Mayer is back from leading his group in Girona now and is busy preparing a drink.
We're supposed to be discussing his running career but instead we're talking about coffee.
The drink is delicious. It shows a part of Mayer's personality that has been integral to his blossoming new running career.
Mayer loves to “learn” about new things, so he carefully prepares drinks inside the first of the cafés he owns and runs with his wife in Girona. He was still racing professionally when they founded the company in 2015.
He quit cycling after a year, aged just 31, in a sport in which riders can continue into their 40s. Although he was only a year away from a lucrative professional contract, coffee and entrepreneurship were his new obsession.
“It's gotten to a point in cycling where I'm starting to feel like I'm doing the same races, and I feel very comfortable,” he said at the time.
“I felt like I wasn't growing anymore. At the same time, with coffee, everything was so new and so young, there was so much room for me to grow and move forward.”
Speaking now, he adds, “I think it's the Buddhist concept of just having a child's mind in your life. A child's mind is full of curiosity; things haven't been imposed on them yet about what you can and can't do.”
“When you're a kid, your fantasy is: 'I want to go to the moon.' But most people would probably choose something easier to do, you know?
“But I have a mindset of being a little bit naive first and then moving on with it.
“Sometimes being naive helps you take those steps and then discover the obstacles in your way.”
Meyer's roadblocks were two-fold.
His first problem was injury. In cardiovascular terms, he was in amazing shape to make this transformation, with a tremendous ability to absorb oxygen, lactate and pain.
But his body was lagging behind the demands now being placed on the various muscle groups. The impact of hitting the ground in his new sport caused Mayer to collapse on multiple occasions.
“When I started running, I had been doing endurance most of my life. The cardio side of things is very transferable,” he says. “But muscularly, it was terrible. I had a lot of injuries early on. It took a long time to adapt.
“Road cyclists are just weak to be honest.”
He also struggled to cope when the tracks were not following an uphill slope.
Mayer's entrepreneurship has extended into a sustainable clothing brand. He says his co-founder — an English businessman named Tom Austin, with no professional athlete pedigree — would “crush” him on his training runs if the terrain was right.
“I was running around the apartment and people were dropping me,” Mayer says.
“We were doing 10km time trials and Tom was beating me by 40 seconds.
“Tom was fit, but I'm definitely fitter. But he was beating me to the ground. I realized I had a lot to learn.”
Usually, Mayer was inclined to learn.
“I was reading, reading, reading about the sport, watching YouTube videos and doing whatever I could,” he says.
“I just wanted to absorb as much information as I could about this new thing.”
Meyer coaches himself and is studying for his coaching badges. While he discovered that there was common ground between his new sport and cycling physiologically, there was less common ground tactically.
“There's not a lot of guile about: How am I going to win today?” Mayer says of his running strategy.
“Basically, you just need to be as fit as possible. You show up and manage your strategy. That's how ultra running works.
“If you see someone struggling a little bit on the descent, you might squeeze a little bit there – but it's not like cycling, where you might sit at the wheel all day.”
There's less cunning and there's still a lot of that child-like naivety.
“My first big race was a 50km race, and I remember thinking, alive, I would run a 50km,” he recalls. “I felt crazy. Then the thought of running 100 miles on foot in the mountains – that feeling was so wild. For a lot of people, a 100-mile bike ride is a big trip.”
“I didn't ride bikes to win. So winning the TDS race was definitely the highlight of my career.
“Winning…it felt like a dream.”
