Cyclepath City

Cornered

February 26, 2013 by admin

Bike riding is a beautiful metaphor for life. You don’t have to be a bike rider to appreciate this concept, although it helps to be passionate about something and be able to see how it applies to your life. If you look hard enough you will notice people all over the world explaining life through the things they love.
A few years ago I was in a contemporary art museum in Vienna and saw an exhibition dedicated to the chair as a metaphor for the human body. With its legs, back and seat the artist easily transposed human character traits to a common household furnishing. When I look at chairs now I can also imagine what their personality may be.

Bikes too have personality but it’s not so much the form of the bike that I see as a metaphor for life but the combination or transformation that happens when a person mounts a bike and they operate as one unit, that’s where the metaphor kicks in. Sure the physical aspects draw a comparison- a seat, a frame and sometimes a mind of their own; but it’s the crucial wheels that allow you to roll through the bumps, enjoy the smooth, and get you in and out of the corners that life throws at you.

On a bike you learn how to take corners fairly early on in your career. There’s two simple reasons for this, firstly when you’re just riding along in the bunch and you keep sliding out in the turns you tend to not get invited along on bunch rides anymore; and secondly if you don’t learn how to corner in races you quickly get spat out the back and totally exhausted from having to chase to get back onto the pack after the dreaded elastic band effect. As the name implies when a pack of riders head into a corner they bunch up and then stretch out again like an elastic band. The first few riders who have smashed through the corner as quickly as possible sprint away as the other riders bunch up into the turn. You learn to corner fast or that elastic band eventually snaps and you end up watching the sprint finish from the crowd.

One of the best cornering “coaches” I had was Karen Bliss. Karen was a world class American racer who could corner fearlessly no matter what the conditions. Rain, shine, wind, concrete or bitumen that woman cornered as if her tyres were glued to the road. It didn’t matter if there were five or fifty riders beside her, when Karen entered a corner she was out of it as smoothly as if she was careening around the smooth banking on the velodrome. This in itself is ironic because one of the few times I saw Karen crash was on the velodrome when we were at the World Titles in Japan, where she crashed in the turn.

While negotiating the banking on the track was my forte, negotiating every other corner was Karen’s. I’m not sure whether it was because at one time we raced on the same team, or that we were very good friends, or maybe just her sense of self-preservation, but one day Karen took me aside and gave me two crucial tips on cornering:

1. Never touch your brakes in a corner; and
2. Find a good wheel and follow it through the turn- don’t lose that wheel.

In life, cornering coaches are harder to find. Sometimes when you least expect it you find yourself in a corner, or having to cut corners or maybe just trying to figure out how to turn the corner. As I get older and I hear talk of life corners it’s all too often in reference to disease or illness. In this past week I managed to come down with the flu. Being a self confessed germaphobe I rarely give myself the opportunity to get sick and so it was a fairly new experience to be flat on my back in a feverish sweat wondering how such small trackie lungs could possibly manufacture so much gooey stuff. I slept a lot and did a lot of positive visualization and I thought a lot about cornering. Getting through a sickness is like getting through that corner and so I adapted Karen’s advice. When you find yourself headed straight into that sickness corner:

1. Don’t stop there dwelling on how sick you feel; and
2. Find a positive “wheel” to follow out into wellness, a thought that gives you happy energy.

My positive wheel had a toned warrior princess unleashing some serious whoop-ass on phlegm monsters and here I am a week later ready to climb back on my bike. I’ve turned the corner and am still in the lead pack ready to win another day. So even when the corner feels like it will never end, know that it will and you will get through it as long as you don’t stop and you follow that wheel.

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Hear No Evil

February 18, 2013 by admin

I’ve just finished a week of being deaf, although only partially, it was enough to scare a bit of life into me. The result of sitting too close to a speaker at the pub, my ringing ears reminded me that filters are a good thing.

For the first few days I had trouble with balance but ironically only when walking. When I rode my bike I could balance perfectly and seemingly ride more effortlessly. But then again that has been normal for me even without damaged ears. I never seemed to have learned how to do the walking thing properly, especially the part where you don’t trip over or walk into things. My lifetime disability has been to be born with feet instead of wheels on the end of my legs. Wheels would have made so much more sense.

