Canadian Pro Cyclist Zack Morris: Director of Team EF Racing
Matt Scarborough recently invited Zack Morris, director of Team EF Racing, onto the podcast to speak about Zack’s background as an entrepreneur and cyclist. The two also discussed personal growth and cyclist safety: In other words, how can cyclists can find balance between riding and personal growth and what cyclists can do to keep themselves and other riders safe?
Who is Zack Morris?
Zack is a Canadian National Champion cyclist and has a top-10 ranking at World Championships. He currently works as the director of Team EF Coaching. “I had my first competitive race when I was eleven,” Zack said of the sport which feels like part of his DNA because of how long it’s been part of his life. “While I’ve had different levels of commitment to the sport as an athlete, I’ve always been a cyclist in my heart.”
Cycling is the kind of sport where it’s not uncommon for people to have periods where they move away from it only to return more seriously. For Zack, that was his early 20s. He hadn’t touched his bike for eight years but started riding again at 29 when he went through a tough time. “I was going through a divorce and needed to reinvent who I was,” Zack said. Every day he’d go outside for three or four hours doing 200 km rides. “Something came over me and I was like, I want to race again. It was a way to occupy my mind and gave me a way to overcome these different things I was going through on a personal level while reconnecting with who I was,” Zack said.
That led him to doing big criteriums in the United States as well as Canada when he won the Critérium National in Quebec. “That led me down an interesting path where I partnered up with a local coach and started working with him because my whole background is in fitness and training,” Zack said. He’d been out of the entrepreneurial game for a few years during his separation and divorce but began helping his coach with the business, bringing it from an outfit with 40-50 athlete-clients to 500 in two years. Though Zack continued racing he realized that being a professional cyclist wasn’t his calling—more than anything he loved helping people and building businesses.
“Most of my fulfillment was coming from building systems that helped people transform their lives and seeing the impact you can have in someone’s life…when they’re reinventing themselves on that road every single day,” Zack said.
Team EF Coaching
That’s when Zack got a DM from Jonathan Vaughters, commonly known as JV, who was a professional cyclist from 1994 to 2003. JV wanted to know if Zack would partner with him on a new coaching business, Team EF Coaching, which would be an offshoot of JV’s EF Pro Cycling team.
How can cyclists use riding time to better themselves?
Matt asked Zack, given what cycling had given him and how it kept him grounded in difficult moments in his personal life, what tips Zack would give to cyclists who want to get the most out of the sport without overdoing it?
Nutrition and increasing performance are both important, Zack said, but those are things that feel natural to him given his background and work with Team EF Coaching. One thing Zack recommended is listening to audiobooks. “Last year I did over an audiobook a week on my long training rides,” Zack said. “I’m trying to learn something and download perspective from somebody else who’s farther along.” Combining the two make the hours pass more quickly on long rides but also makes him a better person, shaping “how I want to interact with the world and what kind of leader I want to be for my team,” Zack said.
Zack also said that it’s important to feel balanced between aspects of life and that what balance looks like can shift over time. “I know there will be certain times of year when business will be the priority. Certain times when family will be the priority. Then there are times when it’s all in on training,” he said. “Your top-level form will come and go throughout the year and that’s fine.”
The more people can accept those trade-offs, the easier it will be for them to set priorities for themselves and their training.
How can cyclists make the sport safer for everyone?
Zack and Matt both expressed frustration about the fact that giving cyclists tips for how to stay safe is helpful but not enough to keep them safe on the road without making drivers part of the conversation too. Wearing lights and bright colors and helmets just isn’t enough if a driver decides to run someone off the road.
Zack said, “part of me feels a sense of defeat.” He’s seen professional riders for whom “their bikes are an extension of their bodies” get hit by cars and killed every year. Many of these drivers don’t understand that bicyclists and drivers have the same rights to use the road.
Zack expressed frustration that laws don’t support riders’ safety enough. “The only difference between someone swinging a baseball ball at my face and someone trying to swerve their car into me when I’m on a bike is the 1500 pounds that the car weighs,” Zack said. But drivers often go unpunished for aggressive driving around cyclists.
Matt said that from a legal perspective, things won’t change until states charge more of those people with crimes. “They are assaults with deadly weapons,” Matt said. “That’s why you might need a lawyer.” But at a local level, the police often let those people off.
One way to make prosecutors take this more seriously is through big verdicts, Matt said. “When I try these cases and people see there’s a multi-million-dollar verdict against an aggressive driver, they might think twice about it.”
