Master These Three Cycling Tips

Life is complicated enough as it is, and trying to add competitive cycling into the mix can be difficult. I’ve grown up with cycling in my life, and it’s an ongoing battle to maintain a balance between cycling and the rest of life. 

Over the years, I’ve acquired some essential skills to integrate cycling into my life. In my opinion, here are the three most important skills when it comes to managing a training load with your life.

Organization/Planning

When you’re trying to squeeze all of the time out of the day, this is the most important skill to have as a competitive cyclist (and possibly in life in general).

With good organization, it’s completely doable to manage training and life stress. For me, I’ll start thinking of the upcoming training week, the weekend before. I’ll consider the times I’ll start each workout, the routes that fit the time/workout demands, and the weather for each day.

From there, I’ll make sure it fits with work or any other prior commitments I have for the week and make any adjustments. The small details are important too. Such as washing your bikes and gear to be ready for the upcoming week of training. Or making sure you have enough groceries and ride food to fuel your workouts. 

Knowing when to sacrifice which part of your life

Everyone talks about all of the sacrifices you have to make for cycling, but no one talks about when to sacrifice cycling for life. As an athlete, it’s incredibly tempting to completely hole yourself up and focus on nothing but your training.

In my experience, this is not sustainable, and it’s not worth it even for the short term. Here at DDA, we are focused on your longevity in the sport. So it’s important to know when to sacrifice cycling or other aspects of life.

Cycling will always be here, but certain events or periods in your life won’t. Most of the time, it’s okay to sacrifice a bit of recovery/training to be social, engage in other hobbies, or do other things in life. For me, unless I’m within a few days of a race, I’m always willing to give up a bit of cycling for other things.

Another great time to employ this skill is when life stress ramps up. Life stress can be deceiving in the sense that it’s different from training stress, where it’s not physical in nature. However, it should be equally respected as training stress. When life gets stressful, it’s important to back off on the bike. It’s simply too difficult to be dealing with both types of stress at the same time. It’s essentially burning the stick at both ends.

For some people, the bike is the most helpful tool during stressful times, and in that case, we would keep riding, but only ride what sounds enjoyable. For others, it’s too difficult to find time to pedal, so in that case, time off is just as effective. It’s important to understand how life affects training and to be continuously making adjustments.

Consistency

We live in an age where we can basically have any metric we could think of available to us. Power, heart rate, sleep, macronutrients, weight, CTL, and the list goes on. Those numbers can beg you to try and nail them every single time. However, as humans, we can’t be perfect; it’s impossible.

Not every training session will be perfect; there will be days when you are tired or stressed out. If you’re searching for perfection, it’s easy to feel defeated and fall into the all-or-nothing mindset. It’s about accepting those days when they come and continuing to show up.  That might look like shortening the workout or riding the bottom of the power target. However, that’s still getting it done and a lot better than not riding at all. Consistency will always outdo perfection.

A great training plan is one that is sustainable and allows you to be consistent. Unfortunately, there are no shortcuts with training. You can’t make a sudden jump in training volume or try to drag yourself along without rest without accidentally digging yourself into a hole. Getting fast is all about consistent, targeted work over a long period of time. Finding a rhythm in training that’s sustainable for you can be your own superpower.