A NEW WOMAN
Life, sang John Lennon, is what happens to you when you are busy making other plans. Lizzie Deignan’s had her fair share of life in the last few seasons, what with the whereabouts business, the baby and now the covid-19 crisis, and it has gone further than interrupting her plans; it’s upended her whole self-image.
“I’m a plan-focused person, but we can’t plan anything. That’s been difficult” she tells Procycling over a WhatsApp video call from her home in Harrogate. “I’m learning,” she adds, “to take each day as it comes.”
Deignan loves a plan. She wrote in her autobiography Steadfast of the colourcoded, hand-written training plans tracking her progress towards specific targets over months and months of micromanaged detail. The first time I interviewed her, after her 2016 World Championships win, which was a masterpiece of perfection and control, she told me she was a perfectionist and a control freak. It was said with a smile, but I made a mental note never to turn up late for an interview.
But she’s been a bit up and down recently, the same as the rest of us. She was lucky, to an extent, that she and her family had been visiting family and staying at their home in Harrogate just before lockdown might have made travelling from Monaco complicated. She’s not had the same restrictions
