Believe to Succeed or Succeed to Believe
The chicken and egg of sport psychology
Thursday 10th of April, 21 minutes and 44 seconds after 8PM. A loud F****************CK! disrupts the evening calm in my street. Where did it come from? My house. An exclamation of frustration, disappointment and self-blame. No-one to hear it except maybe the neighbors, some random passers-by in my street and possibly some birds in the garden. The reason: I just crossed the virtual finish line in the Zwift World Series race and I messed it up. Again.
Now first, let’s not be over-dramatic. I am framing it here. Failing in a Zwift race – also an elite Zwift World Series race – is not the end of the World. Actually, failing in any sports event is never the end of the world. It’s only sports, the Sun will rise the next day. BUT, if you put your effort and passion into something it is perfectly fine to be disappointed after you did not get what you aimed for.
Believe to succeed
Back to the race – what exactly happened? In short: I stopped believing. After 50km of racing a small group of riders broke away from the peloton. My racing instinct told me no-one was going to ride this back, so I jumped. I bridged to the group and closed the gap just before the final 1.5km uphill drag to the finish line. It was the right decision, the peloton was not really responding – anticipating the final climb and bunch sprint. We got a 10 second lead and I knew the winner was in my group. All good, right?
Yes and no. Here is the problem: I had been in this situation in three previous elite races. And three times I popped just before the finish line, got overtaken by the peloton whereas the winner was in my group. Halfway up the climb, I felt my legs filling up. With that feeling, intrusive thoughts entered my mind: ‘no not again’, ‘you are going to loose it just before the line’ , ‘you can’t hold the wheel of the riders in the break’, ‘the peloton is accelerating, you are losing your lead’. And poof, my legs followed my thoughts and I sat down before I knew it. My group stayed ahead of the peloton, me P25. I failed, again.
Succeed to believe
My legs didn’t fail me, my head did. I stopped believing because I had no success in previous, very similar race situations to make me believe. This is confirmed when looking at the raw data of the final 5 minutes of the race.
I came in rather fresh, you can see that the green graph, my W’ – a measure for how much is left in your anaerobic reserves – was almost completely full. After putting in the initial surge I took out quite a bit, but it was far from empty. After that I continued at a power slightly above my threshold before I sat down. I averaged 420W for the final 5min. For reference: my FTP is 400W and my 5min power is 480W. The conclusion is simple: I could have gone harder.
And of course you will feel your legs at the end of a race after 1 hour of hard racing and putting in a big surge. But that does not mean you can’t continue. I was far from my physical limit. It was my head that stopped me.
Mental aspect of sports
You can be as data driven as you want, have done the numbers 100 times in training – when you are racing it should happen in that moment. It doesn’t matter whether this event is your local park run, a random Zwift race or the Olympics. Overthinking rarely helps. 9 out of 10 times, it hurts. Next time, the only thing I'll be thinking about is not thinking.
Bonus tip: for anyone interested in the mental aspect of suffering, be sure to check out the book How Bad Do You Want It?: Mastering the Psychology of Mind Over Muscle.
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