Coach Rob Wakefield

When I was growing up, cycling was about transportation to and from friends' houses, but when ET came out, we all begged our parents to buy us BMX bikes. As "Radical Rob," I spent school holidays building jumps, berms, and racing tracks, where we would spend all our time making features more extreme until one of us ended up in hospital!

In 2008 I was able to leave my corporate job in London and move back to the beautiful North Devon countryside, where my love for bikes was reignited. At the time I didn't even realise that coaching for amateurs was a thing. My brother, who was racing, persuaded me to get a coach, and that started the journey. 

Amazed at how my body and performance changed when training in an organised way, I had a lightbulb moment in 2014 and decided that I would become a coach myself, fulfilling one of my lifetime ambitions of working in sport.

Since then I have coached hundreds of riders remotely, set up and managed youth and junior racing teams, organised and delivered training camps and skills classes, and taken squads of coached riders to major European gran fondos. 

My corporate experience enables me to have firsthand insight into the demands of a high-pressured career and family life, and how to balance that with training and riding. They say that variety is the spice of life, and that is what I love most about cycling coaching: different skills, different demands, different people, never boring.