Where could you? Where should you? Where do you have no choice?

You need to start being fast. As you master the necessary technique, you have to remember to make it pay off; don’t forget that in the beginning (when you are practicing) you aren’t reaping the benefits (you are limiting the losses [which will only become a kind of benefit over time.])

You need to start saving more (true) but also looking for places to spend what you save (don’t spend it but ask yourself “where could I [where should I,]”) like when you creep (or sneak really [steal in a way]) into a really big gear and you’re already going fast without having done anything to get there.

Where are the small obstacles (that get smaller as the speeds increase [that will provide ever larger gains]) given their position in relation to what helped build your speed (descent, tailwind, match, etc.)?

It might be worth it to spend your energy holding that giant gear over a small rise or into a gust of wind (probably always with a pedaling technique that waits [except when it is now or never (and it rarely is)] but, all the while, not fighting back against anything that isn’t worth the tax.

You have to limit the damage, between 40 and 60 kph (that’s where it matters [unless you’re on a mountain, and you aren’t] in terms of average speed ; ) forget about 20 to 30.

The technique of sitting back to get to speed and the ability to sit back after a match are the same. By combining proper pedaling with the decision of where one could build speed with a match (as opposed to waiting patiently for external forces to diminish) and the choice of where to use that match (as opposed to profiting strictly from the external “help,”) you won’t have to work to get up to speed (especially not in the tailwind [or on a descent.])

 

Bad Rides

How do you narrate bad rides? Do you even tell yourself or others about them? There are several possible approaches to the phenomenon of the bad ride. First, there is the ignore approach. The real problem with ignoring is that one cannot unintentionally ignore something. A narratee can only be said to know of what is told, therefore the real audience determines what is not told by discerning between what could have been told and what was actually told, between their own knowledge of possibilities/choices and the textual effect that constitutes the narratee. This sounds complicated, but think of how you might narrate an embarrassing mistake that yopu made in a race. You are likely to remember it in a way that limits the narratee’s understanding of the degree of the embarrassment. Simply put you are going to play it down. Or you are going to make light of it with humor. This brings us to the second possibility when approaching bad rides: absurdity. By highlighting the absurd nature of cycling (or of drivers, or of legs, or of life) a cyclist can move beyond the negative to the inexplicable. This is different than neutral; bad rides in this sense do not fall into the paradigm positive and negative. They are simply a matter of fact. But this too can be problematic for an athlete because of the determinism that such an idea might breed. A cyclist has to go into rides and races prepared to overcome predetermined difficulties. If failure becomes simply a fact of life, an athlete no longer has the possibility of improving because nothing can be overcome. Lastly, a cyclist can allow bad rides to shake her at her core, testing the fragility of her resolve and providing the opportunity to quit. This is obviously the riskiest stance to take vis-a-vis a bad ride because the potential loss is enornous. You may never ride a bicycle again. But as one would expect the benefit of taking such a risk are equally huge. It’s part of training for the difficulty of cycling. When asking yourself questions that get down to the heart of what was “bad” about the ride, you won’t remember things in an objective way. This is when it pays off to understand the narratology behind remembering. Rather than ignoring the storytelling tactics confront them. The cyclist is the author. She should know what choices she is making when telling the story of her past. The question that I think scares people most about this approach is that it is hard to arrive at the question “do I even like riding a bicycle.” The term “like” is not ideal for describing an activity characterized by overcoming personal difficulty and a whole lot of failing/losing. How many people lost the Tour de France this year? The problem is that cycling is more complicated than yes and no. This is the reason cyclists must be prepared for bad rides. If a cyclist depends on always wanting to ride or “having fun”, she will not be prepared for the hardships of training and the disappointment of racing. She’ll end up burning out or managing an excuse factory. She’ll just be another person in the field for the winner to have beat. Cycling is beautiful because it is difficult. The next time that you have a bad ride, remember the beauty of overcoming and the grace of a smooth peddling action that seems effortless.

