From the first time I did some mountain bike races, I fell in love with it.

You've had a pretty remarkable career at a young age.

You can excel at all these different forms of biking and cycling.

You need the numbers, but you can also win races by being smarter or doing the right things in the right moment.

The strain is always close to the maximum.

I would say it's painful in some way, but there's also some joy in the suffering

when it goes well. How did you get to that place mentally to enjoy the suffering? On good days,

it's easy. Then the suffering is something I enjoy, actually. On bad days, it can really be hard

to push through it, especially on the bike. That's part of sports, I think everybody has good

and bad days. It makes you appreciate the good moments even more. Okay, Matthew, welcome to the Whoop Podcast. Thank you. Excited to be here.

So you've had a pretty remarkable career at a young age and you're one of the fittest dudes

around. So we're going to talk about your training. I wanted to start, though, by just understanding your versatility, because when people talk about you, there's the

endurance, there's the strength, but really a lot of it comes back to the versatility, the fact that

you can excel at all these different forms of biking and cycling. Talk a little bit about how you

actually got into these different disciplines.

Yeah, so I started with cyclecross, which is really big in Belgium.

And I think I switched to road cycling to have like a new challenge, which was really

successful and still glad that I made a choice. And then for the

Rio Olympics, as Cycle Cross is not an Olympic discipline, I wanted to try mountain biking,

which was a difficult part back then and still now, yeah, I have to say it's maybe the most difficult discipline for me to excel in.

But that is what makes it really exciting for me as well.

I love the challenge.

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