My deaf ride to work blocked out the drivers yelling at me, the traffic noise, the ringing of other cyclist’s bells and the planes overhead. I was able to focus on my technique and feel more fully the joy of riding. The trees appeared greener and the air was somehow fresher. I’d blocked out some of the negative that had crept into my consciousness. I could hear no evil and see and feel only the good.

When I was racing I surrounded myself with positive people. I avoided reading newspaper articles about my racing performance regardless of how I went and my standard reply to how I was feeling was always “amazing, incredible or fantastic”. I suppose you could call it a positive filter and it served me well during my racing years but over the years I had let my filter slip to the point of non existence. So as I rode along last week in my cone of silence I started to toy with the idea of reapplying this positive filter.

First port of call was to de-friend some of the Facebook friends that filled my virtual page with negativity. Oh sure I was cutting down on some of the thumbs up likes I could receive but when you really think about it what good is virtual reality approval? I can’t emotionally bank forty likes and dip into them when I’m feeling down; nor could negative comments ever make me feel better.

My hearing has almost completely come back now except don’t try to talk to me about the gloom and doom of life,how you don’t have enough money or hate your job, for that I still have deaf ears.

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But I’m an Olympian!

January 25, 2013 by admin

Did I mention I was an Olympian or as we say ‘am an Olympian’ because once you’re an Olympian you are always an Olympian or so the saying goes.

Did you notice the four-year theme in that opening sentence?

I say this tongue in cheek because in general I don’t shove my Olympianism in people’s faces; in fact I refrain from mentioning it at all. Sometimes it’s better that way. Easier not to have to answer the typical questions of how I went and what it was like and then the appraisal that I don’t look much like an Olympian. I suppose there’s that expectation that once an Olympian you must forever fit the physical stereotype, people not realising that a large part of what makes an Olympian is what they have on the inside.

I don’t tell people because they treat me differently and I’d prefer to be judged on who I am and not what I may have done. But of course I am different. I have a twelve-year gap on my CV from when I left school to when I landed my first job at age 30 and then another ten years until I got the degree that most people get 20 years earlier.

At job interviews this raises a few eyebrows, “An Olympian, but shouldn’t you be…”
I’ve sat through so many job interviews waiting for this inevitable question to be left dangling like a squeaky trapeze swinging in the space between me and the interview panel.

Shouldn’t I be living happily in Olympic land funded eternally by Olympic dollars or coaching my sport or commentating or perhaps hosting a reality television show?

What the non-Olympian’s don’t know is that the jump from full time athlete to normal life is a tricky manoeuvre. You have to find a way to operate in that world you so successfully ignored during years of training; that world that cheered you on when you represented their country and then forgot your name when you retired. Some athletes choose to stay involved in their sport and reap the benefits of their reputation, the successful ones using their past achievements as a platform to reach new goals but still having the safety blanket of the past kept close.

I chose to venture out into the unknown in an effort to discover who I was aside from being that bike rider. The first few years after sporting retirement brought what my friends like to call my teenage years. During those years I ate and drank what I wanted, stayed out late, partied, misbehaved, got fat, lost friends and generally acted like a reckless teenager, which is fine when you are 18 but not so fine when you are 30 and supposed to be responsible.

Thankfully my two teenage years passed and I worked my way into management in corporate land before deciding I needed that academic piece of paper that would prove my intelligence. I received that piece of paper and went to work for the government where I could believe in the ideals of integrity, honesty and being rewarded for hard work, only to find that my positive work attitude was at odds with the complacency of public service life.

This is the legacy of being an Olympian, always striving to do the absolute best in everything you do. It’s the mental discipline and attitude that you can make a difference that you can hold yourself to a standard and along the way help people reach their potential that both sets the hapless Olympian up as a great example and yet isolates them as out of the ordinary where a lot of employment is concerned.

So what has the past 16 years of working life taught me? Doing your time in a job is really where the kudos lay, it’s how long you stuck it out in your chosen profession and that’s where the irony is because for 18 years I retained a top ten world ranking, surely the equivalent of that in corporate land is executive level?