The Other in Cycling

The subject here is the other, the being who is not oneself. In a bicycle race, the other cyclists are obviously not oneself. However, in the context of the race the concept of individual might need to expand itself. Larger, synthetic individuals might be acknowledged in the story of a bicycle race. Individual textual actants such as the pack, the breakaway, the team, the “threats”, the move, etc. are only the other when you are not in them. If you are in the pack, the breakaway is the other. But if you are in no man’s land trying to bridge the gap, every other cyclist in the race might be the other. There would be no team; there would be no combining or grouping of others with oneself. That is until someone bridges to you. In such a case, one must effectively manage the dual conceptualization of self, constantly balancing the use of “I” and “we”. So, as you remember how long the other cyclist pulled before she asked you to pull through, you other her. But the telling of what happened has another effect on the conceptualization of the other. The act of narrating is necessarily at the extradiegetic level. The act of telling is one step removed from the action it recounts. The event is on the first plane (diegetic) but telling is also an event. Therefore, remembering is on the second plane (extradiegetic) because memory is not the event remembered. This means that, even with what seems like instantaneous thoughts, telling oneself what is happening distinguishes the experiencing-self from the narrating-self. This again is the difference between acting and evaluating. If you are narrating a race you are not racing. And telling yourself that you are “in a race” is a form of narration. I am not saying that a cyclist shouldn’t think when she is in a race. What I am suggesting here is rather that she should make an effort to think in training in such a way that encourages a more valuable thought process when racing. This would include but is not limited to aspects such as the events one tells oneself, who one distinguishes as the other in varying contexts, and how much of a race to spend narrating instead of racing. This last point is especially important because an informed tactically sound cyclist spends a calculated amount of time during meticulously chosen moments in a race to tell herself the story of what happened up to now. Being aware of what is happening is really just the result of valuably creating and interpreting a story. Cultivating this skill, along with knowing how and when to use it, is a sure way to develop a savvy cyclist.

Who should analyze cycling narratives?

The cyclists are the ones riding the bikes, but there’s a lot more to cycling than riding. You have to know how to ride on a daily basis if you want to improve. This means an expertise in physiology. You also have to know what to eat or how to fuel your body, linking the domain of the nutritionist. The stress of training can take its toll on cyclists. They might need the help of a psychologist to improve stress management and visualization. However, as this blog has repeatedly demonstrated, the analysis of memories is not outside of the field of narratology because a memory known is a memory told. Telling and remembering are inextricably connected. So, whereas the coach would focus on the developing body as the indicator of performance and the nutritionist would focus on the processing of nutrients to produce energy, the narratologist analyzes the relationship between the act of remembering and the the memory. The act of remembering requires the construction of a narrative necessitating a narratological analysis. This sort of analysis would not overlap the realm of the psychologist because it is focused on the story itself. Sports psychology is more concerned with tactics for preventing or overcoming weakness, obviously not the domain of narratology. But psychology is not equipped to analyze something that is necessarily in narrative form. The narratological approach to athletic training does not contradict other methodologies; it simply adds another domain of study, another field of analysis. It is the aim of this blog to develop a training/coaching methodology that would emphasize narratological analysis as well as awareness of narratological elements in decision making.

Tell the story well rather than correctly

The story of what happened should only ever help cyclist improve, meaning the events need to be recounted in an encouraging way. If you came in last, it might be hard to tell the story so that it motivates you to improve. Somehow a cyclist must balance staying optimistic about improving with being painfully blunt about performance. It does no good to simply say that the performance was unsatisfactory. The subtleties of the narrative have to be constructed in such a way that they allow the cyclist to use the past to continue working hard in the future; this is true even for a last place finish. There is no lying about what happened since the entire story is a fabrication. There is also no exaggeration because the actuality is impossible to reconstitute when remembering. So, tell the story well rather than correctly. But don’t be lazy about how you tell it. A cyclist who concludes that a ride was a disaster and that in order to move past it she must forget about it will only be plagued by the story she is not telling. Instead of a “face the facts” attitude that implies ignoring the truth, I suggest a “tell the story” approach. Remembering is storytelling and stories have no intrinsic effect on real audiences because the story of what happened on a ride has to be interpreted. One should not be afraid to remember what is negative. One should never be afraid of encountering his own story. This means that telling the story can always be a useful activity because it does not necessitate certain responses. As a cyclist creates the narrative of what happened, there is always the possibility of tweaking certain details that might lead to valuable recognition of weaknesses.

