Mental Skills Part 3: Thought Habits

“You’ve lost your mind”

This is what I usually hear when I attack relentlessly up the hill. I am not the lightest rider out there, so my power-to-weight ratio doesn’t help to climb. In fact, the last time I checked, my sustained effort power output is 270 Watt. As I weigh 168 lbs, I have 3.5 Watt per Kg of my weight. Exactly half of what it takes to win Tour de France.

Yet this doesn’t stop me from attacking up the hill.

The key to attacks are the thought habits. Merely by imagining that my 30 lbs trail bike is, in fact, a 20 lbs single speed bike I focus on momentum preservation and on steady pedaling.

By imagining that I am constantly wiping my feet of the ground, I prevent my legs from pushing the pedals down, which really soaks up the momentum.

And by imagining that the hills are not steep, I prevent myself from being intimidated.

Same thing about going downhill. On the straight path down the hill I do not look on the path – I look on the corner ahead. This gives me enough time to think about the corner, while simultaneously lets me perceive the downhill part as short and slow. You see, if you are looking straight ahead, your perceived velocity goes down.

Right now, my bike can handle so much more terrain than me, my perception is the weakest point. By circumventing that weakest point, I raise the bar.

By immersing into that imagined world of light bikes, firm surface and strong legs, I can drive my bike faster than before. Yet I still have to work on my thought habits. And then I will drive my bike even faster.

As one smart man said: “… I have no weaknesses… just future strengths.”

But the positive thinking extends much further than mere concentration on the positive side of riding. It also spans these thoughts that keep you calm before hard effort, or tough exam for that matter.

End of Base One…

So, the Base One period is finished.

Highlights….

- My pedaling really improved. I pedal circles, and do it at higher cadence than ever. The downside is that I am much more sensitive to the pedal jack.

- The cadence… 90 rpm is the norm, no problem spinning up to 100. 115 is the current limit.

- Bike handling has improved, which is really weird. The only explanation I have is the visualization technique I use: watching DH movies while grinding the indoor trainer.

This week is my recovery week, which means 3 easy (60-90 minutes at aerobic rate) rides during the weekdays, and a 60 minutes time-trial at Saturday.

The easy LSD (Long Slow Distance) Ride

This is how my LSD ride looks like these days. Contrary to what other people may think, my LSDs (Long Slow Distance) rides are long (well, not very long) and slow (really really slow. Less than 20 km/h. Word).

Having said that, it is really hard to keep myself from pushing over (and baking myself with beans and bacon before April). As Frank Brigandi of the Biketopia correctly states…

… any time a grizzled and seasoned roadie tells you that [the ride will be slow and not hard at all .o.s.], take it as the opposite of the definition of the word “not” Going easy means, going hard enough to try and kill you and leave you for dead 48 miles from home with blown legs, severe dehydration and a mutillated ego. Roadies are akin to a poker player “just sitting in on a hand” they always play to win. Roadies are always baked from riding too hard in winter and subsequently blame it on their mountain biking friends for “making them ride off road”.. even if they only did 3 mountain bike rides all winter….

By this definition I am definitely a roadie – by definition But I am trying hard to ride easy (which is harder than trying easily to ride hard, fwiw).

I still do not believe that going slow will make me go faster. Even though I go faster when I want to – climbing on the middle ring and attacking relentlessly up the hill become my usual traits on the “hard” days. Still, it feels weird.

Mental Skills Part 2: Motivation – Keeping it Real

After writing a short introduction to the importance of the Mental Skills to the competitive rider, I am going to elaborate. I am starting with the most basic Mental Skill, the Motivation.

Being motivated is the key to the training. This is a simple and universal truth. What’s not that immediate is that many frustrations happen to highly motivated people.

The reason for this unfortunate behaviour is simple. Strong motivation + strong work ethic can easily lead one to the sure path of over-training, which by itself is demotivating.

This is how that happens:

Kim, who is young, motivated and completely fictional rider, starts with his training at Monday. He rides for three hours on the plains and feels wonderful. After the workout, Kim discovers that his legs don’t burn that much, and that he doesn’t feel tired, so he adds some heat for Tuesday. Two hours, out of which 50 minutes are spent in an “pyramid” of anaerobic intervals. One minute in the red, one minute rest. Two minutes in the red, two minutes rest. All the way to 5 minute of some “leg stretching”, and then back to one minute.

For Wednesday Kim does some intervals again, but this time he cuts the workout shortly, in 2:40. Work, studies and other obligations take their toll, and Kim decides to add some heat on expense of the duration. Now the intervals are 3 minutes of sprints * 5, with decreasing rest periods. Nice.

