Michael Woods Went to Scotland for The Gralloch. Haggis Pizza and Bradley Wiggins Were a Bonus

My dad grew up on a farm outside of Fergus, Ontario. As a kid, we would make the long drive, multiple times per year, from Ottawa to the town settled by Scottish immigrants in the 1800s. Going to Gatehouse of Fleet this past week to take part in my first UCI World Gravel Series race, The Gralloch, in Scotland, I couldn’t help but think; “now, Fergus makes sense.”

Things must have been bad for someone to sail across an ocean, then trek across a quarter of the world’s second-largest country to settle and live in what is basically the same place. The old stone houses, the moderately bad weather, and the profound sense of isolation are everywhere in Fergus, and so too are they in the southern region of Scotland. As someone who grew up in a city, I couldn’t live here, but to someone from places like these, I can see why going anywhere else would feel like an overwhelming assault on the senses.

Gatehouse of Fleet is painfully beautiful. And when I say painful, I mean it. Your heart hurts looking at the landscapes. Barren, windswept ancient hills, mossy old stone fences, and solitary houses sitting among fields pockmarked by sheep, woolly cattle, and spring flowers of yellow and blue are everywhere. The town where the race is held feels like it hasn’t changed since Fergus was first settled, and when riding the course, around every corner, you anticipate seeing Mel Gibson yelling, “Freedom!”

If you told me to paint a picture of what I imagined Scotland to be like, Gatehouse of Fleet would still be a caricature of this image. The place is ridiculously Scottish, and man, I am glad I came.

Three weeks ago, Travis McCabe, my man on the ground with Ventum, asked me if I wanted to fly north to the UK to race The Gralloch. Between racing in California, Girona, and preparing for Unbound, I have had a busy schedule, but when he told me the race was super cool and I would have a chance to do a shake-out ride the day before with Sir Bradley Wiggins, I said, like a tech bro at the gym wearing a set of Shockz headphones and an Under Armour cutoff t-shirt, “Let’s Go!”

The Gralloch is representative of most gravel races I have done this season. The event is booming. Starting just half a decade ago with 900 participants, the race now has over 4,000 riders, quadrupling the population of the town in which it takes place.

I crashed with the Ventum crew for this one, on a dairy farm 20 minutes from the race venue, and riding to and from the event was spectacular. The race venue had an excellent vibe, and being in the UK and at a UCI event, it had a far greater sense of organization and safety than the wildness of the Traka two weeks earlier.

One thing I have really enjoyed about racing gravel is the eclectic group of athletes I am brushing elbows with. This week, on the start line, I got to shake hands with Olympic triathlon champion Jonathan Brownlee, and I bumped into Anton Palzer. Anton, a Red Bull athlete, had come because the energy drink behemoth was sponsoring the Gralloch. Anton was a world champion skimo athlete who turned his attention to cycling and raced in the WorldTour for several years. This season, he switched back to skimo.

Anton is one of the inspirations behind my calendar this year, so I was excited to see him at the elite athlete presentation the day before the event. I “raced” him at Pierra Menta this year. When I say race, I mean he finished 2nd, I finished 107th, and several hours behind, but it was a blast talking to him about skiing down the same couloirs in the Alps, some two months removed, while sitting in a field in Scotland.

He told me, in his heavy Austrian accent, “Michael, you did great! Skimo is not easy.” I told him my shoulders still hurt from the race (I think I tore both rotator cuffs) and that I don’t understand how he can go downhill so fast. “Michael, at Tour de Rutor [a race he won a week after Pierra Menta], I descended 2000m of elevation in 8 minutes; I almost died 8 times.” We both laughed.

