Key Points
- Train your brain to be as strong as your heart, lungs, and legs. Your brain is command central; when it says you’re done, you’re done.
- Build your “grit” by incorporating difficult situations, like crappy weather, into your training.
- Manage your mood and emotions to make even the hardest days feel easier. That can make the difference between throwing in the towel and finishing with a smile.
Part of the allure of gravel events and adventures is the little voice inside you that says, “Can I really do this?” This fact is not lost on event directors who create courses. When you ride Crusher in the Tushar, there will be moments when you wonder why the hell you signed up and promise yourself that if you just manage to finish you will sell all your stupid bikes and take up paddle boarding as soon as you cross the line. Then right as you cross the finish line, your endorphin-flooded brain will start fantasizing about doing it again.
When everyone is glowing about how great some ride or route is it’s easy to forget that there are going to be miserable moments. Preparing for and getting through the hard parts is legitimately hard. I believe riding gravel requires extra effort — training your brain the same way you train your body. Because when all else is equal out there, the people with the most grit — a psychological trait that enables you to work harder, longer, and more often without giving up — will be most successful on gravel. Here’s how to get more of it.
Ditch the Trash Talk
If you do nothing else, change your internal dialogue from negative to positive. Research shows that both types of self-talk impact performance, and only one actually helps you.
It’s natural for your muscles to ache and burn when the going gets hard. The challenge is to prevent your brain from piling on, says Kristin E. Keim, Psy.D., sport psychologist and owner of Keim Performance Consulting. “Your inner dialogue and thought processes are always with you and they have a profound effect on your performance,” she says. Insulting yourself by saying (or thinking) things such as “I suck at hills” or “I’m so slow” can actually become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The good news is: Your inner dialogue and thought processes are in your control. You just have to train them as you do everything else. And the payoff can be pretty enormous.
In one study, researchers had 24 volunteers do a cycling test to exhaustion, which is pretty much as terrible as it gets—you’re in a lab on a stationary bike with no pretty scenery or sun in your face to make you feel anything but sucky. Half of the group then got a self-talk intervention, in which they were coached on motivational phrases. They chose two for the early stages of the test (such as “feeling good”) and two for the later stages when things got tough (like “push through this”). They practiced their statements during exercise sessions for the next two weeks. The other half of the group continued as normal, with no self-talk intervention. Then they all came back for a retest.
The positive talkers improved their time to exhaustion by 18 percent—nearly two minutes—and their rating of perceived exertion (RPE) on a 10-point scale increased more slowly (meaning the exercise actually felt easier), while those who hadn’t practiced any positive self-talk saw no improvement.
It appears that this kind of self-talk may work on a physiological level. In a study published in Clinical Psychological Science, people who were encouraged to feel self-compassion had more energy, lower heart rates, and a lower sweat response than when they were prompted to have self-critical thoughts. In other words, negativity can waste energy and make an already challenging situation even harder.
If you typically tear yourself down, you’re not going to gag the gremlin overnight. But with practice, you can override it with a more positive voice. Some proven strategies include:
Make some mantras: Distract yourself from the difficulty and focus on positive elements of performance by repeating phrases during hard efforts. In Inside Sport Psychology, renowned sports psychologists Costas Karageorghis and Peter Terry penned a whole chapter on how this works. They recommend making your mantras specific to your personality.
Jacked up with aggression? Try “Use it, don’t lose it.” Feeling sluggish: “Eyes wide open.” Or one I made up and use when I need to relax on a hard climb: “The hill is flat.” Sure, it’s a lie, but according to Terry, lying to yourself works just fine. “Self-talk plays an influential role in endurance performance. Even if we know that the hill isn’t really flat, telling ourselves that it is can reduce the negative effects of anxiety, keep our minds firmly on the task at hand, and provide a much-needed confidence boost. Most people are pretty suggestible, even to the point of choosing fantasy over reality.”
Another option: Lines from your favorite songs can make really great mantras. “During True Grit (a race in Santa Clara, Utah), I kept singing Rihanna’s “Work, work, work, work” to myself over and over again,” says pro racer Karen Jarchow, who has recently been bitten by the gravel racing bug. “It helps me find my focus when I’m getting tired and a little loopy after many miles in the saddle.”
Jarchow and others also outright talk to themselves. “I’ll literally self-talk out loud. It keeps me smiling and pushing hard,” says Jarchow. Alison Tetrick has been known to have full-blown conversations with herself out in the Flint Hills at Unbound Gravel. “I start talking back to myself in third person like a crazy person. ‘You really think this is fun, Alison? Welcome to your fun factory. I will remind you later that you chose this. I thought you were supposed to be good at suffering, Alison.’ And when I say my name, of course I always use it in that tone that your parents used when you were caught red-handed. It amuses me, and sometimes what you need most is a little amusement.”
Make yourself some signs: There’s a reason you see people lining the streets holding signs of encouragement during marathon races—they work. We’re so primed to respond positively to encouragement, even subliminal messages make us move faster. In a study published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, cyclists pedaled three to five minutes longer when happy subliminal messages such as smiley faces and positive action words like “go” were flashed on a lab screen than when sad faces and negative words popped up.
