Something isn't right

Well, it was a rest week and I had some days off, but at times I struggled to rest. I would be laying in my bed for 10 hours but only sleep 7-8 hours. My mind was keeping me up. Anyways, come Saturday I was back on the bike doing some z4. I had a delightful ride heading out to St. Johns around the terminal past the airport and did an interval out to Troutdale and then headed back towards the airport and then down to Dave's Killer Bread to stock up on gluten.

Hagg Lake

Then Sunday, it was on to racing. I headed out to Hagg Lake with the help of the awesome Eric and Ellen from my church group. I thought it was going to be about as miserable as last week's Mason Lake, but the weather turned out to be nice and sunny. There were only 13 riders in my field. All was going well, but I could tell there were some monsters in this field who were about to rip things up. On lap 2, Tim attacked on the decent west hill and then Kyle, Jesse and Al all matched the attack and proceeded to put the hurt on. I was trying to bridge but had just nothing on the steeps it seemed. After the sprint hill I tried harder to bridge with the help of my teammate Tyler, but by the time we got to the middle of the dam we gave up and decided to wait for the next 2 chasers.

Eventually we had a little chase peleton of 6 of us going, but I knew it wasn't close to the pace Kyle would be setting. Lap 4 we dropped the Hutch's rider and then it was me who was struggling to keep up with the group on the steeps. Lap 5 I got dropped for good on the sprint hill and pedaled in z2 the rest of the lap. Turns out 2 other cat 3s quit so I was 10th and second to last.

I got dropped, really?

Wow, guess I'm not in Cat 4 anymore. But still, last year I was the one doing the attacks even in Cat 3 but admittedly the breaks I did get in weren't solo breaks. But I could always stay with the peleton, but this week's peleton was quite small.

After talking to my coach about this, I'm thinking that I'm having a self-confidence problem. The problem isn't that I have utterly no self-confidence, it's that I don't have a massive self-confidence. Based on what my coach tells me and what I've seen myself output on the bike before, I know that I should be able to stay with the pack and even get in that break. And looking at my data, I was only at 172 beats per minute heart rate when I got dropped on the final lap - not even in my z5!! It could've been that due to only believing 70% of the way in myself that I was only able to output 70% of the possible power that I can actually output. It could've even been that it wasn't my body that felt like it was shutting down, it could've been that my mind was perceiving a shut-down even though I had room for exertion.

So my diagnosis is that without a strong self-confidence or perhaps faith, challenging situations are going to be much harder to excel in since the mind limits whatever needs to be done to perform at the high level. It seems quite likely to me that especially in a bike race pain can be amplified through a loss of self-confidence. But not only in a bike race, nearly anything where there is effort required low self-confidence can just ruin people. I imagine and can even relate to the homeless people outside who may at times just piss themselves yet do not have the self-confidence that they can stand up and pull themselves out of the literal shit they have created. Or perhaps you can take Arthur Ashe's quote for it as my Mom shared with me:

The most important factor determining success in athletic competition is often the ability to control mood swings that result from unfavorable changes in the score.

I'm perhaps a bit reluctant about this self-confidence thing however, because I'm a firm believer in using numbers, statistical evidence and formulas to make decisions - I will try to rationalize anything in excel if I can. And I further dislike that self-confidence is often times used by people instead of hard evidence in decision making. But often times this self-confidence thing is what people kind of notice and can use as a gauge to estimate someone's ability to deliver on something, and perhaps it is quite a reliable trait that can be used as a gauge for some items.

Nonetheless, I must admit that self-confidence matters quite a bit. In trying to categorize it in the success equation I came up with, I'd say it would fall under the execution parameter. It's possible to have massive self-confidence in say biking at an average speed of 30 mph for 20 miles, but if you don't have the resources (fitness) it's still probably not going to happen. It's rather weird thinking about how the mind works and directs the body to do things, but that is what is going on - it's not like the legs control the mind, they just whine and complain under stress hence Jens Voigt's saying "shutup legs!"

So what to do, or what would Arthur Ashe do?

I knew that I had to do everything possible to keep this avalanche of deadly emotion from starting. One simply must not despair, even for a moment.

It's so cheesy, but it's so true about letting bad thoughts entering your mind. When you start believing less in yourself in anything that you do, your mind will be unable to perform at the level you want and in the case of bike racing it won't be able to overcome the whining and complaining of the legs saying "stop, this is haarrddd. wawawawa" and perhaps the mind will give in and give up. Instead, excellence must be pursued.

IVRR, I'm coming for you

Goal: annihilate myself on the hills of Independence Valley. I will not be satisfied with any race performance this weekend unless I hit a heart rate of 192. I know I can do it, I've seen myself hit a heart rate of 196 last year. Aside from that, I think I'll be satisfied if I stay with the pack, but if I'm still with the pack after that last hill, we'll see what happens.