The other rider that I was excited to connect with was, of course, Wiggins. Though I did feel like a bit of a heel doing the pre-race shakeout titled “The Wiggins & Woods Shakeout Ride.” In hockey terms, for much of my career, I was a solid first liner. I wouldn’t have been the most controversial pick to make the Olympic team, and for a year or two, I was making the All-Star game, but Wiggins is Connor McDavid. The man is literally a knight. Just reading his Wikipedia page, it is mind-boggling the accolades. The man won the Tour de France and then, two weeks later, at his home Olympics, won gold. Post-career, he has dabbled in a wide range of projects, including an attempt to make the Olympics in rowing. I have to admit, I have always been star-struck running into him and also taken aback. The first time I met him was in 2021, moments after I was presented the KOM jersey at the Tour. As I walked off the presentation stage, there was Wiggins, only 50 lbs bigger than his Tour-winning form, a huge beard on his face and smoking a cigarette in the press booth. I did a double take.

I always cheered for Wiggins because, unlike many of the seemingly robotic GC men of that era, he was unique. He had tastes outside of the sphere of the sport, he had charisma, and could be, at times, damn funny. His commentating for GCN a few years ago was some of the most insightful, interesting, and hilarious punditry I have seen in the sport. I told him this as we rolled out in front of a group of 300 riders the day before the race. Surprisingly, he seemingly knew just as much about my career as I did his, and it is a testament to his encyclopedic knowledge of sports.

The final guy I enjoyed bumping into was former WorldTour rider Lukas Pöstlberger.

Lukas had won the Traka 200 two weeks earlier and was also at the elite athlete presentation. For me, Pöstlberger was a guy who surprised me when he left the sport’s top level. The World Tour can sometimes be a very unfair place. Sometimes you will be teammates with riders, and you think, “How the hell did this guy get a contract?” However, on occasion, a solid rider who truly belongs will fall through the cracks. In 2024, Lukas was one of those riders who, through bad circumstances, mistimed contracts, and poor management, found himself without a job. This guy won big races, took the leader’s jersey at the Giro, and was a classy bike racer. What I liked most about Lukas’ wins is that they were complete. Riders who win like him that come to mind are guys like Toms Skujiņš and Simon Clarke. They are riders who are strong, but they aren’t the strongest in the race. Instead, through a combination of great skill, inspirational levels of bravery and resilience, and well-executed tactics, they defy the odds and win at the highest level. They are my favorite type of rider, and their wins are always my favorite to watch. I still remember Lukas’ wins at the Giro and the Dauphiné because they were works of art.

So, when Lukas was not re-signed, I was surprised; however, he has since switched to gravel and has taken to it like a duck to water. For the aforementioned reasons—his skill, his race craft, and his toughness—gravel is a perfect playground for him, and when I asked him if he would ever consider going back to the World Tour, he quickly replied, “No.” The next day, I would see why.

Starting with a 6km narrow gravel climb, I knew I would have to start the 110km Gralloch hard. This season has been a learning process, and after my first few attempts, I realized that I have been too passive in the races. I am an emotional rider. I always have been and I feed off the energy of being at the front. When I was a runner at university, for the first three years of my cross-country career, my coach, Ron Warhurst, would say, “Woodsy, you are a miler; you need to start slow and then pick the guys off at the end.”

I hated this tactic. For me it never worked. I would do this, start at the back, and when it was time to start picking things up, I would instead go backward. I still remember one time, while having a particularly bad slide from mid-pack to the back of the pack at the NCAA Cross Country Championships, Ron yelled at me, “Do you have any pride?” I don’t know what his aim was in saying it, but he may as well have handed my 19-year-old self a boat anchor.

It was only in my final year at Michigan that I realized the power I draw from being at the front of a race. Being in the action, having fans screaming, and the camera aimed right at me gave me a boost of adrenaline whose benefits far outweighed the advantages of starting conservatively. It was a tactic I stuck with once I entered the sport of cycling and something that I fed off when I was at my best. I have been criticized by DSs and fans for being too aggressive in certain races, and tactically they were right; however, this was also a conscious decision to tap into this state.