As my CV is put to the side I want to shout out ‘but I’m an Olympian! I will be the best worker you’ve ever had, take that leap of faith and trust my ability’
The squeaky trapeze continues to swing as I wait for faith to intervene.

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Self-Inflicted

January 24, 2013 by admin

There’s a new fitness craze in town. It comes on the back of boot camp style back to basics workouts that moved people out of the gym and into local parks where they could emulate their televised overweight selves being pushed by celebrity personal trainers. It’s called Cross fit and it seems to be transforming the chubbies to the chiseled all over town.

I had resisted learning anything about cross fit until an old training buddy posted a photo of herself on Facebook. She looked fitter than she had ever looked when we were training together and we trained hard.

Suddenly I was interested, but wasn’t a workout just a workout?

She sent me links to cross fit promotional clips and gushed about how inspiring it was and hard and exhilarating, an all round fitness feeling, she said.

There was that expression again, all round fitness. I hadn’t heard that since my sad association with the institutionalized fitness of the 70’s and 80’s during my school years.

Back then, and if the truth be told, now as well, physical education or P.E. was never one of my strong points. Gymnasium activities were compulsory and designed to promote a healthy all round fitness for young growing kids. Sometimes it was also called Physical Culture, perhaps to apply a level of sophistication to fitness that could allow it to be discussed in educational terms. P.E. was a marked unit of study and extra curricular “fizzie” classes were seen as fun homework and were all the rage in the 1970’s.

“Fizzie” was never something I was interested in. It wasn’t that I was not a sporty child, because I was quite active in body and mind, it was more that I was uncoordinated, some would say clumsy even, and definitely not suited to gymnasium activities.

The pommel horse for one was a logistical nightmare for someone with two right feet, two left hands and the perspective of a third eye pointed inwards. I would either miss the mini trampoline launch pad altogether or spring up off the trampoline and slam into the side of the horse and then land ungracefully on the smelly blue gym mat. Eventually the P.E. teacher excused me from the pommel horse and restricted my activities to floor exercises where I faired no better, easily defeated by the dreaded backward roll.

The fact that my hand eye coordination was non-existent didn’t help matters outside of the gym either. Outside of the gym I was the bench warmer only called in to play when a strategic loss was on the agenda. My friends wanted me on their team but only for motivational purposes. Sometimes it wasn’t just what I said that made them feel better it was also a boost to their egos when they compared their abilities to my comic efforts at ball play.

Bike riding proved to be my athletic saving grace. It is ironic really that my inability to balance on two feet would be overshadowed by my incredible ability to balance effortlessly on two wheels. In many ways being on two wheels has always felt more natural than standing on my two feet. My feet trip and stumble whereas my wheels roll effortlessly towards my goals.

By age 15 I had wheels and spent up to four hours before school each morning riding towards my childhood Olympic dream. The torture of P.E. class was transformed into 45 minutes of nap time on the mats that weren’t so smelly after all. Out of school I had started working out in a homemade gym in my coaches garage. Gym sessions were focused and specific and continued throughout my entire racing career. I didn’t work out for all round fitness, I just wanted to ride a bike fast.

When I looked up an example of a cross fit workout I had to first download a glossary of terms. The gym was called a ‘box’ to imply the raw natured unwankiness of it all, the routine or workout of the day was simply the ‘WOD’, cross fit was CF and personal bests or PB’s were commonplace as everyone ‘genuinely’ cheered each other on in a supportive environment. Devotees were also encouraged to eat a caveman style diet of proteins, veggies, fruits, roots and nuts and shun the evil carbs, grains and dairy products that make up so much of the fun food.

Okay so the diet would be hard but I could do hang cleans, squats, deadlifts, lunges and burpees, maybe it was time I joined the cross fit cult? Or at least this was what I was thinking until my newly chiseled old training buddy said it was also a good idea to leave my attitude and ego at the door.

No, that was never going to happen. Oh sure the attitude could sit it out but Ego and I travel as one unit, inseparable. My ego serves only me. In reality I truly don’t care what other people look like unless it has a bearing on me and then the question is how could it possibly have any bearing on me? Oh no, me and ego have gone through too much to abandon each other now, it looked like cross fit and I were not going to be friends.