Try taping motivational phrases or photos to your top tube. For a long race, I’ll cut out the course profile, draw little stars and happy faces, and jot down a word or two of encouragement for key points along the way. I’d be lying if I said it always made me faster or stronger. But it does make me smile, and that never fails to make even the hardest ride feel easier.
Turn that frown upside down: Speaking of smiling, you may not feel like making happy faces when staring into a seemingly interminable ribbon of sharp crushed stone winding into a 30 mph headwind, but try faking a smile any way. You’ll feel better, according to a study published in Psychology of Sport and Exercise.
To test the power of expression, researchers at Ulster University and Swansea University in the U.K. had runners wear breathing masks to measure oxygen consumption, then run four six-minute sessions on a treadmill while alternately smiling, frowning, relaxing their upper body, or maintaining a neutral expression.
In the end, consciously relaxing didn’t do much for the runners’ performance. Frowning made it worse, increasing the runners’ perceived exertion. It was smiling for the win. When the runners smiled they used less oxygen, improved their running economy by nearly 3 percent (so they used less energy), and reported a lower perceived rate of exertion (so the running sessions felt easier for the same intensity).
Nobody expects you to grin from ear to ear for five to more than 10 hours in the saddle, depending on your day. But periodically looking up, taking a deep breath, and smiling, even at the absurdity of the task at hand, will definitely make you feel at least a little better, and may even ultimately improve your performance.
Use Your Nervous Energy
Many cyclists have a nervous monkey that lives in the corner of their minds, always ready to start bouncing around, riling up the circus of butterflies in their bellies, just when they most need to calm down and focus on the task at hand.
That’s not to say you should never feel nervous. Of course you will. But runaway butterflies and relentless monkey brain literally waste watts. For one, stress saps your energy stores. Your brain consumes 11 calories of glucose per hour just sitting there between your ears. Even mild stress sends your brain’s blood sugar usage up by about 12 percent. And mental fatigue wears you out physically faster, causes you misery, and makes you more prone to negative self-talk.
You’re not going to tame the monkey, especially when it’s 5 a.m. on race day, and you’re getting ready to pedal your bike for 50, 70, 100 miles or twice that distance in challenging conditions. That’s like asking a Jack Russell puppy to sit still; it’s not going to happen.
But just as you would with a puppy, you need to keep your monkey brain busy. Make a pre-event routine and stick with it. If you have a checklist of to-dos—such as pumping tires, lubing your chain, filling bottles, kitting up, and performing a prescribed 20-minute warmup—you’ll be too focused on your objectives for your mind to race into imagined catastrophic scenarios.
Though the butterflies never go away, you can harness them for what they are: potential energy. Instead of interpreting that fluttery feeling as being “nervous,” frame it as being “excited.” One makes you feel doomed. The other makes you feel amped up and ready to go. You might have to fake it at first. But then at some point, you’ll realize you are really excited to get out there. And that’s a good thing.
Once the gun goes off, the nerves almost always vanish. But, depending on the course and the conditions, that monkey can start bouncing around again, especially during particularly nerve-jangling times like sketchy descents. It can be hard to remember your self-talk and to keep the monkey calm when you’re following a few hundred of your closest friends down a 7-mile descent that resembles a wagon train road. That’s when you pull out the advice of pro mountain biker Leigh Donovan, who says to start counting in your head to activate your logic lobes and drown the emotional ones.
Visualize Success
When you first start riding, you make gains very quickly, not because you build powerful muscles or start circulating more oxygen overnight, but because you make neuromuscular adaptations pretty quickly. Your brain communicates with your muscles more effectively and efficiently, so you use less energy to do the same work—like climbing a steep, gravely grade—even before you make measurable strength and fitness gains.
Progress generally slows after that initial period, as you focus your energy on the physical elements of your training and racing. But you can push your performance even further by tapping into that mind-body connection.
By envisioning your performance, you can improve your ability on your bike. Research shows that people who mentally rehearse upcoming actions perform better, even if they don’t physically practice. And it’s not “all in their head,” it’s in their muscles.
Take two studies as evidence. One from a few years back found that volunteers who just imagined exercising their biceps five days a week for 12 weeks improved their strength by more than 13 percent, even though they never actually moved a muscle. Those who did no imaginary exercise reaped no strength gains. Another study, published in the Journal of Neurophysiology, involved a group of men and women who wore wrist casts for four weeks. Half the group was told to perform imaginary strength training with their wrists five days a week, while half did nothing special. At the end of the study, the visualizers lost half as much strength as those who were immobilized and did no imaginary exercise.
“When you visualize an action, your brain maps it out in your body so your muscles are primed to perform,” says Sean McCann, Ph.D., sports psychologist with the U.S. Olympic Committee, who has had athletes “train” through injuries using this type of visualization.
Before races or hard rides, picture yourself pedaling strong and fluidly, effortlessly getting out of the saddle to charge up steep pitches or clear challenging obstacles. When you’re on your bike, imagine the muscles you want to use working together to push you over the top of a hard climb. Will this make you bionic? Nope. But it will help you ride and race better.
