TRAINING & HEALTH

A common theme in many of my articles is that training is, first and foremost, a question of mindset.

If you want to do achieve anything important the first essential step is to fully engage your mind, to give it a clear sense of purpose.

Purpose is one of the things that makes us humans special. Indeed it might be the single most important thing that makes us special. We are willing to invest huge amounts of time and effort, even risk our lives, for something intangible that we may not even achieve. At the level of the individual this makes no biological sense if we are warm, safe and well fed. But for our species as a whole this has made us the first that will shape our planet rather than it shape us.

“If You Can Believe It, You Can Achieve It”

When I see that oh-so-common poster saying adorning school walls, I want to pull an Oedipus and poke my eyes out.

I don’t know about you, but I’m not telling the seventh grade boy whose dream job is to become a jockey to “Go for it” — if he is 5’1” and 190. I’m not about to sell an impressionable boy, or girl for that matter, a false bill of goods. But regardless of gender, you’re not in seventh grade.  Or 5’1” and 190 — unless you stopped cycling and started working the night shift at Golden Corral.

So let me sell you on something else — something that on first take doesn’t seem too different from those words that make me want to see no more. Something that will summon up your inner Ronnie Lott and improve the suffering you sometimes need to do or want to do while cycling.

 But what I liked even more than averaging .42 mph more than I did four years ago were the sensations I experienced during the effort. When I would see my speed going down and feel my body tightening up, I would relax my facial muscles, smile — something else I learned to do in Endure — and say, “It’s all downhill from here.”  I decided on that saying as my self-talk because it was said to me by the driver of lead vehicle as I struggled at the top of the final climb the very first time I won a road race on a solo breakaway. He then gave me the thumbs-up, hit the horn three times, and flew down the hill.