Realising that I would never be able to join a group of ego-less trainers in a box, sweating over the WOD and hoping for a PB so I could post my results on the platform of egocentrism – Facebook, I decided to go for a ride. Catching a reflection of my diamond shaped calves and muscular thigh in a shop window I smiled, maybe I’m not all round fit or have chiselled looks like my old training buddy, but ego and I are doing just fine all the same.

“Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar” Sigmund Freud.

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Ceramic Balls

January 22, 2013 by admin

Bearings of course, ceramic ball bearings, but wait, I’m getting ahead of myself, let me back up. Lend me your ear for more gap year stories.

Mr CB was also known as ‘Penguin’ as in ‘The Penguin’ from the Batman television series. The original series first aired in 1966 and ran for two years, went off air and hid out in the bat cave until making a Hollywood resurgence decades later. If you look up a clip from the original series you will see the twin of Mr Ceramic Balls who earned the enviable nickname of Penguin due to a rather pronounced twitch that overcame his features every time he spoke about his bikes.

Penguin had many bikes in his well to do stable. Not the run of the mill expensive racing bikes that any old Joe can pick up with enough cash, but hand crafted titanium and one off concept bike-show bikes. Penguin had bikes that I had only ever seen in magazines or hanging up like the precious, magnificent pieces of art that they were, and lucky for us he took turns bringing his obsessions de art into the shop to be tuned i.e. cleaned and drooled over.

“These are our kids” he would crow, answering the unasked question of why his wife would allow such frivolous expenditure.

“And I can afford it” the real answer.

Obsessed with weight, Penguin would, on occasion have us special order ceramic parts to lighten his ride. Ceramic hubs, ball bearings and bottom bracket, carrying wholesale price tags in the hundreds of dollars range and for what, a few less grams?

A few less grams when climbing the Alps, Penguin informed me one fateful afternoon that try as I might I will never get back.

If you’ve looked up the Penguin character from Batman or you have an idea of what a penguin looks like, then you would have an idea of the basic shape of Mr CB- a bit pudgy and short, with the excited twitch of course, but in this case substitute a ridiculously expensive bike for the umbrella and a top of the range pair of Oakley’s for the monocle and you will have the perfect image of Mr CB. Add in cycling shoes with cleats and he even walked like the real thing.

On this particular afternoon while he waited for the finishing touches to his ceramic bottom bracket installation, I made the classic error of pointing out the absurdity of a fat man worrying about the weight of the bike when he could clearly lose a few kilos and save thousands of dollars.

At this point the twitch risked dislodging his eye socket as he proceeded to account for his heavy stature being a result of fine dining every year on his annual pilgrimage to Le Tour. As punishment for my comment I then endured an oxygen zapping thirty minutes as Penguin detailed his rides up Alp D’Huez, Hautacam and of course Col du Tourmalet, all pronounced with a Berlitz language school accent and emphasized with a stare and twitch. I frantically looked towards Tim the trusted mechanic, working on Penguin’s progeny however with the bike still in the work-stand I was beginning to fear that the only way out would be an appearance by Batman and his trusty BFF Robin.

On and on Penguin droned and twitched until the delicate sound of a ceramic bearing bike stopped the comparison of Tourmalet cheese to the lesser local curds and the excited twitch took over in a comical bend away from the cheesy grate of words.

Wordlessly Penguin handed over $800 as he stroked the bike and made soft cooing sounds. Tim and I watched on with relief as the gentle click of the ceramic bearings weaved their magic spell and guided Penguin out of the shop.

Holy ceramic balls Batman pass me the cheese!

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Monkey See

January 17, 2013 by admin

After two glorious days of riding the 65km round trip to work I had occasion to catch a train yesterday. I told myself it would be a rest day, time for my legs to recover and a chance to catch up on returning messages and to continue working on my new book.

Well at least that’s what I told myself.
The reality was somewhat different.

Almost immediately the idyllic, peaceful bubble I had surrounded myself in burst as a loud complainer huffed and puffed, stomped, swore and gestured his way into ruining everyone else’s peaceful morning as well. When the lovely lady in front of me pointed out to Bubble Burster that he also had a choice of three ticket vending machines to feed his cash to, he complained that he didn’t want a pocket full of jangling coins in change. He then went on to complain about eftpos users and disjointed sleep that had been caused by a damned full bladder.