Perspective and the Act of Remembering Cycling Experiences

By the term perspective, we again mean the perceptual experience and the degree of knowledge the narrative reveals. Regarding the combination of point of view and focalization respectively, a cyclist needs to be aware of two distinct modes when remembering what happened: that of the cyclist experiencing the events (je-narré) and that of the cyclist doing the remembering (je-narrant). Is the narrative told from a perspective that emphasizes the quick decision making required in the moment? Or does it focus on the retrospective aspect of remembering? Does it narrate the experience of encountering the memory of what happened? In order to narrate from the perspective of the experiencing cyclist you do not have to pretend to be the cyclist in the story, since you are the one remembering. The cyclist remembering is not the narrator (extra-diegetic), so she is definitely not the character (diegetic). Like the author, the narrator is also free to distinguish himself from the cyclist experiencing the events. The story of a ride can be narrated from the perspective of the experiencing-I while being narrated from the perspective of the narrating-I. For example: “I looked ahead and the hill didn’t seem so big, and my legs felt great. I didn’t have any idea how wrong I was.” The “I” in this excerpt is not the extra-diegetic narrator. It is the experiencing-I that is looking ahead. It is the “I” who underestimated the difficulty of the hill and overestimated the sensations in his legs. The focalization, however, is on the narrating-I. This is clear by the distinction made in the excerpt between the knowledge of the narrating-I and the misguided conclusions of the experiencing-I. In conclusions, let’s look at some combinations:

 

Diegetic point of view and diegetic focalization

“A hill. Not so big. My legs feel great. But I don’t know.”

 

Diegetic point of view and extra-diegetic focalization

“Looking ahead, the hill didn’t seem too tough as I considered the awesome feeling in my legs. I didn’t have any idea how wrong I was.”

 

Extra-diegetic point of view and diegetic focalization

“I remember seeing the hill that I died on. I miscalculated my fatigue. But in the moment I didn’t know my legs were shot.”

 

Extra-diegetic point of view and extra-diegetic focalization

“I must have thought there was more left in my tank at that hill. That was where I messed up.”

The Argument for Qualitative Data

Sometimes in road racing, the final results are determined by a factor which is indecipherable. If you consult the line graph of your power output, it will only tell you the effects of this unknown factor. Quantitative data only proves consequences; it does not reveal factors. One has to decide what and how to research before gathering empirical evidence. But even after it has been collected through a consistent method which eliminates all possible variables, quantitative data still needs to be explained. It needs to be interpreted. This obviously happens with power meters and heart rate monitors, but it is also the case with something as simple as race results. As the most obvious quantifiable number in road racing, it is best to start with the analysis of race results. I have already alluded to the different possible stories one could tell about a second place finish in a bicycle race. So, I would prefer to focus on the accumulation of race results and the stories cyclists tell to explain them. After never having been present at the end of a race, a top 10 finish can be reported as a kind of success. However, it is unlikely that several top 10 finishes would also be called a good result. If a cyclist tells about one race in such a way that it resembles another race, she might assume that the “kind” of race is a constant, a fact that would permit her to compare race results from more than one event. Such an analysis could conclude that she has not improved because her final place has remained the same. Even if that is the case, a general conclusion such as this may have wide reaching effects. There could evidently be more factors that are being overlooked when deciding the degree of similarity from one race to another. A conclusion that is based on qualitative data of the different races needs to be more mindful of how the story that explains the race results is constructed. There is no argument about the value of the cold hard facts when it comes to athletic performance, but the facts always require contextualization. That’s where the narrative comes in because you can include these numbers as details in the story, adding value to the available data.