Script out your perfect performance: what you do at the venue, where you line up, how you’re going to pace yourself at the start, how you’ll calmly react if something goes wrong. Play it out in your head until it becomes automatic when it’s time to execute.
Recharge Your Brain
Mental fatigue makes physical exertion feel harder. No kidding, right? But most of us still don’t really appreciate how a taxing day on the job can slow us down on the bike. A few recent studies show just how much. One from 2009 found that cyclists could hold 80 percent of their peak power for 12:34 during a time trial test when mentally fresh, but for only 10:40 (that’s a 16 percent decline) when they were mentally fatigued. Another study in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise found that runners ran considerably slower after taking a series of mentally taxing tests compared with when they just chilled out with a movie for the same amount of time.
Chances are nobody is paying you to ride your bike, so chances are also pretty good that you’re not always able to put your feet up and watch your favorite Netflix series between hard rides or even before big events.
Counteract mental fatigue with some instant energizers. “The reason for impaired performance when mentally fatigued is an increased perception of effort,” says study author Mitchell Smith, of the University of Technology, Sydney. “Therefore anything that reduces perception of effort should combat these negative effects.”
If it’s not too late in the day, a little java could help. Caffeine gives your brain a jolt and helps exercise feel easier. You also can create an energizing playlist, which is like audio espresso when you’re stuck in low gear. Smith also recommends a little pep talk. When you’re dragging from the day, grab a little joe, cue up your favorite Spotify tracks, and say, “I’ve got this.” Then go get it.
Don’t Get Hangry
You know you need to eat enough to keep your muscles fueled, but most of us forget that we also need to feed our brain. In fact, when the negative talk creeps in and your mood grows dark—sure signs of “hanger,” the sour mood you feel when you get hungry—it might just be a sign that you need a little sugar.
“We tend to forget that our brain fuels and feeds like our muscles. When you are low on fuel, your brain function is off just like the rest of you. It’s going to make you cranky and possibly defeat you,” says Kristen Dieffenbach, Ph.D., an AASP-certified sport psychology consultant and associate professor at West Virginia University. “From a bio-physical standpoint, it’s essential to pay a lot of attention to nutrition. Once you set off the biochemical spiral of bonking, no amount of self-talk will bring you back.”
Practice eating on training rides just as you would during races so your body and brain are finely tuned to respond to being fed and performing. And don’t forget to pack a few special treats.
Staying on top of hydration is equally essential. A study on cyclists competing in a 161-kilometer race found that hydration has a pointed impact on your feelings of well-being and that even mild dehydration sours mood, makes exercise feel harder, and amplifies fatigue and pain. That’ll make anyone get grouchy over the course of one day.
Watch the time on your cycling computer. Aim to eat 120 to 240 calories and drain a bottle of fluids each hour you’re out there to keep your brain happy.
Cope With Suffering
The most pronounced “who turned out the lights?” episode I had was during the Coast to Coast Gravel Grinder across Michigan. About 150 miles in, I was swooping along a web of snowmobile tracks that felt like a pump track play date. Alone, I let out a few random “Wheees!” while laughing out loud. I was giddy in love with the Mitten State. The Mitten State was beautiful.
And then 10 miles later, as if in a David Lynch film, the Mitten folded upon itself and became a boxing glove. That high-five feeling turned into a punch-in-the-face state. Everything hurt, my stomach queasily flip-flopped, and I felt like I was awash in a sea of soul-sucking false flats, endless rollers covered in loose gravel, and deep sand.
They call this place the pain cave, that mentally dark, physically painful place where you really don’t know if you can go on…and you really don’t want to. When you’re in it, the temptation is very strong to pull the plug and wait for the SAG wagon to make it stop.
First and foremost, realize that “cave” is a misnomer. This place of pain is not a deep, dark place that only leads to a deeper, darker place—and perhaps a hungry bear that will make a snack of you. It’s a tunnel. It may be a long, twisty one lacking a promising pinpoint of light at the other end, but a tunnel nonetheless. Just the knowledge that there’s “another side” helps a lot.
Researchers who have studied why people sign up and pay money to suffer during Spartan races and endurance events describe these trips through the tunnel as “regenerative escapes from the self.” People pay for this type of pain, say the researchers, because “by flooding the consciousness with gnawing unpleasantness, pain provides a temporary relief from the burdens of self-awareness.” I personally love this explanation, because I, like many, struggle with lots of internal angst. If I ride long and hard enough, I drop my demons.
Of course, you have to get through the tunnel to reap all these rewards. And sometimes all the songs and mantras and mathematical games go nowhere. That’s when you have to find a way to make it more manageable.
When I was in Michigan, I gave myself the goal of getting to the Salsa Chaise Lounge. Bike manufacturer Salsa has been dragging a chaise lounge onto the course at events around the country for funny photo ops during these tough events. The night before, “Kid” Riemer from Salsa said, “If you can make it to the chaise, you can definitely make it to the finish.” I told myself if I just keep pedaling, I will eventually see friendly human faces, and hopefully get a second or, maybe at this point, a third wind. It worked. Other times you just have to set your own tiny goals to get you through.
Finally, remember: You’re just riding a bike, and for the most part, you love riding a bike. ❖
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