However f lawless your physical preparation, the mind has a tendency to throw a spanner in the works come the big day. James Witts offers six ways to keep the brain onside with the body
Your thighs are burning, your calves are aching and your lower back is creaking like the proverbial rusty gate – don’t you just love what cycling does to your body? Or should we say, your mind? W here do you actually feel that pain? It might stem from your peripheral ner ves but it’s your brain that interprets and reacts. As many of you will k now from the psychological arc endured on long days in the saddle, cycling success – be it completing or competing – is as much about what happens up top as it is about what happens below.
The mysterious nature of pain affects all cyclists across the board, from the apprehensive commuter heading out into the rain, to the elite racer seeking Tour de France glor y. It ’s why, for this feature, we’ve tapped into the mental resources of those in the k now, from a WorldTour rider to world-class sports psychologist, to reveal the psychological strategies you can use to help deliver peak physical performance.
1Segment for success
Michael Woods races for Israel-PremierTech, with stage victories at the Tour de France and Vuelta a España on his palmarès.
The secret to his success?
Don’t look too far ahead. “The mental fatigue component in races, especially the Classics, is underrated,” Woods says.
“That’s why it’s so important to break them down. I can’t start the race thinking, ‘Oh man, I’ve got 250km left.’ It would ruin me.”
Woods’s deconstruction is known as ‘chunking’. “Essentially, this is breaking down your ride and challenge into smaller segments,” says Noel Brick, lecturer in sports and exercise psycholog y at Ulster University. Brick is also a top-notch ultra runner whose services I drew on for my book R idingwiththeRocketmen. “If you start thinking about how you might feel after two hours of riding, that brings stress and wastes energ y. It’s about keeping in the here and now.”
This segmenting might cover the whole ride or tough sections. “When it comes to a brutal climb like A lpe d’Huez, for instance, use those 21 hairpins to your advantage,” Brick says. “One strategy is counting up to halfway, so one down, two down… and then counting down from halfway, so 10 to go, nine to go. Doing it that way gives you more of a lift.” In short, from little acorns, mighty oak trees grow.
2 Knowledge is power
Course recon software VeloViewer is used by every men’s and women’s team on the WorldTour. The granularity of routes is immense but also vivid thanks to 3D charts
