Christian Meier: From Tour de France grinder to ultra-running winner

Meier is back from leading his Girona group run now and is busy making a drink.

We’re supposed to be discussing his running career but instead we’re talking coffee.

The brew is delicious. It illustrates a part of Meier’s character that has been integral to his burgeoning new career in trail running.

Meier loves to “geek out” on new things and is therefore fastidiously making drinks inside the first of two coffee shops that he owns and runs with his wife in Girona. He was still racing professionally when they set up the business in 2015.

He quit cycling a year later, aged just 31, in a sport where riders can continue into their forties. Despite having a year to run on a lucrative professional contract, coffee and entrepreneurship was his new obsession.

“It got to the point in cycling where I started to feel like I was doing the same races, and getting too comfortable,” he said then.

“l felt like I was no longer growing. At the same time, with coffee, everything was so new and so young and there was huge scope for me to grow and move forward.”

Speaking now, he adds: “I think it’s that Buddhist concept of just having a child’s mind more in your life. A child’s mind is full of curiosity; it has not yet had things imposed about what you can and can’t do.

“As a child, your imagination is: ‘I want to go to the moon’. But most people maybe pick something easier to do, you know?

“But I just have a mindset of firstly being a little naive and then, just going for it.

“Sometimes being naive helps you make those steps and then you figure out the roadblocks as you go.”

Meier’s running roadblocks were twofold.

His first issue was injury. In cardiovascular terms, he was in incredible shape to make the transition, with a huge capacity to absorb oxygen, lactic and pain.

But his body was underdeveloped for the demands that were now being placed on different muscle groups. The impact of sole hitting soil in his new sport caused Meier to break down on multiple occasions.

“When I started running, most of my life had been doing endurance sport. The cardio side of things is very transferable,” he says. “But from a muscular standpoint, it was terrible. I had so many injuries early on. I took a long time to adapt.

“Road cyclists are just weaklings to be honest.”

He also struggled to cope when the trails weren’t following an upward incline.

Meier’s entrepreneurship has extended to a sustainable clothing brand. He says his co-founder – an English businessman called Tom Austen, without any professional sporting pedigree – would “smash” him on their training runs if the terrain was right.

“I’d go running on the flat and people would just drop me,” Meier says.

“We were doing 10km time trials and Tom was beating me by 40 seconds.

“Tom was fit, but I’m definitely fitter. But he was smashing me on the flat. I realised I’ve got so much to learn.”

Typically, Meier leaned into the learning.

“I was reading, reading and reading about the sport, watching YouTube videos and doing whatever I could,” he says.

“I just wanted to absorb as much information as I could about this new thing.”

Meier coaches himself and is studying for his coaching badges. While he has discovered there is common ground between his new sport and cycling physiologically, tactically there is less.

“There’s not a lot of cunning about: How am I going to win today?” Meier says of his trail-running strategy.

“Essentially you just need to be as fit as possible. You show up and you run your strategy. That’s how ultrarunning works.

“If you see someone and they’re struggling a bit on the descent, maybe you push a bit there – but it’s not like cycling, where you might sit in the wheel all day.”

There is less cunning and still plenty of that child-like naivety.

“My first big race was 50 kilometres and I remember just thinking, man alive, I’m going to run 50 kilometres,” he remembers. “It felt insane. Then thinking about running 100 miles on foot in the mountains – the feeling of that is just wild. For a lot of people a 100-mile bike ride is a big ride.

“I didn’t ride bikes to win. So winning the TDS was definitely the highlight of my sporting career for sure.

“To win… it felt more like a dream.”