At this point I had switched off and considered walking home to get my bike but that’s when lovely lady gruffly told me I may as well go ahead of her because she had to use the damned eftpos too. I smiled and said that I was happy to wait since my bladder hadn’t kept me awake. This comment was met with a roll of her eyes and an instruction to Bubble Burster to stop complaining to the ticket officer and move on; and like an emotional domino it seemed everyone in the line was all of a sudden cranky and annoyed.

In communication lingo this is called mirroring and it’s supposed to be a tool to help comprehension but on this morning it only served to dump us all on the train to cranky town where others mirrored Bubble Burster and soon an aura of anger settled in over our entire carriage.

Until this morning I’d forgotten how quickly mirroring could produce results. When I first started riding I was one of a maximum of three female bike riders in the bunch at any one time. Usually it was just me, and being just a chick none of the good riders would ride next to me. Perhaps they thought it would make them look bad, or slow them down. Regardless of their reasoning I was usually left to ride next to my coach or a desperate dateless who was hoping to ask me out. I could always be assured that behind me some creepy, pervey bloke would be staring at my butt and imagining he was the seat.

I had no control over who rode behind me but I did do my best to control who I rode behind. I always tried to position myself behind the best riders and mimic their technique. Among other things, I learned how to blow my nose properly and point out potholes, how to relax my shoulders and look comfortable when I was in all kinds of pain, and I learned how to ride so close to the rider next to me that our knuckles occasionally touched. Eventually the technique of the good rider and my technique were the same image and I had become one of the riders in the bunch that people wanted to ride next to.

Mirroring was a fast track to success and as I boarded the afternoon train from cranky town to the occasion that had placed me on the train in the first place, I decided that the best course of action was to try to find a happy person to mirror.

Fortunately the occasion that I attended provided me with both a positive mirror and an ideal example of the power of positive mirroring. The event was the opening ceremony of the Youth Olympic Festival. An event where close to a thousand young sport stars from selected nations compete for five days in a kid’s version of the Olympics. Now to be honest I have to admit that I wasn’t a fan of an overgrown kids sports carnival taking on the sacred name of the games. I thought that in some way it would tarnish what I consider the holy grail of sport.

I was wrong.

As I watched the young athletes proudly walk in behind their country’s flag and high five the little kids that lined the stage for them, I started to believe in the event’s tagline “See tomorrow’s Olympians Today”. Statistics from the last Olympic Games in London show that over a quarter of the Australian Olympic Team were athletes that had competed at an Olympic Youth Festival, and out of those 104 athletes, 19 won medals.

Now that’s what I call a positive mirror. With my idyllic positive bubble safely inflated again I chose to walk home, damn full bladder or not I wasn’t hopping on that cranky town train anymore.

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The Professional Trainer

January 11, 2013 by admin

One of the great things about working in the bike shop during gap year was that I met some amazing characters. The most interesting were the ones that I came to call the expert trainers, people who came into the store under the guise of having a service on their bike that was mechanically in mint condition and yet not going as fast as they expect it should. Mostly they just wanted to talk about how hard they trained and to use me as a sounding board. One such customer was Mr RPM.

Mr RPM was the perfect mix of a really lovely, intelligent, personable and reasonably attractive guy that had collided with too many Internet cycling forum pages.

Mr RPM liked to train on his race bike, although like most bike riders these days, Mr RPM owned several bikes, he preferred to bring his ‘A’ game to the training bunch each weekend. Now when I say race bike I mean his full deep dish carbon rims, titanium railed saddle, high-end carbon dream machine. To put this in perspective, Mr RPM’s race bike was better than any bike I had competed at World Titles or Olympics and one that I could never justify buying due to the over the top expense.

When one day I tried to explain to Mr RPM that it would be more advantageous to train on heavier wheels, he looked at me as if I had gone mad. “But everyone in the bunch trains on their good wheels!” He exclaimed. I shrugged and told him that he should keep training on them if he wanted to be like everyone else, but if he wanted to win races and not just be the man who hammered at the front of the coffee ride, he should train on heavier wheels.

