Nah, I couldn’t do that.
That was a colleague’s response after I told him that a friend of mine had just completed the Munga, a 1,000km single stage MTB race across South Africa. In fact, he didn’t just finish it – he smashed a Top 10 result. Boom!
Nah, I couldn’t do that.
There we go, you probably just said those very words in your head, didn’t you?
Depending on whether or not you muttered those fateful words is a little test of your mental game. My friend says that riding the Munga is 20% physical and 80% mental. You simply cannot train the body for 1,000km of riding. After 200kms, it turns out that what keeps you going for the next 800kms is how strong your mental game is. Someone else said recently that bike racing is 50% physical and 75% mental. I like that. It’s so true because there’s a paradox between physical and mental fitness.
The interesting thing is this: we are quite familiar with training our body to take on the physical challenge of races, but we very seldom train our brain. Why is this, when the instructions to turn our legs comes from our brain? Every pedal stroke requires an act of psychological will paired with activation in the motor cortex. Surely, we should be paying as much if not more attention to the way our brain and psychology influences our performance as we do to heart rate, power zones, Functional Threshold Power (FTP), nutrition and hydration? Why is it that the most powerful organ we have, and the one we rely on the most, is barely an afterthought when we train?
A few reasons come to mind, but the two main ones are: we either don’t know or disregard how much influence psychology and the brain has on our performance, or if we do acknowledge how important our mental game is, we do not know how to train it.
We end up making the assumption that cycling is a physical activity, so training should just be about getting on the bike and riding as hard as we can. And therein lies the key: as hard as we can. Your mental game is fundamentally about how hard you are willing to push. The extent to which you have trained your body is the entry ticket to the race, but the strength of your mind and how you use it is what determines your results in the end.
On one level, sharpening your mental game is about developing deep, resilient and unshakeable levels of motivation and determination. You’ve got to want it badly enough to push through the discomfort and fatigue you will feel while training and racing. But on the other hand, it’s about using a new set of psychological methods to push your body beyond what you thought you could do.
Fortunately, recent developments in exercise physiology and psychology are making it easier to train our brains for optimal performance and to foster levels of motivation that can make it possible to push ourselves beyond what we think our physical limits are.
Methods like motivational self-talk, imagery, visualization and mind wandering are some of the key skills to master in a mental game. Let’s look at self-talk more closely, because we all know how negative the voice in our head becomes when we are suffering on the bike. Researchers have shown how turning your inner monologue into motivational self-talk can improve your performance massively. In one study, time trial performance improved by up to 71 seconds, while drastically reducing the perception of effort. You not only go faster with motivational self-talk, it also feels easier at the same time! That sounds like a win-win.
So, when the temptation to soft-pedal is highest, simply turning the tables on your negative self-talk from “Nah, I can’t do this!” to something motivational like “Yes, I can do this and I will do it!” can make the difference not only between quitting or finishing, but also between being mediocre and finding a new limit.
About the author: Aiden Choles
Aiden suffers from an Ultra MTB race affliction and has a background in psychology, which means he lies on his own couch, asking himself how it feels. He runs MentalWorks and is passionate about helping athletes overcome their mental demons and redefine what they thought was impossible on the bike.
