How do you dig deep?

Normally mixture of the calm detached just keep spinning my legs, “it can’t go on forever can it?” and the angry man must defeat the hill tactics, along with judicious use of caffeine if available.

However I’ve an inkling jota’s HSTW visualisation method will be applied sometime soon.

Nice one Weeksy. You look much younger without the beard.

I try

a) detach from the situation and think of nothing;
b) concentrate on relaxing, calm breathing and spinning;
c) think about the winter season and that this pain will make me fitter for backcountry skinning/snowboarding; or
d) swear, a lot.

Sometimes it works, sometime it just hurts.

I sometimes tell myself to imagine how much more painful this would feel if I was running instead of riding the bike. It kind of opens the door to enduring a higher level of pain. I am not a good runner.

I tend to do a few things, including:

Focus on a bike length at a time. Riding one bike length is easy, even when on the limit. Just do that, then focus on the next one.

Or I relish the pain in my legs, and imagine I’m building it up to unleash on others at a later date in a race/ride/whatever.

Or think about it as getting the pain all over with now, so you can ride one more hill in summer, with no pain, cos you’ve already paid for it.

I can cope with wind and rain and headwind, and I can cope with being tired with empty legs.

When they both happen at the same time it’s hard work, but thinking of the other STW undoubtedly helps. And I’ve gotta get to work and back.

I used to kind of go into a neutral blank mindset and keep pedalling, and detach myself from the suffering.

This +1 usualy, just sperate out the “I’m enjoying being out on my bike” part of the moment from the “I’m **** cold and **** miserable” part. Got home last night and the missus said “got wet then?”, I’ve gotten so good at it I didn’t actualy know whether I had or not!

For the really bad days, Jota’s method or variations thereof work.

Headwind, pannier and 42×15 gets my cadence down to about 65-70. So I get low on the drops and stare at the stem. It will be over soon enough.

“Better than the alternative” seems to be our family motto. The alternative in this case being not being – and we’ve too much experience of that.

And when I’m racing, I just say to myself “Never, never, never give up”. That got me around the last 10 laps of a recent 100km road race after I’d bruised my ribs on the pump track at the Bike Show the day before, and fallen off the back of the pack on the second lap. Finished 31/32, but I beat the 24 who chose not to finish at all.

Great stuff. I try the zone out. It will be over just keep pedalling. I also think, lots of people would love to be able to be in this situation.

I was grinding up a hill once and some old boy walking with a stick smiled. We both knew that smile.

I had it on the big grassy climb at last years SPAM winter challenge. I just completely put any thought of pushing out of the equation- that was not an option.
Then, that just leaves one pedal revolution at a time to complete and suddenly a zen like peace descends- only grinding up an awful hill can you be truly in the moment 😀

Not far from the top now 😉

(and yes, I did buy a copy of the picture so not a total chav 😉 )

This one comes a bit out of leftfield but always works for me.

I tell myself I’ve witnessed childbirth and consequently any argument I may have had about being a little uncomfortable whilst playing out on my bike becomes entirely irrelevant.

Like I say unusual but works, that’s not to say I’ll not try the soapy tits trick next time!

Hah…. STW – Single Track World or ……

I just know what will be popping into my mind during the next big climb now.

Cheers 🙂