jill
January 12, 2019
jill
January 12, 2019
One of the biggest lessons ultra-cycling has taught me about riding through the night has nothing to do with power, training volume or equipment.
It’s about mindset.
Not the kind of mindset that tells you to dig deeper, push harder or refuse to quit. The kind an ultra-influencer might tout.
Quite the opposite.
It’s about learning when to stop trying to overcome something and start working with it.
I learned this the hard way in the early years of my endurance racing.
Riding through the night was a significant shock to my system. I could be riding strongly until around 1AM and then, almost as reliably as the milkman (I know, I’m showing my age with that reference), sleep deprivation would start to take over.
Eventually I would be forced off the bike and to sleep.
And because it happened so consistently, I developed a belief about it.
As 1AM approached, I would start anticipating the problem before it arrived.
Here it comes.
I would tense up, preparing myself for a fight.
My mindset had become me versus sleep deprivation, and it wasn’t helping my endurance performance.
Stop trying to overcome everything
At some point I realised I needed to stop asking:
How do I overcome this?
And start asking:
How can I work with this?
That was a much more useful question.
Because the moment you stop insisting that there is only one way through a problem, other possibilities start to appear.
Perhaps I could change my approach and manage my effort differently.
Or I could eat differently, pace differently, and rest differently.
It was also possible that the answer would be different on different nights.
And that last point became important.
I stopped looking for the solution to sleep deprivation.
Instead, I learned to explore what was happening in front of me.
Some nights I could keep riding.
Other nights I needed a short sleep.
Sometimes I needed to change the pace or the way I was thinking about the next few hours.
The point wasn’t to beat sleep deprivation.
It was to understand it better and work with it.
Flexibility is a performance skill
I think this is one of the most important characteristics of a good endurance mindset.
A flexible mind is a curious mind.
It doesn’t immediately decide – this is bad, this isn’t working and I can’t do this.
It asks:
What else could I try?
What am I not seeing?
What does this situation need from me now?
That matters enormously in ultra-endurance because very little goes exactly to plan.
The weather changes.
The road changes.
Your body, energy and sleep change.
The plan you made six months ago meets the reality of the road, and the road doesn’t particularly care about your plan.
The ability to adapt isn’t a sign that the plan has failed.
It’s part of the plan.
Don’t make the obstacle bigger than it is
I still use this principle now.
When something isn’t going well, I try not to turn it into a battle.
I take a step back and pause.
What is actually happening?
What can I influence?
What options do I have?
And what happens if I approach this differently?
Sometimes the biggest change isn’t in the situation itself.
It’s in the way you’re looking at it.
When you stop fighting the problem long enough to get curious about it, you often see things that weren’t visible before.
Said another way – when you change the way you think about a thing, the thing you’re thinking about changes.
That doesn’t mean every problem has an easy solution.
It means you give yourself more than one way to respond.
And in endurance, that can make all the difference.
Because the goal isn’t to become someone who can overcome everything.
It’s to become someone who can keep finding a way forward.
Finding a way forward is at the heart of ultra-endurance and at the heart of how Joe coaches.
If you’re preparing for an ultra and want to train with the experience of someone who’s spent decades learning what the road demands contact Joe and have a chat.
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