Mr RPM gave me a curious look and left the store. Clearly nobody had ever spoken to him in such a way, certainly nobody on the forum pages.

My training wheels were 36 spoke heavy clinchers compared to my lightweight (by 1980’s standard) 28 spoke tubulars with tied and soldered spokes at the cross-over point for greater strength. Training was hard work and although there were many days that I felt great at training, psychologically I tried to finish each training session having given everything and then switch off, eat, rest and begin again a few hours later for the next session. When race day came and my light wheels were put in, and the spares pack, pump and heart rate monitor came off, when I got on that same bike it felt a few kilo’s lighter and that gave me the physical and most importantly the psychological boost to be first across the line many times.

Yes I did say that the heart monitor came off, and that’s because at the big races it didn’t matter what my heart rate was or my rpm. I was a sprinter and my concentration was completely on my external opponent not the internal one. It didn’t make a speck of difference if a thousand other riders could prove they had a lower heart rate over the same distance as published on their shared Internet training diaries, they were not in the race. The time to race against myself was in the months of training beforehand. I was a professional racer, not a professional trainer.

Eventually Mr RPM shook off my comments and returned with a box of new parts that he had bought on the Internet. He had purchased a you beaut whiz-bang fandangle new power meter crank set and wanted us to fit the new group set to his bike. The ‘old’ group set was in perfect working order and at the same high-end level as the new one except for the absence of the all important power meter and what Mr RPM called the ‘magic gear’.

Mr RPM assured me that the magic gear was the gear that would enable him to pedal at 120 revolutions per minute, but I was confused, couldn’t he pedal at those RPM’s in any gear, depending on fitness? And did the power meter tell him what wheel to be sitting on and when to make his move in the race? Mr RPM shook his head, “You don’t understand, this is how everybody trains now, it’s a science”

Now I’m not saying that technology doesn’t help you train smarter but technology alone cannot win races. You can spend hours analysing the readouts from your power meter beautifully cross-referenced against the results from other techno-trainers or you can get out there and become a bike rider by training smart and racing.

Sometimes I wonder if Mr RPM has ever won an actual race but mostly I keep an eye out for when they will be holding the World Training Titles because I know that he will definitely win that event and he will have published the Internet statistics to prove it.

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Beware the Cyclepathic Rager Within

January 8, 2013 by admin

I used to wonder why bike shop owners drive a car or catch public transport to work. However after a year spent firstly trying to get my own bike business up and running and then working for another business, I don’t wonder why anymore.

In what I now call my gap year, I discovered that what had once been a joyful commute to work had become a chore that I often swapped for the train and a long walk. Then, after spending the entire day around other people’s bikes I barely wanted to see a bike let alone write about one.

When I did start to ride into work again I found that I had become the very thing that I had sworn I would never be – a cyclepathic rager. You know the ones, always in a hurry, angry with the world, yelling at wayward pedestrians who dare to step onto the green path, making loud comments behind slow moving riders, sarcastically congratulating riders who go through red lights for their obvious genius and then blasting through their own red light because they can’t be bothered to wait any longer.

The cyclepathic ragers are the ones who give bike riders a bad name, right? Aren’t they that small minority of cranky riders, who really should have taken up running instead, or perhaps bought a ball and kicked the leather out of it while being spurred on by a drunken crowd?

Unfortunately they are not such a rare breed.

After crossing over to the cyclepathic fringe and back again, I realised that we all have the potential to become a cyclepathic rager, even the calmest, most law-abiding rider can turn if exposed to enough cyclepathic triggers. These triggers are different for everyone but I am fairly confident the following triggers I’ve identified below would tip even the meekest rider into a full-fledged cursing cyclepathic rager.