So, coming into the Gralloch, I decided enough of this trying to be at the back and learn from those in front of me; I would simply go full throttle on the opening climb. Fortunately, Pöstlberger thought the same way.

We went out of the gates full at this race, and from gun to tape, I averaged one of my highest sustained powers for three hours in my career. Lukas and I traded off big pulls on the opening climb, and we broke the group. Only Jenson Young, a young rider from the UK, was able to match the pace. For the next 2.5 hours, we formed a strong alliance. Each taking solid pulls, we managed to break the cohesion in the chasing group behind and build a solid 2-minute gap on the field.

I was feeling great, and spurred on by the excitement of being back at the pointy end of the race, I pushed each climb hard. Too hard. I felt like I had finally nailed my tire selection, I was fueling well, and with 30 km remaining in the 110 km course, I started hatching plans in my head as to how I would attack my breakaway companions in order to win the race. I decided that with 12 km remaining, on the final short paved climb, I would launch my move and then roll down the final 10 km false-flat paved road to victory.

On the penultimate climb, I took the front and pushed the tempo even harder than I had on previous climbs. My goal was to pad the cushion we already had on the group behind and put a little fear in the hearts of Lukas and Jenson. This was a bad move. After we crested the climb, I started to feel like my legs were lacking a bit of coordination, and then when Jenson took a pull in a subtle crosswind section, I started to panic. I could hardly hold his wheel, and I realized then that my overzealous pace had only served to ruin my own legs.

Once Jenson flicked his elbow for me to pull through, I didn’t. My mind completely converted from how to win to how to survive and at least salvage third. “I can’t pull,” I yelled. “I will give you guys the win; just let me recover.”

I sat in for a few consecutive pulls by Lukas and Jenson, hoping that my legs would rebound, but they just wouldn’t. I was cooked, and just as we hit the final climb that I had hoped to attack on, Jenson flatted. He pulled off Lukas’ wheel in order to fix the flat, and I couldn’t even close the gap to Pöstlberger. I was going all out, but I looked down at my computer, and I saw 200 watts reading on my power meter (to the uninitiated in power, this is a very pedestrian pace for a pro). This was a bad sign. Lukas yelled back at me, “Come on, Woodsy, you can hold on!” He waved at me to just try to survive, knowing that I would get a solid draft from him on the final false-flat descent, but I could hardly pedal. It was a disaster.

As I watched him ride away, I did everything in my power to keep my composure and just try to maintain some forward momentum. Then Jenson passed me after fixing his flat for a second time and shouted, “Come on, man, just hold my wheel; we can make it.” I tried to accelerate, but that short acceleration only gassed me more, and I then watched him easily float away. I was in no man’s land. For the next 6km, I tried to keep things going, hoping that the group behind had enough games going on between them that they would not catch me, but I was going damn slow.

Finally, a group of four riders, including the Belgium national champ and my good friend and Canadian champ Ben Perry, caught me. I had regained some legs in that time between, just enough to jump onto their wheels. But when one of the riders pulled off the front and tried to swing in behind me, I yelled, “Dude, go in front of me. I will ruin your race if you go behind me!” He followed my instructions, and when a rider from this group attacked, all I could do was watch as they too sped away.

Fortunately, no other riders caught me, and like all of my other gravel races this season, I limped across the line. I was buckled at the end of this thing. Dizzy, nauseous, and exhausted, I walked to a beach chair at the Ventum booth and collapsed. It took me a solid 10 minutes of sitting there before I started feeling somewhat normal, and another 20minutes before I could stomach a tallboy and haggis pizza (which was actually delicious).

Although I was pretty upset to have thrown out the chance at a win due to my own over-excitement, I did place 7th—a far better result than my previous outings and without a doubt my best showing in the discipline.

I once again learned some solid lessons this week, and because of this, I now feel like I am getting the hang of this sport, which makes me a bit less anxious about my immediate future, as up next is what will undoubtedly be my longest day on the bike: Unbound.