Keep Your Mojo

We cyclists are lucky enough to live in a part of the country where, if you were so-inclined, you can find a bike race, or some other organized ride, nearly fifty two weeks a year.  If you race road, track, mountain and cross you could race nearly non-stop year round.  If you love to race, like I do, this is a door wide open for burn-out.

For years I was of the HTFU school – race hard, race often and treat every training ride as though it’s your last.  Luckily with age comes temperance, and with the passage of time I’ve learned that a body, as well as a mind, needs a rest.

A bike racer’s schedule includes training, racing and recuperation.  Recuperation (i.e. rest) is the stepchild – easily overlooked and underrated.  It’s easy to think that the most effective way to improve is to train more, train harder and to race more and to race harder.  Rest doesn’t factor into the equation. A young body can absorb a huge amount of work, but as we age rest plays a bigger and bigger role in peak performance.  Simply put we need to allow our bodies (and our minds) the time to recover from the stress of training, go too far and you risk overtraining.

Overtraining is physiological, basically you’ve broken your body down below its ability to readily recover.  Burn-out is psychological equivalent of overtraining.  In short you lose your mojo.

An effective way to avoid burnout is to define a set date/race that marks the end of your season, and stick to it.  Once the season is done take it easy for a few months.  Some people advise “hanging up the bike” for a while.  I’m not a big fan of this approach as I love riding my bike, it’s a part of my everyday routine, and thus I’m not going to hang it up, but I will avoid the temptation to make every ride a hard training ride.

I decided that my 2014 season would end at the MFG Cyclocross finale at Woodland Park.  The last minute announcement of a sanctioned UCI race here in the Seattle area this weekend tempted me to come out of retirement, but I’m going to stick to my guns – no racing until March.