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.