How to Win the World's Greatest Road Race

The Lives Less Ordinary series brings you the most exciting, adventurous and entertaining true-life writing that is out there, for men who are time-poor but want the best. Lives Less Ordinary drops you into extreme first-hand accounts of human experience, whether that's the adrenaline-pumping heights of professional sport, the brutality of the modern battlefield, the casual violence of the criminal world, the mind-blowing frontiers of science, or the excesses of rock 'n' roll, high finance and Hollywood. Lives Less Ordinary also brings you some of the finest comic voices around, on every subject from toilet etiquette to Paul Gascoigne.

With more Tour de France stage wins than any other Brit, Mark Cavendish is one of the most explosive sprint cyclists that has ever graced road racing. This is his heart-pumping account from the saddle of what it takes in body and mind to win one of the sport's most legendary classics - the 298 kilometre Milan-San Remo.

This digital bite has been extracted from Mark Cavendish's riveting book Boy Racer.