Has Your Head Fallen Off?

If you’re read­ing this I have good news for you. Prob­ably not.

In cyc­ling, when someone refers to their head fall­ing off, they’re usu­ally talk­ing about a tem­por­ary or com­plete lack of motiv­a­tion to ride. It’s very com­mon for cyc­lists to lose motiv­a­tion for vari­ous reasons.

• Over train­ing
• Poor diet
• Lack of sleep
• Dehyd­ra­tion

I’ve also writ­ten about this before — When train­ing becomes a chore.

You may think these above men­tioned are all isol­ated to phys­ical reper­cus­sions but that’s not the case. They all have pro­found psy­cho­lo­gical effects on your motiv­a­tion to train.

Recov­ery is more import­ant than the train­ing itself

For years I’d arrive home after a qual­ity train­ing ses­sion and think all my work was done. In a lot of ways I was wrong. My train­ing was only just start­ing. Food, water, rest — all so very import­ant. Set­ting your­self up for a good day tomor­row is cru­cial for the com­pet­it­ive cyclist.

If you wake up tired and dehyd­rated — the chances of you not rolling out of bed are a lot higher.

Train­ing today is one thing but have you put any thought into tomor­row. You’ve just stomped out 150km on the bike but what are you going to do now? Do you skimp on the recov­ery drink and head down the pub with the lads?

It’s what you do right now — post ride that will determ­ine how you go tomorrow.

There’s no point train­ing well today, If you’ve totally ruined your­self for tomor­row — and so on. Improv­ing per­form­ance as a cyc­list is all about con­sist­ency over longer peri­ods of time.

I would also add two massive factors to heads fall­ing off:-

• Lack of preparation
• Lack of goals

Goal set­ting is so import­ant. You need to pick a race, an event, whatever — some­thing you can set your sites on in the future. That will go a long way to keep­ing you motivated.

By pre­par­a­tion I mean know­ing what you’re going to eat for din­ner, after­noon snacks, mak­ing time to clean your bike and mak­ing sure all your cloth­ing is washed. If not taken care of, these are all factors that’ll con­trib­ute to you just tak­ing a day off the bike. We all know that leads to two days, then three and so on.

This post is designed to remind you there are a lot of men­tal factors in play here. Be mind­ful of that — it’s not just all about the hill repeats and sprint efforts.

I’ll leave you with some pic­tures and a cool race report from the Marys­ville Ride in Vic­toria on the week­end. Who would have thought Jar­rod was such a good writer.

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