My selection of triggers include spending too much time talking to people who want a quality bike for under $300; working on $10,000 plus bikes that get ridden once a week and are owned by chubby fat men who know everything about bike riding because they read the cycling forum pages; helping Joe cyclist try on six pairs of shoes only to have him tell you he just wanted to get the sizing right so he can buy them cheaply on the Internet; the sweaty commuter that walks into the shop at five minutes before closing to just ‘have a look’; or perhaps the biggest trigger is working on bikes that have noises coming from the bottom bracket which upon removal you discover is saturated in urine because champion club grade triathlete felt the need to urinate down his seatpost as he raced. I have no doubt this particular triathlete will be able to make a smooth transition to casino table games where urinating in your pants is often necessary in order to keep your place at the table.

I don’t wonder anymore why bike shop owners are sometimes cranky and short or why they can’t drop everything to fix my bike while I wait. I now understand why they charge so much and if my bike comes back cleaner than I left it I should pay extra because it’s not their job to clean the snot and road grime off my bike. I never go to a bike shop 15 minutes before closing time and if I need to urinate I use a toilet. Simple things really that if more riders had paid attention to perhaps I may not have experienced that uncertain anger that engulfs the cyclepathic rager and keeps them from the one thing that is supposed to be the reason why they ride- sanity.

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Lost in Space

October 19, 2011 by admin

Have you ever been in a difficult situation at work or home when you just wanted to shut your eyes and go to your happy place? In my previous job I used to joke with my colleagues about needing to go to the locker room to shut my eyes and go to my happy place.

I wasn’t really joking, in fact going to my happy place has been a practice of mine for many years.

Eyelids, earphones and imagination provide a fast track to a happy place, an imaginary space that you create in your mind in order to keep calm and relatively sane.

My Grandmother, who lived to be almost 100 years old, taught me a lot about mind space. Existing almost entirely on a diet of coffee, chocolates, ice cream and imagination, a conversation with Nan would be a journey into our shared past or her imaginings of where she may have been in the time since she had last seen me.

Physically she had never left the nursing home but in her mind she had taken off on an adventure, where sometimes she would tell me that I had gone with her and what a wonderful time we usually had.

In between dozing off to sleep and sitting around looking at other people dozing off Nan had somehow found a space where she was free to think and do what she wanted even if her body could no longer accompany her. She had gone to her happy place and chose to take with her whomever she wanted.

Like my grandmother, I too have always been an avid daydreamer. Long before my cycling career had begun I could often be found sitting quietly somewhere in the house or backyard dreaming up adventures.

This practice served me well for when my cycling career started to take off and I began the process of daydreaming about perfect performance with the view that if I could imagine it, then it could be done.

Skiers most notably practice perfect performance visualisations immediately before they hurtle down the mountain. With their eyes closed they do a mental run through of the course to warm the mind and then they open their eyes and do the real thing.

I have always been fascinated by both the ability to create this illusionary space and what we choose to do with it once it is created. When I first started training hard it soon became apparent that it was not only my body that needed to be trained but also my mind. I needed to quieten down that chatterbox that told me to just sleep in or slow down or perhaps eat that chocolate bar.

As most athletes will tell you, convincing yourself that you can do something is half of the battle and so in the early hours of the morning before going out for a training session I would spend a few moments lying in bed thinking about the session ahead.

The lazy chatterbox in my subconscious would then try to convince me to stay in bed and most mornings I would outsmart it by imagining that I had already been out training for the day and that it was now night and time for sleep. I spent a few moments enjoying that feeling of relief that the pain of the training session was over and then I would plan how I would improve on my next training session, which of course was imminent. The imagined knowledge that I had completed a brutal training session and the physical truth of feeling physically fresh combined to convince me that I was capable of training even harder. In effect I truly began to believe that whatever the session threw at me I could handle it and just like a self-fulfilling prophecy when all was said and done, I could handle it, just as long as I first believed that I could.

Mind games and discipline are just part of the normal taking care of business of being an athlete where finding new ways to get the best out of your body is the focus. When you stop racing there’s a period of relief from the rigid schedule of training and racing. However as you allow yourself to do all of the things that you denied yourself during your athletic career eventually the mind starts to soften in accordance with the body and you wake up one day and realise that a bit of focus and discipline may just be what you need.

After one such extended period of inactivity and non-focus, lately I’ve rediscovered my happy place. This imagining, of course, does not entirely substitute for the doing, and spending time dreaming of greatness and then leaving those dreams un-actioned is as if the dream never existed. The imagining is the precursor for doing and together they can transform an imagined happy place into a new happy reality.

