Friday Group Ride #123
The Tour is coming. You know this, because the weather is hot and when the weather is hot (or cold for you Aussies and other Southern Hemispherics), and you’re a fan of bike racing, you can more or less feel in your bones that the Tour is coming.
We’ve already more or less discussed the contenders. The quick wrap on them is: Cadel Evans will win because he knows how and has a good team and will peak at the right time. Unless Brad Wiggins wins because he has been absolutely flying and Sky is a super strong team also. Unless someone else wins. All the others are dark horses and thus super fun to imagine standing on the final podium. Andy Schleck is not a contender, nor is he a dark horse. He’s a spectator, which is too bad.
So we’ve covered the contenders, and we’ve talked about the Hump, that mystical mixture of confidence, luck, maturity and talent that finally puts an already strong rider onto the podium in Paris. If you have not won the Tour de France, and you want to or think you can, you will know, in your heart, that you will have to race better than you ever have at any other time in your life. You will have to surpass yourself.
This week’s Group Ride explores the strategies a potential champion, or any rider really, might use to surpass themselves. What are the mental tricks we employ to go farther, faster and better?
One idea I have worked with a little bit recently is something I call the Doppelganger Challenge™. It is a variation on the competing-against-yourself strategy, but there’s a twist.
It goes something like this. I set out on a ride, and I don’t feel my best. I begin to wrestle with my conscience over whether I’m going to press on to meet whatever goal I have for the ride, or whether I’ll turn around and go home. Most of the time, in my case, my goal is simply to finish whatever distance I’ve set out on, so I set the bar pretty low. That makes the mental wrestling match even more intense, because I quickly conclude that turning around and going home is pathetic (even if it is sometimes the right thing to do).
The trick with the Doppelganger Challenge™ is to imagine that someone just like me, with the same body and lack of talent, is racing against me. I ask myself, “Will that person give up? How hard will they go? Maybe they’re mentally strong, so I need to push myself to match them. Often, when I compete against that false stranger, I can do more than I would have on my own.
I’m not sure Cadel or Bradley or any of the other Tour riders will need to employ this strategy. I will hope to collect royalties from them if they do, but getting back to the task at hand, what do you do? What are your tricks? How do you work around the mental hurdles that arise? Tell me how to win, even if winning just means getting home before I fall over in the pedals, drooling on the hot asphalt.
Photo courtesy of Matt O’Keefe.
