Mike Torckler: God worked away at me
Image courtesy of Unsplash.com
WRITTEN BY:
As told to Samuel Harris
READ TIME:
5 mins
I’m a civil designer. I model the roads you drive on, and the water pipes under them - stormwater, wastewater. I size it all up, do all the calculations, then model it to make sure it’ll all fit where it needs to go, then send that to the contractors.
I got into this in my late twenties after spending some time as a professional cyclist. I did a bit of triathlon at high school and road cycling was my strength so I went with that and joined a New Zealand development team based in France. I spent two years riding for that team in stints of three or four months at a time, returning to New Plymouth in the off-times and picking up other work. Then I got a ride in Pamplona, Spain, through a guy I knew from Wellington, and spent two years there. I also lived and raced in Malaysia, Canada and California. I loved it, loved the cycling and the time off and the travel. It’s similar to going to uni after school - it’s eye-opening, your horizons expand.
The highlights were living in France and Spain. In France eight or ten of us guys lived and raced together. The riding there was pretty amazing, and also we just spent a lot of time in the rivers that ran through the town we were in: swimming, building dams, fishing. Probably one of my most fun years was the year I managed to get a couple of Kiwi guys on to the team in Spain, including my brother-in-law Josh. He has a lot of stories from that year that I just don’t remember now, as a result of a serious crash I had a few years later, but I do remember doing a lot of walking around the town - there’s so much history there, castles and so on, and we had time to burn. I never ran with the bulls though - I just watched; I saw too many people get clobbered in that to risk doing it myself.
As far as race highlights go, my best achievement on a big stage was probably winning King of the Mountain in the Tour of Utah in 2013. As a 60-kilo ex-runner, hill climbing was my strength.
It got to a point, around 2014/15, where new cycling contracts weren’t forthcoming - at the level I was at, you’d go from one contract to the next as new teams were formed then folded - and it was a bit daunting. I thought it was the end of the world in a way - I had bills to pay, and you can only live with your in-laws for so long, eh - but I had a rough idea of what sort of work I wanted to do, so I got in touch with a friend who was in the engineering field, and he lined me up with a cadetship doing civil draughting, and I’m still at the same place. It was part-time to begin with, which was good. I had a big crash in 2012 which knocked me around, and although the physical injuries were pretty much healed up three years later, the effects of the concussion took a long time to recover from. So easing back into work life was good, and I took a bit of time off to do some racing as well.
Cycling for me now is a lot of fun - I enjoy the racing now a lot more than I did. I used to enjoy training more, and the racing was tough. Now I don’t do much training, and the racing is more enjoyable because the real drive to make something of it isn’t there - it doesn’t matter now, I race then go back to work on the Monday, so who cares? At the moment, with Covid, a lot of the country’s best riders are back home, so we get to race against them all the time, and it’s great fun trying to beat them as much as possible on as little training as possible. I enjoy the thrill and challenge of that, and the racecraft - the strategising beforehand, the tactics during the race, and the debrief after. My wife Rowan has a sporting background too, as a competitive runner, and she loves the racecraft too, possibly even more than me: she gets pretty firey!
We got married in 2014 and moved to the US a couple of months after that. I was received into the Church just before we were married, which was great timing. I grew up Christian, and lived it my whole life - I used to Skype into my church’s Sunday Service from France and Spain each week while I was overseas. I started investigating the Catholic faith when I met Rowan. She gave me some talks to listen to, and things to read. It all struck me pretty hard but I was stubborn. “Fine for you: you can keep that. But it’s not for me.” God worked away at me and eventually it became pretty clear to me that joining the Church was what I needed to do. I can remember a specific moment in the back of a van with a bunch of guys on the way to a race in California. I was listening to a talk on headphones and it hit me really hard: God was saying pretty clearly to stop mucking around and listen to what he was telling me. I connected up with Opus Dei in Hamilton and they gave me a big injection of catechesis and formation over a few months.
I’m naturally a bit of an introvert, so when it comes to sharing my faith with people I’m not in the office blasting trumpets or condemning people or whatever. Connecting with people one-to-one is usually easier and more natural. You just get on with your job, deliver your best work, be a good person, chat to the people who you know you can talk to about religious stuff, and see what might pop up.
Last year during lockdown we all worked from home, and would touch base on video call each day, and we took turns coming up with an activity to do. I enjoy hunting, and when my turn came round it was close to the roar - mating season for deer. I’m used to imitating the stag’s roar so I got everybody to make animal mating calls and everybody else had to guess what they were. It was great fun, and in a wider work video call - about a hundred people - somebody brought it up, which led to one of the bosses doing his best mating call, which went down well. At the end-of-year function one of the awards was a “Wildcard Award” which I won: the prize was a small trophy and getting the boardroom named after me for the year, with a couple of nice pictures of me on the wall!
I’ve been lucky to get good work after my cycling ended - I really feel like God’s had his hand over Rowan and me and our kids, providing a path for us - but there’s certainly an element of looking back and thinking if I’d done this or that we’d be better off financially and careerwise. But I’d still do much the same again - it was heaps of fun and something I’ll probably never get to do again. To live in France, Spain, Malaysia, Canada and California for six years, it was a real adventure. I’d say to anyone in a similar spot to where I was, young, with some sporting talent, to definitely go for it.
