We are not machines

I ride my bike a lot.

Well… depending on who you ask, I either ride my bike way too much—or not nearly enough.

Regardless, riding my bike gives me a lot of time to reflect and it’s part of the reason I enjoy riding so much. It’s also why I like racing, but maybe that is for another day.

Training brings structure—and structure brings intervals. Interesting enough I never did “intervals” when I participated in other sports, at least not in the same highly structured sense. So I’m relatively new to interval training.

The biggest thing I have learned is that we are not machines and not every interval session will be perfect. This is especially true with me. Life happens, maybe you didn’t get a good night’s sleep or maybe you are worried about a family member. These things impact us. It’s easy to set targets for your training, IE do 10 minutes at X power 4 times. Then you roll out and 8 minutes into your first session you want to die and you start negotiating with yourself.
I have this bad habit of beating myself up. If I don’t meet or exceed my interval expectations the negative thoughts start winning. “You are slow”, “Why do you even try”, “Your power numbers are weak”, “You will never succeed in a race”

That isn’t healthy.

While I’m not advocating that we easily give up mid interval, pushing through the mental blockage it’s a skill in its own right. What I am advocating for is keeping a healthy mental attitude. It’s better to have a future of bad intervals than no cycling future. Meaning, don’t burn yourself out. Embrace that there will bad days because there will also be good days where you crush your intervals. Without having a bad session the good ones will never come. So keep showing up, keep pushing hard. Become the best version of yourself and remember, even MVP has off days.