Thursday is the recovery day, so Kim starts with easy spinning on 120 rpm. As the road gains some elevation he struggles with the cadence, but keeps on keeping on. After 45 minutes he abandons the training, because it’s the recovery day…

By Friday Kim is toast. It takes him two weeks to recover from the first training week, which isn’t supposed to happen after the first training week.

What just has happened is that goals were completely irrelevant to the plan, and as the consequence Kim used up all the energy he had before. By setting a realistic goals for each week one can keep up his motivation in healthy zone.

However, realistic goals can be pretty dull at the beginning of the base period. After all, it is all about the LSD – long slow miles. And unless Kim has that particular Zen state of mind, it is very hard to send the competitive nature to winter vacation while still maintaining the training regiment.

To escape the boredom, all kinds of things can be done in particular. Concentrating on other issues such as family, work and studies; working out in the weight room; practicing jumps in the BMX park; substituting long rides for long hikes – all these work.

But the most important thing is to keep a diary, in which the progress can be made. Nothing is more motivating than discovering that you are getting stronger and stronger.

In addition to keeping track, it is important to remember the law of diminishing returns, which suggest that if we break the regiment 10 percent of the time, the remaining 90 percent of the time are almost as good as 100 percent. Which means that you can do some slightly higher-intensity ride during weekends, as long as these LSD rides constitute 90 percent of your workout, and not 55 or 40.

I have to admit that on the first week of my base training I succeeded to bonk completely after 3 hours of riding my mountain bike. It’s indeed hard to keep going slowly – but the benefits are real. I can literally feel how my body becomes stonger, leaner and lighter. Slowly, but steadily. A long way to ride.

Eating for Success, Keeping the Mass Where It Counts

It’s cold these days, and the body tries hard to preserve any energy it has and turn it to fat. Then it wants to have some nap.

To avoid overeating and to stay relatively in shape, I try to use these simple rules:

1. Staying hydrated. I find that if I am thirsty, I am automatically hungry as well. So I am having as much cups of water or tea every day. I stay away from non-diet sodas, and am having a diet sodas only once in a while.

2. Eating often. Usually I try to eat something small when I am hungry, so I am almost never hungry. Typically I am having a few carrots over the day.

3. Having a breakfast. My typical breakfast is a whole grain English Muffin with some Peanut Butter on it. The combination of fats and carbs works great to fuel me until the lunch, and the sugars in the peanut butter help me break the night fast.

4. Having a post-ride meal. Usually it is Yogurt or Lifeway Kefir. It always contains proteins.

5. Staying away from fatty meat. No pork, no white fat. Fatty fish, on the other hand is always welcome.

6. Preferring small amounts of quality food to large chunks of cheap food. I have no idea where the food manufacturers cut the corners in order to keep their margin of profits. What I am eating right now will be my muscles this summer, and I’d rather be in great shape then.

In addition to this, I am trying (with varying success) to have a weights program, so that my big muscles will burn more calories. It also really really really helps on the trails to have strong gluts, abs and lower back. The amount of punch I can deliver into the trail matters!

One Bike Attitude

The biking world is full of diversity. DH bikes, XC bikes, 4X bikes, TT bikes, what not.

Here is the thought – the bike quiver should be as small and as orthogonal as possible. And here’s why: comfort. It is much easier, in my humble opinion, to be really good on a bike that you know inside out, than on a few different bikes that are being in equal proportion.

Having said that, I fully understand that some things are just not interchangeable. Racing criteriums on DH bike would be at least silly, and most probably more dangerous than exciting, same for vice versa.

This means that a quiver should be diverse, yet compact. What do I mean? The least amount of bikes that will allow one to ride as much of his liking. So whoever rides only road should have a road bike, while whoever rides only DH should have a DH bike (although I would argue that a road bike is a necessity for any serious rider). But having a short travel trail bike AND a long travel trail bike (again, in my opinion) will lead to one of the two being constantly left behind in favor of another one.

These days racing DH on a 7″ bike is not unheard of, and yet there are 7″ bike that sort-of ride uphill. Sub 30 lbs DH bike? Maybe…

Mental Skills

Motivation, Thought Habit, Focus and Visualization. This is the real deal. A rider with appropriate mental skills will probably win the race, while a rider without appropriate mental skills will certainly lose. Actually, the rider without the mental skills has already lost, he just doesn’t know that.

Later I will post in more detail about every one of these skills, and how I perceive those.

Right now it is clear to me that I must work on the mental skills as hard as I am working on the physical training and on the riding technique. And this goes long way: adopting a positive attitude, choosing a supportive environment, visualizing good riding and victory as opposed to weak performance, being weak and crashing down. Once adopted, these skills must be honed consistently, just like the body must be trained to withstand the stress of riding and performing exact movements of the control.

