Overcoming obstacles – muscle versus technique

I was recently struck by a confluence of lessons learned between my strength training and my career development, specifically in relation to pushing through difficult situations.

Wednesday evening I had strength – heavy lifting. I work hard on my strength technique. I like to think I know what good posture looks like and how to implement it. This evening was a total fail, however. I was given a new type of dynamic workout – I had to leap forward, landing on one leg then the next, keeping total stability to land balanced before immediately generating power for the next leap. With a resistance band around my ankles. This is hard…if you don’t have core locked, hips aligned, butt engaged, knees bent, chest up AND trailing leg activated then from what I can tell, you’re basically going to either fall over or not really go anywhere fast in a forward direction.

“I don’t get why I’m so unstable”, I moaned to my trainer. “In my head I’m doing all these things, so why am I so rubbish?”

“Well, a) you’re actually not doing all those things, and b) you’re trying to muscle through the movement instead of locking your posture in and using it to generate momentum. So, you’re losing power and stability left right and center.”

Well phooey. So much for having great technique. One ratchet up in exercise difficulty and suddenly I’m a wobbly mess.

The next day, I had a one-on-one with my boss. I’m up for promotion to Director this year; I wanted his feedback on where I needed to improve in order to be effective in such a role. He pointed out that while my tenacity and drive were strong, my ability to accommodate deviations from my intended plans was weak. In other words, I needed to get more creative about overcoming obstacles, as opposed to just ramming against them as hard as possible in the hope they’d eventually collapse.

Hmmm. That sounds familiar…. is that a little theme emerging? Muscle versus technique…clearly you need both, but the former will only get you so far. A stationary position allows force to overcome a myriad of weak links. Add in a dynamic environment – competing priorities, shifting objectives, difficult colleagues, plyometric jumps…and those links will get tested. In the context of strength, these are posture and flexibility. In the context of work, these are communication and adaptability. In both cases, having a strong core, or center, and finding calmness at that center is key. I think of it a bit like being in a hurricane. You want to be in the eye of the storm, not the swirling clouds.

I’ve learned that curiosity is the key to keeping that center. Acknowledge and try to understand the problem, don’t try to fight it. Put another way, it moves the conversation away from “this so hard for me” (negative) towards “why is this so hard for me and how do I overcome it” (positive). Sometimes, that may mean taking a couple of steps back before you can move forward again. But that’s OK.

In the end, I spent about half our one-on-one waxing lyrical about the parallels between work, cycling and strength. Happily, my boss didn’t seem to mind too much.

Finding just the right amount of positivity

One of the hardest things I had to contend with when getting into bike racing was negativity. There’s plenty of opportunity for it.

First, with such a small community of women racers, your placing is visible to all and people care…this is strange when coming from the world of triathlon, where it’s all about your personal effort and you can literally have no idea what position you’re in from start to finish of a race. That’s pressure right there. Then there’s the whole “you have to get picked for a team” thing (I thought I could pick one, just like a running club!) that had my anxiety through the roof. Then there’s the misery that is being positioned well for the entire race, only to completely blow it in the last 200m. Or just not quite being able to hold on, and off the back you go. That doesn’t happen in triathlon either. Yet more reasons to feel crappy about oneself.

The key is, to come in with the right attitude; “right” being the one that keeps you calm, motivated and enjoying the sport. For me it’s about staying focused on my goals & not letting my competitive monkey brain get the better of me. It’s about remembering how much bloody fun it all is…it’s also about “positive thinking”, defined most broadly as having an optimistic attitude.

There’s a mountain of articles out there about the benefits of positive thinking. It improves quality of life, resilience to bad situations, and improves the mind’s ability to learn. From an athletic perspective it can directly improve your race times.

Some classic positive thought mantras for races are “I can do this”; “shut up legs”; or “this is what you came for”. I personally don’t find that these kinds of mantras help me that much though. Trying to believe in them feels like I need to do this big mental leap which drains me of energy. I can’t seem to link the intellectual sense of positivity to any physical one; in fact such thoughts take me further away from what my body is feeling, and once I lose that connection, I find hard efforts exponentially more difficult.

The self-talk that works for me is a little more neutral. I seem to gain most strength from observing and accepting what I feel. For example, during a race I’ll think, “hmmm, the pain in my legs is truly horrendous”, or “f*ck this f*cking sh*t, I should have just stuck to running”; but then I’ll think, “OK, so what can I do about that?” And then I just do it.

I perused a few articles on the subject and found some which could potentially explain this. I found two studies, here and here which explain how mental fatigue can undermine athletic performance. In addition both the former of those (in paragraph 3.4.5) and this one discuss how emotional suppression can hinder performance. For me, trying to “think happy thoughts” whilst dying a slow death in zone 6 most definitively constitutes emotional suppression.

Positivity to me means, not being defeatist, but focusing on the present and what I can control to keep going. Maybe it’s a rather British understated type of positivity; but in any case, it works for me.

