“Wherever you go, you’ll always run into Catalans,” she assures me. And I believe her. Cycling has allowed her to meet her best friends and people from all over; at home and abroad, sometimes very far away. Even in New Zealand. At one competition, she made friends with some Belgians, and three years later she ran into them again - but in another country and at another race. That is the magic of cycling, according to Ada Xinxó.
45 years old, with Sabadell stamped into her skin and a passion involving two wheels and a strong desire to work her legs. Browsing her Instagram account, I see that she describes herself with a phrase saying that she’ll leave the contemplative life for another day. When I speak to her, she confirms what I had already suspected she meant: “I don’t know how to sit still. Even when I’m on holiday, I have to go on one adventure or another.”
Wonderful, I think. We’re dealing with another case of extreme dynamism. Let’s see if we can learn something.
Ada takes part in MTB races (or mountain bike races - because apparently we now want everything in acronym form too), both long-distance and ultra-distance, as well as stage races here and there. For those of us who are only humbly beginning to enter this underworld, that means races of 70 to 120 kilometres in the long-distance category and 500 to 1,000 kilometres in the ultra-distance category. Not to mention stage races. I’m fainting.
What I find most curious is discovering how this passion began. Because Ada has not always devoted herself to it. She was an executive assistant at a company, and one day she said enough was enough. She moved into the world of cycling, which she recognised as her passion from the age of 30, and worked in bike shops, as a cycling guide and in online sports stores. Once the Covid-19 pandemic was over - or at least under control - she returned to working as a cycling guide (for both road and gravel), mainly for tourists eager to soak up the beauty of the landscape in southern Europe.
But why cycling? And, even more so, why at 27 or 28? “I wanted to change the unhealthy life I was leading,” she says. “Working, going out partying at weekends, smoking…” She set herself the goal of reshaping her habits and started running, but she couldn’t breathe. I sympathise, Ada. Later, she tried cycling and liked it. That experience became a healthy activity that also had a strong social element and took her to places she had never been before. To top it off, one day - almost without meaning to - she was amazed after cycling 80 kilometres. Then she saw it clearly and started signing up for races.
Laughing, she adds that she went from going to bed at 5 a.m. to getting up at 6 a.m. to go cycling. What a plot twist, Ada, I have to admit. “I was very clumsy as a child,” she confesses. Apparently, she had tried many sports as extracurricular activities, but they never quite convinced her. However, during the holidays, her cousins and she would get around by bike. As an adult, she tried it again and it suited her perfectly. In part, too, because it got her out into nature for a while, which is always good for you.
Before asking her about Salssa (no, she still hasn’t tried a single pouch), I try to explore the connection she maintains between nutrition and sport. She leaves me speechless when, without any fuss, she says, “I’m very much someone who eats what I feel like and tries to do so in a balanced way.” She doesn’t overthink it, which, in fact, seems perfectly fine to me. To each their own!
To finish, I turn to a typical question that suddenly strikes me as mysterious: could you be happy without doing any sport? “No. I need to move,” she declares, in a mix of enthusiasm, energy and liveliness.
No wonder they call her “Ada non stop”.