P.S. So far the Base period is progressing well That’s a positive thought.

Training Program

What does it take to ride faster?

As I see it, one must want to ride faster. Without a commitment to speed, one will not improve. I heard many times that once a rider finds his “comfort envelope”, he perceives the speed as high and stops improvement. This is something I would like to avoid.

The other thing is that in my humble opinion, in order to ride faster one should be able to pedal hard, to sustain high power output and to control bike at that time. Since Sam Hill entered the downhill scene, just sitting on the bike and pushing it into corners doesnt count anymore. One must push pedals as well (PUSHing shocks helps as well).

And the third thing is consistency. Haphazard and erratic effort will get me nowhere, besides raisign the level of randomness around me.

So I decided to get a training program.

Since I trained with a program in the past, and I know what my goals are for the near future, I started with a Periodisation-based training approach, which includes the Base, the Build and the Peak periods. During the Base I am going to build up endurance and make my body burn fat instead of sugar for power. During the build I will work towards more and more muscular and anaerobic endurance – this is what helps one produce fierce sprints out of the corners and relentlessly pump the bike. And during the Peak I will work on sprints – yes, these moments of maximal power that one puts into the bottom bracket, in hope of projecting himself forward with the greatest speed possible.

Contrary to the popular opinion that gravity-propelled biking does not require any aerobic endurance, I do believe that in my case the aerobic training, a.k.a. the Base, is necessary. And here’s why: one that does not have any aerobic foundations can not successfully train his body to withheld multiple sprints. This is because he will run out of sugar
wherever he should be running on fat. This is very important aspect, and I will try to explain now:

Using modern cars as an analogy, fat is the usual gas, while the sugar is the nitro. If the engine does not run well on gas, one should use nitro as much as possible. On the other hand, engines that can run well on gas alone, can use the nitro when it really counts – for speeding out of corners, for power-sliding, etc.

Just like a high-performance car, a high-performance rider should conserve his sugars, and run on fats. Unlike the car, the body always burns sugars. However, a well-trained body will burn fats as well as sugars, and will, therefore, use less sugars for a given efforts, thus conserving the precious fuel source. How precious? It has been shown that the body can accumulate around 2000 sugar calories in the body at any given moment. Eat more sugar, and it will turn to the fat. On the other hand, there is no limit for the fat calories in the body (as the average sedentary person probably knows). 10,000 calories, 100,000 calories – the sky is the limit. As Thomas Chapple, a downhiller racer who happens to be an elite coach for road racers, says in his book “Base Building for Cyclists”: “it is unlikely that you will run out of fats”

In addition to the inherent limit, there is another reason to prefer fats+sugars over sugars only when riding – control over the bicycle. When our muscles run on sugars only, i.e. when the muscles are not able to use any fat for fuel, they are in the state of immense stress. And so is the rest of our body – legs hurt, they cause the lungs to hurt, the head to ache – not a good idea for precise control required in gravity racing. Think of a car that feels like it is going to explode every time you push that pedal to the metal. So is your body.

In short, the Base period is a necessity for every rider whose sugar economy can be improved. And after looking at my VO2Max results, I can attest that in the car world I would be a Drag racer. Meaning that I use almost no fats at all. Good for great power, not that good for great power for more that 30 seconds. And frankly, I am not THAT fast to finish a race in 30 seconds (no, Dual Slalom is not my cup of tea).

So, I am starting my Base 1 period tomorrow.

PUSHed Shock – More about that

My first experience with the PUSHed Fox Shock was somewhat ruined by the “stuck down” effect. I sent the shock back to PUSH for a second rebuild, and got it within a week. Now I had enough rides on that shock to write a real review.

Bottom Fishing

A few days ago we had some rest and recovery at Napa Valley – area best known for its wineries, somewhat known for its rich and famous inhabitants and not known at all for its great bike shops. We did spot one bike shop, however, and Shmoopy found in a pile of closeout junk a pair of brake rotors of suitable size.

The new rotors have more holes in it, just like a cheese of better variety:

These are the new rotors, and the old ones are below: less holes, more wear.

The price was reduced by about 40%, so I bought the rotors. I put these on, and proceeded to prime the rotors. Priming rotors is necessary to reach the full braking power, and it is best achieved by gentle braking. As it was cold and dark outside, I decided to prime rotors on a work stand. To do so, I span both wheels while squeezing brake levers gently. It took me five minutes on each wheel.

I took these outside yesterday, and I was really satisfied by their performance. The new rotors have same amount of stopping power as the old ones had, and in case you wondered, this is lots. Besides that, the new rotors work in silence! No more “braking ogre hollering” from behind, just the occasional sound of lost traction. Did I mention that there is no shortage in braking power?

I am satisfied.