Time Online

Shearer: You need to have a goal

23rd February 2008, by Owen Slot

Former Newcastle star explains why he is tackling a new fitness challenge

The singularly most intriguing aspect of Alan Shearer and his forthcoming attempt to cycle from Newcastle to London in aid of Sport Relief is not that his average mileage over two days will be considerably longer than most stages of the Tour de France. It is that Shearer could not be more blatantly honest in sharing his long-felt dislike of endurance sport.

In the course of our interview, the slightest question that referred to his own history as a sportsman would have him restating his endurance phobia. Beautiful as the sights may be as he crests the peaks of the Pennines or plunges through the rolling chalk valleys of the Chilterns, he knows that he’ll be hurting like hell and reminding himself that what he was good at – scoring goals – involved short bursts of explosive power and not a 36-hour test of his aerobic ability and lactate threshold.

The fact is that being an England striker of international renown, and scoring 283 goals in 18 years of club football with Southampton, Blackburn Rovers and Newcastle United, does not necessarily make you a cyclist.

Shearer, 37, retired from the game nearly two years ago. The world he has discovered beyond the treadmills and fitness regimens of football is one he has warmed to: more family time for his wife, Lainya, and ferrying his three children Chloe, 14, Hollie, 12, and William, 7, on the school run from their home in Ponteland in Newcastle upon Tyne, skiing holidays (“I really enjoyed it apart from when my kids, who have been going for years, took the mickey out of me”) and slipping quickly into the pundit’s seat on BBC’s Match of the Day team.

If he thought being on the pitch kept him on his toes, his children have proved they are also adept at keeping him guessing. For a man notoriously guarded of his private life, he cannot have been too amused when a couple of years ago they videoed him singing along to U2 in the car and posted the clip on the networking site, Bebo. “No, it didn’t amuse me at the time, but it does now,” he says.

This is a nice life which, given his views on endurance sport, makes the bike ride an interesting option. “Endurance was never of interest to me,” he says. “And if I don’t find something interesting, my patience levels drop immediately. I’ve always hated running. I didn’t mind it in a game because there was something at the end of it for me, a goal. But in preseason at any of my clubs, I was running for the sake of it. This made me the worst person ever in preseason training.”

So praise be to Shearer, then, for accepting the challenge laid down by Adrian Chiles, his Match of the Day co-presenter, to join him in cycling 335 miles in a day-and-a-half to finish at London’s BBC Television Centre as part of the March 14 Sport Relief coverage. The programme is due to finish at 10pm. “Someone kindly told me that we have a slot for early in the show,” Shearer says. “It’ll be 9.55pm if I can have my way.”

Other celebrities participating in Sport Relief include the Olympic rower James Cracknell, who is rowing, swimming and cycling from Britain to Africa, with David Walliams accompanying him on the 14-mile swim across the Strait of Gibraltar to Morocco, and the TV presenter Ben Shephard and the soul singer Lemar, who are climbing into the boxing ring.

The aim of Sport Relief, which is held every two years, is to raise money to help children in Africa and devloping countries suffering from behavioural disorders and incurable degenerative diseases, as well helping them to gain an education. The charity raised £12 million in 2006.

Sport Relief isn’t the only charity work Shearer is involved in. Almost a year ago he opened the Alan Shearer Centre, a community support initiative in Newcastle, for which £320,000 came from his own pocket. The centre helps people with a disability and their families to participate in activities together, as well as providing support and residential breaks.

Shearer is not simply being modest when he complains that he lacks endurance capacity. As was revealed three weeks ago at a session at the British Olympic Association Medical Institute, at Northwick Park Hospital in Harrow, where Shearer went to have his fitness tested and have a training regimen devised. He was greeted by a 45-minute ordeal of controlled pain on an exercise bike marshalled by Professor Greg Whyte, a former Olympian (modern pentathlon, 1992, 1996) and leading sports scientist.

Whyte’s manner is gently to cajole and encourage his victims until they begin to slow up at which stage the sergeant-major in him starts to surface. All this time, he is recording their oxygen intake, monitoring their heart rate and taking readings every three minutes from their earlobes to measure lactic acid levels, an indicator of fatigue.

Struggling to make the grade

Shearer, interestingly, does not fare any better than your average athlete. We know this because I, his interviewer, am one, but when I got the 45-minute treatment, I beat him. My own personal challenge is a 3,000-mile bike race this summer across the United States, called the Race Across America. Like Shearer, I am a relative novice to the road bike, yet my capacity to transport and utilise oxygen during exercise – my VO2 max rating, a gauge of physical fitness – is markedly superior.

To give the context, they say that Olympians, whatever the discipline, invariably record a VO2 (measured in millilitres of oxygen per kilogram of bodyweight per minute) of above 55. Paula Radcliffe’s is 66. One of the highest recorded was the three times Tour de France winner Greg LeMond at 92.5; and thoroughbred horses tend to be about 180. I – three years older than Shearer and zero years spent as a professional athlete – came in at 48.1; Shearer was 41.8.

Shearer’s weight has not ballooned since retirement from sport. The question that faces many athletes when they retire – how and to what extent they should maintain their fitness – was largely taken out of his hands because of the knee injuries he sustained as a player. As he explained: “I have to keep my knees active because of the operations I’ve had on them. If not, my knee gets painful.”

So he maintains fitness by playing seven-a-side football once a week with a group of friends, most of whom played in the amateur game. He also was introduced to biking – on a mountain-bike – by a friend on his retirement and goes out two or three times a week for up to 50 miles. “I have really enjoyed cycling,” he says, “and that’s what I’ve been doing for the past 18 months to keep fit. I love it. I’ve seen certain parts of Northumberland that I would never have otherwise. It gives you a good sweat, you don’t get injured, you don’t pull muscles.”

Generations of players before Shearer lacked the benefits of sports science to deliver them healthily into retirement. “Twenty years ago,” he says, “no one knew anything different. Players were told about pain-killing injections [cortisone] but not the hazards, and are beginning to pay for that. It’s not nice to see. Their ankles and knees no longer work.

“Your body gets a battering when you’re a footballer. I would say that for 75 per cent of the season, you are not 100 per cent fit. If you are successful and playing Saturday-Wednesday-Saturday throughout the season, playing three 90-minute games in eight days is asking a lot. Then if you’re an international player, when you do have time off, you have to play for your country. I’m not complaining, but it’s nice waking on a Monday morning and not hobbling.”

Enjoying a happy retirement

This is just one indication of Shearer’s contentment. Retirement can be a phenomenal mental adjustment for athletes, particularly those who have climbed as high as he did and become accustomed to king-of-the-world status. “I’m fine with it,” he says. “I was unbelievably lucky to have had so long in the game. I had a great great time, but now my life has moved on.

“The only bit I miss is the goal-scoring – the adulation and the seeing the ball in the back of the net. But I’ve been so busy, I haven’t had much time to miss it. And I’m still heavily involved: I’m sitting in front of TV screens on a Saturday watching seven or eight games. I really enjoy that. Certainly, if I could turn back the clock to when I was 17 and start my career again, I would do. I had a fantastic time; I loved every single minute of it. But I’m on to other things now.”

In retirement, just as a player, Shearer presents himself with a sobriety and sense of responsibility that many of his fellow players seem to lack. “Some players do slip off occasionally,” he said, “but that’s life. People make mistakes. But if you learn from them, fair enough.”

Shearer himself seems to have avoided most of them over the years. He hopes his bike ride will be no different.

Visit www.sportrelief.com for information about Alan Shearer’s ride.
For more on Owen and the Race Across America, visit www.united8.org