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I was near the bottom of the totem pole, and cycling isn’t quite as glamorous as some sports
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About two years ago, I was at a friend's wedding, and the wedding band was this incredible funk/soul band that has been touring the world the past year or two. And I was chatting for a while with a guy I knew in college who had started the band:
"Things started to get pretty surreal. I was at an event sitting at the same table as Sly Stone, and he was telling me 'Man, you got to check out this band...' and he was talking about my band."
But, just a month prior, he left the band. It had been his full time job for 7 years, and they were getting big, and he decided he was done: "I guess I realized that you don't 'make it' and achieve a new level - I realized that 'making it' is a constant process of grinding, living in a van, playing seven shows a week and being on the road for who knows, six months at a time. And I stopped wanting that."
I did a double-take because it was so similar to what I've heard from talented guys who get a pro contract, race for a couple years, and then stop. Just a few months before that wedding I'd been riding and talking with a dude who had, the year before in his debut year on a pro team, gotten a pretty impressive top ten at the national criterium championships. He was given an offer to renew his contract but made the hard decision not to.
And I used to know a dude who raced for the Geox-Fuji Test Team in Belgium, which at the time was an amateur feeder team for a Pro Conti team. He was good - got top tens in some pretty big races - but at the time just looked at his career prospects, thought about the work required to make it, and what "making it" would really look like - and decided to call it.
"Living the dream" often only looks like that from the outside. Mostly, it's a grind. Sometimes it's worth it, sometimes it's not. How it all balances out in the accounting is, I guess, the question that some people have to answer.