The Storyteller and the Bike

Ethan Jones of EJ's Training Camp on learning to race with the world watching.

By Rob Ware

Somehow, and in an alarmingly short amount of time, EJ Jones has become an elite cyclist.

There are stronger cyclists. There are smarter cyclists. But there aren’t many who have told the story of their journey as compellingly – or as thoroughly – as EJ. 

In mid-2022, EJ was a 270lb video editor, golfer, and gamer. By early 2023, he was a 170lb cyclist, and much of the transformation is recorded and available to watch on YouTube, starting with the “Couch to Crit” series. Since then, he’s only gotten leaner and faster. (Note that he’s the first to call his drastic weight loss problematic, and his best advice to anyone looking to shed grams is to get a nutritionist and a coach.)

If you’re interested in the daily details of his training plan, we recommend checking out his YouTube channel, EJ's Training Camp, which he made after splitting off from NorCal Cycling. Like we said above, it’s compelling stuff, and it’s easy to get sucked into hours of viewing.

But that’s not the story we’re telling here. Instead, we spoke with him about the behind-the-scenes stuff – how he was able to pull something like this off, why he did it, and what were the difficulties and personal struggles that didn’t make it into the final edits. To begin, we’ll let EJ explain what may be his defining characteristic:

“Everything that I go into, I kind of get really addicted to.”

If you want to understand him personally, that’s a great place to start. If you want to understand his process and how he got the results he’s gotten, you should start with two key elements:

1. Competitive drive and natural ability.
2. A structured, guided approach.

First, competitive drive and ability. We realize that’s really two things, but we’re lumping them together because both are (usually) important for the other. There are some cases where athletes have willed themselves far beyond the limits of their natural talent. EJ’s isn’t one.

He’s a former college pitcher, an under-par golfer (it took him less than a year to go from shooting 110 to beating par), and now a Pro / Cat 1-2 competitor in crits. He even got into competitive gaming at one point. It’s not an accident that he got good, fast, at everything he tried; instead, it’s a connection of physical talent and the need to compete.

The second item – a structured, guided approach – is more accessible to everyone, no natural selection required.

In his early 20s, EJ had all of that drive, but no direction, so his focus was scattered. He was a budding competitive gamer, he was obsessed with golf, and he had as many as 20 video editing clients. In his own telling, he was a bit of a wreck during this period – the biggest tell being that this is when his weight jumped from 180 to 270lb. He described his life during this period as scattered. Cycling became a way to pull all those pieces together, but it’s not something he did on his own.

When he first got into cycling, EJ was an enthusiastic novice (“I’d never done endurance sports before”) whose only plan was drinking straight from the fire hose. Even with his drive and addictive obsessiveness, he doesn’t think he would’ve hit his goals without some external help. He might not even have had goals. He freely credits his successes to the people who helped him impose structure on his cycling life, including his original partner at NorCal Cycling, Jeff Linder, and his more recent coaches, Jack Duncan and Tyler Williams.

“I don’t think I’d be where I’m at without the coaches,” he said, while speaking specifically about Jack and Tyler. “They’re the two most important people in my cycling life, they’ve gotten me where I’m at today. I still don’t understand much of that world [of training and racing tactics],” he said, but back then, he didn’t even know what he didn’t know. “There was a lot of it that just didn’t make sense to me.”

Guidance from the various coaches and mentors he’s had access to helped EJ understand everything from training to race craft to diet. Though it’s easy to skim his online content and reduce it to starving yourself (which, again, getting an actual nutritionist is his biggest piece of advice) and riding harder with a DIY approach, EJ insists that finding trusted expertise is the only way his transformation actually bore out.

“I have a very addictive personality,” he repeated, “and if I steer it in the right direction, it can breed success in certain things, but also it can lead me astray in a lot of other things as well.” He also stressed the importance of every body being different, noting that his own body “has a weird way of adapting to crazy shit, I guess,” and that not everyone would respond to his program – both the wild, haphazard approach from his early days and his more structured approach now – the same way.

“Having a coach or person like that is well worth the money. Generalized training plans don’t work – you need someone knowledgeable to work on your specific case.”

EJ jokes that his relationship to his coaches makes him a little codependent, but it’s also necessary. “I could never coach myself. If it’s me holding myself accountable, I’d never do it.”

The upside of accountability is certainly  familiar to anyone who’s ever wanted to soft-pedal an interval, short a workout, or find any excuse to avoid struggling into winter kit for a 35-degree base-mile ride. It also effectively reiterates the idea that talent and drive don’t amount to much without structure and expertise to point them in the right direction. When he gets that direction? Well, then he can go from 270lb gamer to elite cyclist in under a year.

There is one final element to endurance success that’s universal: Time.

When EJ was editing videos full time for those 20+ clients, he estimates he was spending 80-120 hours a week just working. To go from that to only focusing on cycling – which his success has allowed him to do – actually requires fewer hours per week. Even when he got up into the 20-hour range on the bike, it didn’t come anywhere near what he was previously doing in the editing chair.