Destination Tucson: why bike camp?

I know I’m supposed to be keen into anything and everything cycling, but the words “bike camp” fill me with dread. Yes, great base training bla-di-bla, but the night before leaving, I wondered what on earth I was doing. I’d willingly signed up for 7 hours of flying with all the uncertainty of connecting flights and 300 bucks worth of bike transport fees, to go bike for 3-6 hours a day for 5 days straight, including an ascent of Mount Lemmon. In a desert. Why? No really…so, I kept a mini diary in case it shed light on the matter.

Day 0

Glad I arrived early; I get to decompress although I want to try to build my own bike instead of waiting for the coaches to help. I’m mechanically challenged, but I get out my Ratchet Rocket Lite NTX and “give it a go”. I’m OK until the handlebars which take me 30 minutes with my husband on speakerphone and me sending him photos, “Does this look right to you? What are these long screws for?” Finally, success! Nice bit of confidence boost. I take a glass of wine and watch the sun go down.

Day 1

60-mile loop around Tucson. Nothing too hard to start with, it’s a perfect chance to wind up the legs and get to know my fellow riders. It’s great one of my teammates came; also, a couple ladies from a “rival” women’s team in the city – always happy to get to know my fellow racers better. Determined to save my legs I practice smooth drafting, but I keep gapping around corners and manage to spend 45 minutes in zones 4-6. Coaches take us through cornering skills at end of day to ready us for the descent of Mount Lemmon tomorrow; that’s a nice reminder but now I’m just worried about the ascent and then hanging on another 3 days.

Day 2

90 miles including a 7000ft ascent of Mount Lemmon over 29 miles. My coach can tell I’m nervous and he babysits me the first 10 miles, making sure I stick to zone 3 and distracting me with some good bike conversation. He leaves me in good spirits, but by the time I make it to our halfway SAG stop, I’m suffering. My breathing is ragged, I feel nauseous and can’t figure out why, and I’m upset because I seem to be going slower than last year. Coach 2 is biking up and down the mountain to check on everyone, asks if I’m OK, am I hydrating, eating…I tell him I’m fine and then I walk away from the van to hide a full-on anxiety attack. I tell myself to stay positive and just get the f*ck over it and with that in mind I start climbing again. A few minutes later I’m back with my coach, sitting on his wheel trying to find my own rhythm from his steady pace. But despite my best efforts I feel worse and start to slump over my bike. I make it to 8000ft before pulling over and crumpling on the asphalt, too short on breath.

Coach helps me stand and gets me to box breathe. That calms me but I still feel sick as a dog. My teammate pulls up too and checks I’m OK, she’s ready to sabotage her own day and come back down with me if needed, but Coach won’t leave me anyway and we descend together.

Turns out to be the best descent I’ve ever made. Keen to salvage some biking joy from the mountain and with the cornering drills fresh in my mind, I push the nausea to one side and start hammering, playing around with the feel of controlling my lean and the lines. Maybe I’ll throw up but at least I’ll do it smiling.

At the bottom, Coach gets me to hydrate and then we pedal home easy together, sometimes chatting, sometimes him pulling me through the headwinds. If he was ever worried in all this, he never showed it.

Altitude sickness – who knew? There’s another notch of experience to put on my belt. Best ride fail ever.

Day 3

Today is scheduled for the Tucson shootout followed by a climb up Madeira Canyon, but I’m still feeling sick so I get some extra sleep & pedal easy for a couple hours by myself, exploring downtown. With the sun on my face and no pressure on pace I finally start to relax. There’s a coach’s roundtable discussion in the evening where the camp mechanic talks about learning to listen to your bike as closely as you do to your body. That’s gold dust advice right there; it makes me appreciate how much of a bike novice I am right now; I vow to improve.

Day 4

I wake up chipper and ready for some fun! The day’s ride is 70 miles to Saguaro West and do the 8-mile loop a few times. I follow the coaches around…we talk cornering and crit skills and what I can work on to stay smooth and use less watts. Then I sit in a close draft and make them bike really fast so my pigtails go flying behind me and I’m still barely working. Just like a playground ride!

Day 5

50 miles around Saguaro East. Yeah, I’m done – this is Eyes Up, Look Ahead and Bike Slow day. Actually, these cacti are growing on me. I’m from Wales and more of a rugged-green scenery kind of girl, but I finally start to appreciate the otherworldly beauty and how the stark difference to my usual NY routes feels refreshing to my mind. Today has a bike touring – not training – feel.

Conclusion

Why bike camp? Because it was a great learning experience; it has super-experienced coaches and a mechanic who are skilled at spotting and handling any kind of issue effectively without drama; it teaches you to get through that tunnel of fatigue and out the other side and still be pedaling strong; because a forest of cacti is actually pretty cool and because it captures everything that biking should be.

Thanks to enduranceWERX for a smashing bike camp.