Grit, (no) Guts, and Glory – Riding with Nico Anelli.
Cast your mind back to the time you truly fell in love with cycling. I don’t mean the childhood summers, or riding the bike so expensive you love it like your own child. No, I want you to think about how it first felt when riding your bike was all you wanted to do, all you suddenly seemed to think about. Did the hum of a free hub coasting downhill start to give you goosebumps? Was a run of fresh tarmac like hitting the jackpot?
Picture yourself here, and then imagine being faced with the prospect of losing it all, because at the same time, it felt like your body was falling apart. If you were Nico Anelli, race team member and coach at Ride Revolution, that’s what it felt like. At 17 he had just embarked upon his junior racing career, and within 18 months found himself in a pursuit he loved, along with a daunting diagnosis of Ulcerative Colitis (UC), an aggressive autoimmune condition, hanging over him.
From the spring of 2017, Anelli has been fighting the condition, with his body in a state of almost constant flare, all throughout which cycling has been the one constant. Whilst some days were better than others, he was never fully in remission from the disease, and as such nor was his cycling. For example, he recalled competing in cyclocross the winter prior to diagnosis, as symptoms were heightening – his average HR for the one hour race sat at a sky-high 196 bpm due to, what he would later learn, was severe anaemia due to the blood loss he was suffering. What would quite easily bury many did little to deter him. Even after turning to Google in search of other cyclists with UC, only to come up with nothing, he didn’t take that to mean it wasn’t possible. It simply meant that no-one had done it yet, and the years-long endeavour that followed would show why.
Nico’s heart lay in racing, and during these years where his body was enduring this fluctuating state of flare, his results on the bike were a mirror image manifestation of the immune fight going on internally. There would be good days, where he could podium or find himself in the top ten, only to fast forward a week and be unable to even finish a race, seeing up to 100 watts plummet from his FTP.
Management of the disease and life, both on and off the bike, became a series of trial and error, between medications, diet and doctors. Each had varying degrees of success, however nothing was able to fully control the symptoms. The condition had already resulted in drastic weight loss, and in order to live in as little discomfort as possible, let alone fuel being a competitive cyclist, he had to put extensive thought and consideration into everything he put in his body. As a result, for two years, Anelli’s diet consisted simply of rice, a source of protein and “something to make it taste nice”.
For many sufferers of UC, food can mean pain, whereas for cyclists, food means fuel, and an abundance of it at that. Whilst his peers were putting in 20 hour training weeks, Nico felt as though he was in a perpetual state of training – the physical stressors he was suffering due to UC were compounded by the stressors of hours on the bike, whilst out of the saddle he was being mentally drained by the relentless thoughts of keeping himself fuelled and fed without initiating a flare.
As a junior, Nico’s ambitions had always been to see how far he could go with the sport, and even throughout the aforementioned turmoil, they failed to be dimmed. The relentless nature of what he was going through could be paralleled to his own relentless nature in the face of such adversity, and the driving force behind the creation of Real Guts Racing [Anelli’s self-founded team], and his attempt to break the Scottish Hour record back in 2021 for Crohn’s and Colitis UK.
If you were to do as I did before speaking to Nico, and typed his name into Google, articles written ahead of this event would load in quick succession. Yet you’d be left on tenterhooks as to the outcome, as the search engines go silent. I won’t keep you hanging, he didn’t break the record. So he failed? Debatable. Whilst he will say that he managed the whole event poorly, the ultimate reason it didn’t go to plan was the fact that he had put himself through, what could only be described as, the mental and physical wringer in pursuit of this goal. His body kicked back with an almighty flare, preventing him from even contemplating performing to a level he was truly capable of.
In recounting this story to me, Nico framed this period after the record attempt, (“a state of total burn out in which the mind gave way and his body quickly followed”) as if it were the pinnacle of his downfall. He spent the next two years more or less entirely off the bike. Whilst he might not have known it at the time, or perhaps even now, I would argue this was actually the beginning his rise to success that we are yet to see the peak of. Up until this point, he had, for better or worse, a push through mentality behind his resilience. His output on the bike was his metric for how well (or not) his body was on a given day. There was no reliance upon ‘feeling’ when he’d been in a constant state of ill health for so long, the notion of normal, a base level functioning body was an alien concept.
Through working at a bike shop, Nico gradually made his way back to two wheels. Once he began to train again, this became a motivation to recommit to following up with doctors to find answers; not a cure, that doesn’t exist yet, but a way of sustainably managing the condition, escaping the burnout cycle and constant flare. Perhaps even contemplate the idea of entering remission.
Here, his resilience transferred from the bike, in pursuing such formidable pursuit with no promises in outcome, led to him starting a course of medication which is essentially low grade chemotherapy. The side effects are numerous, and some particularly nasty; for instance the subsequent skin cancer risk as a result of taking it skyrockets, so each day Nico has to apply SPF 50, even in Costa del Dundee’s tropical climes.
Yet this is a small price to pay when, despite the odds, this medication has got him, and kept him, in remission for the first time. Contraindications aside, he’s now the ‘best [he’s] felt in a decade’. He has been able to race consistently without the lingering uncertainty of what his body may do, pushing him to continue to test the waters – eventually leading him here, to Ride Revolution, as part of the team. This medication hasn’t simply given Nico the ability to race again, but the ability to ride and race with self awareness, instead of relying on his metric output to gauge how his body was feeling.
When we caught up, the team had just returned from training camp, and unfortunately Nico hadn’t escaped the illness that the rest of the team ended up with. As unfortunate as it was, it was a prime example of how Anelli is growing as a true athlete – he reflected that now he has a concept of what training “healthy” feels like, having regained a sense of a sustainable baseline through remission, he was riding the illness out, instead of trying to ride the illness out of himself. Trust me, he was frustrated, who wouldn’t be? But knowing that he could trust in the process of recovery, and its role in being able to train optimally, is a newly afforded mentality. Following the hour attempt, and finally reaching remission, Nico had a huge mental shift – he was no longer perceiving himself based upon his numbers and results, but as a product of the process. For the first time, he has a love for the training process, because he can now experience his hard work continually come to fruition with marked, continual improvements across his metrics. Progress is rarely linear, but gone are his days of such drastic performance unpredictability.
It would be easy to think that this new lease of life would be Nico’s signal to chase titles and glory, but ultimately the goal remains the same as it always has been. “This body is the rig I’ve got, let’s just see how far I can get – the illness didn’t change that, it simply put an asterisk beside it.” His metric of success has no endpoint nor definition, because he ultimately sees that he has no point of comparison – there is no-one else doing what he is. Instead, he is directed by the opportunities he is given to push himself, when they come up, he grabs them with both hands. Each opportunity is not about chasing an outcome, but the undertaking itself is the achievement, because it’s the next step up the ladder to achieving something greater. It’s what he’s always done, but it’s the first time the foundation the ladder is set upon doesn’t feel so wobbly.
Define being an athlete of any sport however you want, but there’s no denying that a large proponent is becoming that little bit better than you were the day before. Nico sees that as being the real fun of sport, but highlights the unique point of view his experience has brought him as an athlete, and one that we all stand to gain from; for as long as you’re solely focusing on the biggest goals, you lose sight of the day to day achievements and small improvements taking place right under your nose, and really, that is what success is made of.