How To Make Bike Racing Easy

The overwhelming majority of the time I’m facing a challenge in coaching, it is not trying to solve a physiological challenge that my athlete has to sort out, and it isn’t some mysterious quirk to why they’re an anomaly to some structured development.It isn’t some case of digging through exercise science to pull out that extra 1%. Instead, it is usually that the athlete lacks confidence that things can be hard, and that they’ll still be fine or even thrive. In other words, that they aren’t willing to go into a fight with the understanding that they’re gonna get hit.

When a race gets hard, it does not mean something is wrong with their preparation. When it gets hard and one looks around, many have taught themselves to see that everyone else is fine and that they are suffering. Defeated. It isn’t only at races, though. During training, some people will question themselves and everything about their preparation, because things don’t feel good, but it’s fair to yourself to recognize that we’ll feel bad ⅓ of the time, and we’ll feel fine ⅓ of the time, and we’ll feel good ⅓ of the time. We can’t only try when we feel good. You don’t need to feel good to do well.

You won’t win most of your races. In Eddy Merckx’s peak, between ’69 and 75, he won 35% of this races.  The greatest won only ⅓. There are plenty of pros who never win. You are going to lose (as in, not win) most of the races you do. If this was the fight game, you ARE going to get hit.  You are going to get kicked. Even if you do win, you are going to take some damage. If you can do a race without taking any damage, you are sandbagging.

I’ve seen guys who have 20something less on the VO2max test than others, but beat them regularly. That grit. That toughness. That stubbornness. There’s not enough of it in this game, yet it takes a lot of it to be the best that you’re capable of doing. People get hung up that someone seems better than them, and that they miss that they can improve themselves.

When things suck, be it a race, be it the way your legs feel when you start an interval or workout, be it the way you feel when the lap cards come out, or even if there’s still 49 miles of a 50 mile ride to go…it is just part of it. It is going to happen. It is a near impossible task for me to fully help someone who comes to me or coaching in general with the mindset that they want me to help them make the bike races or tough workouts easier for them. It’ll never be easy enough for those people.

When you are fit and prepared, the easy parts are easier. But you get to start making the hard parts hard instead of feeling like you’re a victim to the pace or intensity. Get your head to the point where you are making the race or workout happen for you, not that the race or workout is happening to you.

- Christian Williams