Training Highs and Lows

Three days ago after a 50km ride in the cold and wet with the body feeling tired, it drained any remaining motivation to cycle clean out of my system. The weather has improved since then but getting back on the bike today took a lot of effort. Every ride has induced leg pain since being hit by a virus last month - even on relatively short workouts with the pain starting at around the 2hr mark and usually on climbs. Pain is not a great worry but it kind of wears you down mentally and affects your morale over time. The one rule however is to get back out there because the only way to get over this reasonably quickly is to train.

Some days you just feel like saying to the world "stop - let me off " and today was one of them. I imagined never pedalling on a bike ever again and just sitting down and eating in front of films and TV until I exploded - like Mr Creosote from Monty Python who blew up after eating "just one more mint". Anyway I set out on the bike with low expectations.  As often inexplicably happens in training the outcome was completely opposite from the expectations. I had a great ride bettering my personal best by over 5 minutes, no leg pains and loads of energy. Perhaps I'd been suffering from withdrawal symptoms from coming off the endorphins a bit too long. Nothing lifts your morale quicker than a successful workout. It must all be about endorphins and other hormones. It does raise the question though regarding the high incidence of depression and even suicide amongst top level athletes. Graeme Obree comes to mind - though thankfully he eventually realised he had a problem - highly recommend his autobiography "The Flying Scotsman" and the film was OK too - but not so graphic about his depression. While the benefit of the endorpins is clear when they are working for you it does make you wonder if there is likely to be a backlash when you can't train. It even makes you wonder if people become obsessed with training simply to keep the flood of endorphins going. On the other hand perhaps that's what nature intended - so that man "the pack animal" goes out and runs all day hunting prey.  It did occur to me that one of the attractions of competition events is that you find yourself in a pack. Perhaps this unleashes all the survival instincts inherent in the human race and that's why you perform so much better than in training. It also makes me wonder if this is why the "peloton" phenomenon in cycling has developed and why tactics and team work are so fascinating.

Obree's biography title is, unknown to most, a play on the name of the most famous racing bikes that used to be produced in Scotland called "The Flying Scot". I had a touring version "The Scot" handed down to me as a kid and at age 16 set off without telling anyone and cycled around the coast of Scotland on it. There was no planning I just stopped off in youth hostels until running out of cash and then sleeping under the trees and feeding off fruit and veg from fields along the way. Guess cycling was in my blood a long time ago.