In this special crossover episode between Performance Process and Wheel Talk, Ronan Mc Laughlin is joined by Escape Collective's Abby Mickey and former world champion Lizzie Deignan to unpack an unusual challenge. Abby has set herself the goal of returning to Mont Ventoux and riding it faster than she did during her professional career.

There’s just one complication. She’s now a full-time journalist, a parent of two, and juggling the realities of normal life rather than the controlled environment of professional sport.

To guide the process, Abby has asked Lizzie Deignan – recently retired world champion and now coach – to take her on as an athlete. The conversation begins with the first step of any coaching relationship: understanding the athlete. Together they discuss goals, constraints, postpartum physiology, training with limited time, the psychological side of coaching, and how performance can still improve long after a pro career ends.

This episode explores a bigger question that applies to every amateur athlete: How do you pursue meaningful performance goals when life, work, and family come first?

It’s the start of a project that will unfold over the coming months. And it begins with a simple but difficult question: Is it possible to beat your pro self?

Could we benefit from different bike fits for different days? If we are riding mountains one day, flats the next, and in a breakaway the day after, does having one position for all road stages leave some performance on the table? In this episode I’m joined by Ken Ballhause, Head of Biomechanics at Pinarello-Q36.5, to unpack if there's any merit in my thinking that we could benefit to tailoring our positions to the specific demands of each day, stage, or terrain.

We dig into what actually drives adaptable performance, why the real unlock is usually equipment and ergonomics rather than multiple fits, before touching on saddle design, pelvic support, crank length, and cockpit setup for the modern “aero road” posture as Ken talks us through his fit process for pros in 2026, before finally looping back to the idea there may be something in adaptable positions. We also challenge a few common bike-fit habits, including sit-bone width measuring, pressure mapping as a decision-maker, and how useful knee-over-pedal-spindle really is. The result is a systems-level look at how performance focused fitters are now thinking about position, comfort, aerodynamics, and sustainability over long races.

In this episode of Performance Process, we finally dig into the tyre-testing project that quietly consumed most of my year.

Nine months, six tyre widths, hundreds of test runs, three road surfaces, four identical wheelsets, and far too many cold late-night tests than any sane person should attempt. But it was worth it.

Today, Ronan is joined by John Buckley the founder of Streamlines Aero, the company behind the hardware and technical support so crucial to this testing. Together, we break down how the test protocol worked, why it’s different, and why those differences matter. We also unpack the major findings: why pressure mattered more than width in this dataset, why some long-held assumptions didn’t hold up in the real world, and how tyre temperature turned out to be one of the biggest and least appreciated variables affecting performance.

This is just the beginning. Later in the episode we explain where our tyre testing goes from here and what to expect in the new year.