Don’t worry about the danger Will Robinson, being Lost in Space is sometimes the most productive place to be.

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The Break Point

October 19, 2011 by admin

Regular readers will have noticed that I’ve been on a wheeling and spieling break. Breaks, I’ve realised(after a ridiculously long time), are absolute necessities in balancing stress and achieving some sort of clarity.

A good night’s sleep, half an hour of meditation, cross training in between race seasons, a weekend away, or even just freewheeling after reaching the top of a hill, there’s no doubt that breaks, well, break things up and give us the opportunity to regroup, re-assess and smell the goanna oil.

Not to be confused with having a rest, taking a break is often characterised by taking the opportunity to stop what you are busy doing, breathe for a minute and make a change that can then get you busy doing something else that will guide you on towards a new or revised goal.

Of course this is the irony of the break, a period of inactivity and the resulting presence of space between activities, regardless of length, can lead to doing more activity. To paraphrase a quote from Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom”

Space, it seems has long been acknowledged by the enlightened as an opportunity and not just pockets of nothing because after all, nothing is a kind of something.

When I first started training and racing in the early eighties the racing calendar consisted of two distinct seasons – the summer track season from November to March and the winter road season from May to September. October and April were natural break months, time used by some to take time off the bike and revisit your extended or close family, others took the opportunity to do all the things that you stopped yourself from doing during the racing season, skydive, surf or ride a skateboard; things that you wouldn’t dare risk in race season for fear of a non race related injury and too many questions from coaches and sponsors on why you would risk your career over a half pipe at the skate park. It was also a time to give your race brain a rest and time to like to regauge your thinking from track tactics to road and vice verse.

When I was racing I learned fairly early on that after hard training sessions it was how I spent the break between training that would determine what kind of benefits the training had produced. But as with anything that you first start doing and find that not only do you enjoy doing it but that you are good at it too, you tend to do it all of the time so that you can get even better and enjoy it even more. Eventually the much needed breaks get smaller and smaller until they stop altogether and in a moment of self preservation your body throws up an injury to give you a bit of space, take a break and recuperate.

Well at least that’s what would happen in my racing world. In the working world I’ve noticed that overuse or lack of breaks manifests as stress.

Recently I swapped one kind of work stress for another. Not unlike good and bad cholesterol, where one will help your body function and the other may eventually kill you; good stress can drive you on to achieve goals that may seem impossible and bad stress can drive you to breaking point. The trick of course is to determine what kind of stress you are under and if it is working for you or working towards your demise.

It would seem an easy enough thing to recognise – good or bad stress, but as usual, money tends to confuse the issue and step in the way of making decisions that would otherwise be easy to make if we didn’t have to consider whether our choice would severely impact on our lifestyle.

I’ve never really been into money. I’ve had it at various times in my life- won it, earned it, lost it, have been given it, found it and have given it away but I have never really concentrated on it. That is until recently when I found myself in a new job that revolves around it. We speak of KPI’s and Gross Profit and margins and profit and loss statements and other fiscal measurements that cripple my creative mind. For three months I’ve been working non stop and focussing daily on the numbers while my words have sat patiently in a recess of my brain waiting for a break and today that is just what I am taking- a break.

So what have I realised so far in these early hours of space?

Well one thing is blindingly obvious; numbers hold no power in my world. They neither motivate or inspire nor disgust or retard me, they just exist, and concentrating on them will never transform them into words that will inspire me. I can rearrange numbers until I create a knot or a wave but they do not change my world.

Recently we celebrated my cousin’s 60^th birthday and to all of us who know and love her 60 is really just a number. Much like our Grandmother did, my cousin carries on through the age numbers as just that- numbers; a couple of arbitrary symbols that have little impact on her lifestyle. Accordingly my cousin has no interest in the digital world unless the device brings her conversation. Sure she operates in the modern world but she plays to her strengths in the analogue world of words; a timely example for me to follow.

There it is, the ‘uh-huh’ moment, and all from taking a break! A much-needed regroup, re-assess and if I close my eyes and sniff at my legs I swear I can smell the goanna oil.

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