career, bike racing was always new — seriously, the first time I hit the Arenburg Forest was at 50kph in the middle of Paris-Roubaix. Talk about jumping in the deep end….

I announced my retirement in the spring of 2015, after 10 years as a pro. I really didn’t know what the coming years would look like, whether I would step away from the sport entirely or still remain heavily involved. Obviously, I still loved cycling, but it takes this hardheaded, almost masochistic approach to maintain the same motivation from the start of the year to the end, year after year after year. My passion to be hyper competitive at the sharpest point of the sport was ever-so-slightly starting to wane. More importantly, I wanted to step away from cycling still embracing the sport that had given me so much.

Fast forward to the present and I’m still very much wrapped up in this sport. I work with cycling’s best sponsors. I lead rides, work with product development, host camps and pop-up rides, I have a small coaching business, I work with some cycling non-profits, youth development, and I’m very involved in the growth and expansion of UnTapped. The point is, the transition has been remarkably smooth. Look, the actual day to day of living as a professional cyclists is quite mundane: ride, eat, sleep, repeat. I tried to stay as busy as possible during my career — I enjoyed writing and immersing myself in the surrounding culture as best I could — but now in retirement, the daily to-do list is never quite complete. Balancing everything I do keeps me on my toes all day, every day.

Peter just wants to race his bike

I raced for some pretty amazing team leaders. Thor Hushovd, early in my career was an inspiration in his ability to keep a very professional balance. A few years later, I raced for Peter Sagan, which was so motivating to race for him since he was more than a half dozen years younger than I was. He was a kid! What you see is what you get with Peter; you can tell he just wants to race his bike, ride fast, and have fun through the entire process. But his energy was so palpable and his ability to deliver was unlike anyone in our generation. It was really an honor to race for him and those memories will last my lifetime.

Then there’s a bit of crossover between people who inspire me as athletes and businessmen. I’m inspired by people who create their own path and who do so in an atraditional way. I mentioned I grew up playing hockey and I still love the sport, so take Mike Richter and Andrew Ference as examples. Both are former professional NHL players, incredible athletes with Stanley Cup-winning careers, they’ve retired and segued to socially conscious avenues like environmental sustainability. Sure, they both ride bikes pretty darn fast, but they have a terrific balance of business, sports, and family.

My life for the past fifteen plus years has revolved around cycling. I found and fell in love with my wife, Laura on the bike, my career has been and continues to be related to cycling, and much of what I do day-to-day are somehow related to the bike. It’s a dream, to be honest. I still maintain a relationship with many friends from college and even prior, and they learned that I would have to forego birthdays, weddings, and holidays as a result of my career. That was tough. But that’s all part of the gig, an American living a European-centric sport. All in all, I see it as nothing but a positive experience. I think my friendships and relationships are that much more meaningful as a result of having cycling so involved in my life.

By Roxanne King (Flickr: Ted King & Peter Sagan) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

The other Ted kIng

The other Ted King in my life, my father, suffered a stroke when I was in college. He was the pillar of our family, a prominent orthopedic surgeon, an athlete, and an incredible human being. He’s still many of those things, but it absolutely rocked our family, and to this day if I think about at length, it’ll bring me to tears and that was nearly fifteen years ago. Brain injuries suck, plain and simple. Every day presents problems and challenges, but my parents’ positivity throughout it all has been tremendously inspiring. My parents and I are Christian and it’s remarkable to me how easily they could turned away from God, but instead found solace in Him. Further inspired by them, I’ve done the same.

My dad found an incredible community in the Krempels Center, an organization dedicated to improving the lives of those living with brain injury. In 2011 I teamed up with Arlon Chaffee and the Krempels Center to create the King Challenge. This fall will be our eighth year, and we’re thinking this is the year we pass $1,000,000 raised for the Krempels Center. It’s really an awesome event, which, just like the Center itself, is all about the coming together of community. There’s a professional feel to the day — a big sponsor expo, the Cannondale team RV, the SRAM support vehicles, but it’s a day without competition; it’s not a race. With routes for any and all abilities, the King Challenge is just a really fun day on the bike.

Shit eating Grin

When you’re racing in the ProTour, you’re pinning a number on and competing somewhere around 60-80 days per year. And those are on pavement and every so often, cobblestones. Whereas, in this current chapter of my life, I’m exclusively dropping in on gravel, mixed-terrain, and off-road races, and all said and done I compete maybe a dozen times per year. So in my mind I’m retired. Intervals are over and it’s now just pedaling (often still really hard) for the enjoyment. Both what I did then and what I’m doing now are pedaling bikes, but they’re totally different genres of cycling. These races produce an atmosphere that’s like nothing else you’ll experienced on the bike. The camaraderie is incredible, you have this shit eating grin pinned to your face, whether you’re in first place or 101st place, and the fact that nearly everyone is reaching for a beer and burrito at the finish line instead of a recovery shake and bowl of pasta makes me very happy.

“If you haven’t picked up on it so far, I should point out that I’m type-A. What I’ve discovered about myself is how much I’ve learned I can shrug off. Things that would previously have really put me in a bad place, I don’t let bother me anymore. That’s a combination of the very narrow success rate in professional cycling and seeing what my parents deal with daily with a brain injury. I learned to control the controllable, and the rest unfolds as it will.”

Push forward every day

I’ve never spent time on Mars, but the first year on a very Italian cycling team - Liquigas - was like moving to another planet. Over time, I picked up the language, learned the ropes, got knocked around a little bit, and came out happy as a clam. You quickly learn that bike racing is bike racing, regardless your nationality or the continent on which you’re racing, it’s pretty straightforward. Bike races aren’t scripted, but you can guess how a race will go north of 90% of the time.

Similarly in business, each member of the UnTapped team has found our roles. It’s less delineated as compared to a cycling team, we at UnTapped all wear many hats, and each day is different with a new set of challenges, but with an ongoing conversation — conveniently, entirely in English — an ever flowing stream of texts, emails, and phone calls, our shared vision of the company pushes us forward every day.

Please excuse me sounding too hokey, UnTapped is an organic company that’s grown entirely organically. We have a checks and balances system since our founding members come from relatively different backgrounds but all stand by the same central ethos of making the best products that anyone would want to eat. We’re in 700 bike, ski, run, outdoor shops, cafes, and grocery stores and the goal is to continue growing that tenfold. So whether it’s going to events, camps, races, these are all places to demo product and get people to try UnTapped for the first time. That’s honestly the trick to success with this product: people try it and they’re hooked. It’s almost a lightbulb moment. UnTapped really is a different type of sports nutrition that spurs people to think about food as fuel differently. They’re immediately taken by it and want to use it, rather than somehow being convinced that the frankenfood traditionally stocked on sports store shelves is going to magically make them faster. It’s part of the modern movement recognizing that real foods are the obvious answer to the sports focused pseudofoods.

Footnotes

Words by Ted King, Cover Photo by John Schnack - courtesy of Cannondale, other photos as attributed, Edited by Cody Royle, Published by Travis McKenzie, Copyright NTSQ Sports Group Inc

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FootNotes

Words by Ted King, Cover Photo by John Schnack - courtesy of Cannondale, other photos as attributed, Edited by Cody Royle, Published by Travis McKenzie, Copyright NTSQ Sports Group Inc

Colin O'Brady

Ted King

Far From Typical

FootNotes

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I'm Here To Win

The Humble Son

My Incredible Journey

The Most Interesting Man In The World

Season 3