Endurance athletes often joke about not having time for anything else. (One of our favorite handmade support signs seen on the road side at an IRONMAN read: “If you’re still married, you didn’t train enough.”) But in EJ’s case, cycling actually opened up more of his life.

“If you’re working that much, you have no time for yourself, relationships, etc. – it was a tough time for my now-wife and I,” he said of his time spent editing. Replace editing with cycling and the nightmare becomes a dream.

He described a recent “pinch me moment,” when he was set-up for a fully supported training camp in Spain, which he and his wife are treating as the honeymoon they were never able to take because of his schedule of training, traveling to race, and cutting clips. “Our idea of a honeymoon was sitting at home with our feet up,” he said, so when a Spanish escape dropped into their laps, he asked, “is this real?” – despite that dream scenario still technically being for work.

That’s not to say it’s all been a dream. From the very beginning, EJ has had some reservations about putting himself on film as a cyclist. It started with body image issues, with him avoiding filming himself training before he’d lost 100lb – a choice he now regrets. But those reservations extended beyond body image; he didn’t feel great about framing himself as, essentially, a Cat 5 clown.

“It was tough putting that out on the internet,” he said of his early days in competition, “my failures – and my wins – because early on, my failures were significantly more consistent than my wins. My tactics were so shit, I don’t know if I even had tactics,” he freely admitted. In those races, he’d regularly find himself in ‘EJ Land,’ blowing 1,000+ watts by himself to close pointless gaps.

“I just followed everything to make sure I wasn’t last, and then would just blow myself up. That was my tactic. I was failing nonstop, because I was trying to learn, and you learn best by failing. But that’s all that was shown.”

He does acknowledge that the early focus on his failures made for more compelling storytelling. Given where he was at, ability-wise, it was the only story he could tell, and the storytelling aspect of video editing is his real passion – that’s the thread that connects video game streaming with golf and now cycling. 

“My biggest passion, I would say, is marketing,” he said, using the term as a shorthand for all the narrative-building and framing that ladders-up into compelling storytelling. “Being able to tell a story is what got me to where I am today.”

And every story needs a character, so – through intentional behavior on-camera and post-production magic in the editor’s chair – he made himself into one. That involved embracing failure as a defining characteristic, because he wasn’t yet the cyclist that he is now. Hell, he was barely a cyclist at all.

“If you’re the best of the best, the story’s easy. It’s like, ‘I’m going out to win, that’s all I’m doing.’ But being in the situation I am,” he said, casting back to his days as a powerful-yet-inexperienced Cat 5, “you kinda have to find different storylines and see how those develop and play out. It’s understanding how to pitch a story when you’re not the best,” he explained.

“It was almost better of a story early on to show my failure,” he acknowledged. “The narrative was for me to be bad.” He described playing a character on camera and then accentuating the clownish aspects of that character. “I knew how to fake it for the camera,” he said, but the constant need to play the clown did wear him down off camera – he described it as “getting shit on on repeat.”

And then, once the videos were filmed and cut, they were posted on the internet, so of course he took a lot of flack. Initially, it hurt.

“I had an ego about it. I’d read [negative] comments and be like ‘fuck that guy,’” he admitted, saying he was tired of focusing on the bad things he was doing. “I wanted to spin the story in a direction where I was pointing towards good. But it’s hard when you’re simply not good. That’s the ego side of it.”

As his abilities as a cyclist grew to match his skill as a storyteller, EJ began to let go of that ego, in part because he actually developed a better understanding of what he was doing well and where he was making mistakes. But is it easier to accept – and broadcast – your own failures when you’re established as a credible expert?

“Yes and… no,” he equivocated, laughing. “Yes, it’s nice to understand my mistakes on a deeper level.” With that expertise, he can analyze his own work better, and he can see his mistakes. Before, as a the clownish rookie, he had more blind spots. “I used to not quite understand what my mistakes were,” he said, describing situations where he was the butt of a joke without getting the context, the setup, or the punchline, and instead just catching strays in comment sections online.

“I think it really comes down to thinking you’re better than you are,” he said of his early frustrations with that negative feedback. “Once I really found my place and understood where I’m at, I think it made me a lot more successful.

“Now I’m totally fine with that. Back then it was harder pill to swallow because of ego.”

EJ’s growing expertise made him more comfortable because he was no longer trying to perform. He was just being who he is – wins, losses, and all.

“That’s been tremendous for my race career, my storytelling, and the videos that I make. Because when you’re constantly trying to prove yourself, it’s hard to make content that’s genuine.” Now, he can “be dumb” in a race, but he understands why he’s being dumb, and that lets him tell a story that’s constructive rather than derogatory.

“Once I understood the ego piece of cycling, it made it a lot easier to tell the story of my journey.”

And in the end, the weight loss, the training, the competing, and the constant filming and editing is all just that – it’s EJ telling another chapter of his story.

“It is so weird to keep telling this story, because I feel like it’s always evolving,” he said, reflecting on everything from collegiate baseball through gaming to golf and finally (for now) cycling.

“I’ve lived a lot of lives. I’m still in the middle of the book, and I’m trying to continue to write it.”

For better or worse, he’ll never forget any of it, because it’s all on film.