Road Bike Racing - Are there any Pros who didn't win right away?

Everything I hear/read about pros (men and women) is that they got on a bike and started winning right away. Are there any exceptions? People who trained hard for more than a month or two before they won state championships or got picked up by a team?

All the instant success I read about is really discouraging, after 5 races the best I've done is 4th place...that kind of start looks like I'm destined to be pack filler compared to even the local elites.

Insperational stories would be greatly appreciated!

Couple of months are the time frame for the genetically gifted. :D Actually, more like "a season" to go from cat5 to cat2. Most of us race within the normal time frame of "years." I say maybe within 3 years of structured training and competitive racing you may advance to cat3 or cat2. Be patient and have fun. If you are really serious, train with a power meter or hire a local cycling coach to accurately keep track your performance. You average power output within a hour TT effort should tell you how good you really are. The rest you work with racing tactics, timing, and luck. I say your fitness come first.

Even though being genetically gifted would give you a definite edge, I'd think being successful would depend more on the quality of your training regiment.

Edit: I'd think mental fortitude would be another major factor in being a successful racer.

You are still learning. Keep racing and having fun with it. Even the best riders do not win every race. You WILL get better every time you race, believe me.

Hey, you're doing awesome if you're been in the top-10 after 5 races! Just think about the adrenaline-rush you get when you think back about the finishes of your race and how exciting it was to finish better each time. You can feel your heart racing and the excitement building as you're looking around the pack in the last couple of laps. You've been keeping your eyes on the top riders and you're ready to POUNCE when they make a move. You can replay the video in your mind's eye over and over again and come up with new strategies on how you can get into better position or be following someone else who ended up in 2nd. The next time, you'll be 1st as you power past them in the last 50m of the race! :)

Don't get discouraged, get motivated! :)

Having some tools for feedback can help tremendously with your improvement-rate. Datalogging speed, HR, gears, RPM during the race can be helpful in analysing your finishing positions and help you devise new strategies for future races. Having videos of your races can be useful in pinpointing areas that you can change, such as being at different parts of the pack at various points in the races. Perhaps find someone that's consistently finishing in the top-5 that you can follow around.

For the most part, the racers I've known who've made it to the pro/TDF arena have been very diverse in their rates of improvement. Some have taken 5 years to get to the 1/2/Pro ranks, others in less than 2 years. It comes down to how quickly you learn from your previous experiences and make changes to your training and racing strategy. Personally, I think most people focus on fitness way too much, when they can get faster results by analysing their training-schedules and modifying that to get faster improvements in their fitness. Or learning how to optimize race strategies and tactics to best conserve energy and speed while forcing your competitors to waste theirs. Bike-racing is not a pure-fitness competition like a cross-country foot-race where you can set everyone off 5 minutes apart and compare their times to arrive at the exact same finishing roster. It's more like a big chess game where interactions with others makes a direct impact on your results.

Some of us aren't even fast enough to race at all, so don't complain.

I dont want to hijack the thread but on a related topic, is there anyone in the pro peloton that began racing later on in life? ie. 20+. It seems like most of the started racing very young.

http://www.bikeforums.net/showthread.php?t=144284 he entered the pro peloton at 30

TT genius and former hour record holder Tony Rominger (http://www.geocities.com/Colosseum/Field/4116/rominger.html), who also won a Giro and a few Vueltas, didn't start racing until he was 21, didn't turn turn pro until he was 25, and wasn't remarkable at all until his 30s.

He was also famous for his hump (http://cyclocosm.blogspot.com/2005_10_01_cyclocosm_archive.html)...