Resituating the Narratee in the Effort

So, if there is no objective account of what happened in a bicycle race and remembering is a project that involves telling stories, what kinds of effects does this have on the interpretation of data and the analysis of information? Cycling depends on data analysis. A time trial is really just one piece of data: the time. But anyone who has ever ridden a time trial knows that there is much more to what happened than the average speed and the time at which the clock was stopped. The narrative of a time trial is likely to be much more than the simple story of looking at the speedometer. The discipline is not by any means void of decision making. Power numbers and heart-rate readings are only part of the story. They cannot elucidate the mental aspects of what happened. However, narratives are no different. They are also incapable of recreating mental functions because telling stories is always just that and nothing else. The act of remembering is the act of telling, and both are isolated from the reality of what happened. The difficulty in training is attempting to resituate yourself where you were during the effort. The contextualization of the experience of riding your bicycle has everything to do with story-telling practices and techniques. By taking into account the textual audience (the narratee), a cyclist can more effectively represent the decision demanding situation faced during the ride in narrative form. Narratives of the past can only create the effect of a situation, since the “real” situation (that of telling/remembering) is happening after the remembered events.  This is not, however, problematic when remembering because the real situation that did exist at one time is no more. So, the reality of remembering is that the verisimilitude of the memory is actually a narrative effect. Memories of rides are colored and elaborated upon as they are told not as they were experienced. The details are not simply there for the cyclist remembering to mention or not. They must be created which means the author of the memory must remain skeptical of the story because it is not the previously lived experience. Memories are always new, allowing for infinite modifications to the story and in effect the analysis of something as dependent on quantitative data as a time trial.

To Whom One Tells Cycling Stories: Real Audiences and Fictional Audiences

There can be several uses for the story of a bicycle ride. A cyclist might tell her coach about what happened. She might tell herself what happened in order to overcome a loss or refocus after a win. You might even want to tell your spouse about the existential crisis you just experienced, a deeply personal experience that you may want to share. A cyclist might want to remind herself that this race is no different from the difficulties she has already experienced on such and such ride, carefully selecting details that allow for such an optimistic conclusion to be made. The focus here is the recipients (real or otherwise) of these narratives. If the cyclist who remembers a race is not the narrator who tells her memory, the real recipient of the story of a bicycle ride/race opposes the author not the narrator. In opposition to the narrator is the narratee. This means that one should not confuse one’s coach, one’s teammates, one’s wife or oneself with the recipient who is bound to the story. You might tell the story to your coach differently than you tell it to your wife. His version might contain more data (speed, power, etc.) whereas hers might contain more description (of the experienced situation). Neither story is the objective account of what happened, meaning neither recreates the totality of the race. They are both equally incapable of recreating the past. Memories, and in effect stories, are not related to the past except that they may be about them. In fact, there is no objective account of what happened. Even the camera does not capture every crash in the Tour de France just like it cannot show Gilbert, Cavendish or Contador on every camera shot. The impact of recognizing the difference between various real audiences (coaches, teammates, television viewers, or even friends who do not cycle) and still being able to differentiate them from the narratee is two-fold. On the one hand a cyclist can tell the same events employing a variety of narrative techniques, taking into account the plurality of telling stories. This aspect of the story might take into account how much cycling knowledge the audience has. The second effect is related to the narratee not being a real audience. The narratee is the audience that develops its understanding in the narrative. This fact allows the cyclist to remember events in a somewhat malleable and modifiable way. The discourse that is developing the narratee’s distinct perspective  can be changed as a way to take into account previously ignored narrative features.  The importance of remembering in a way that allows for change will be further explored in a future blog. For now, keep in mind that your mom is not your training partner; she needs a different story to want to listen to you recreate your memories out loud. Also, the “true story” is an impossibility because there is simply too much potential variation in the narrative of what happened in a bicycle race.

Consistency in the Story of Cycling

It is evident to any cycling barb that the story of what happened can vary a great deal from person to person. It can also vary from ride to ride or more pertinently from ride to race. It seems a reasonable conclusion that like any mental habits employed in training, those used to tell yourself or others the story of what happened are the ones you’ll likely employ in a race. This does not mean that you need to conceptualize every ride like a race or embellish its importance or difficulty. The idea behind consistency is rather to highlight what aspects are similar between the story of a ride and the story of a race. There is no problem with forming stories that differ. In fact, I would argue that it is better to understand the multitude of narratives that could be told of the same events. This allows you to create a common thread between a training ride and a race, allowing you to analyze details regarding the decision making process as well as better recreate, and in effect, understand the situation you faced on your bicycle. This common story should not serve as the objective account of what happened. It does not hold any status superior to that of your epic narrative of adventurous exploits on a bicycle or your journal entry of suffering in your diary of pain and “just not feeling it today”. What is suggested here is a compare/contrast of various instances of telling stories in cycling, from recounting what has happened so far in order to calculate how many people are still up the road to deciding how hard to go on an effort the goes out tail wind. In all accounts of what happened, there are noteworthy consistencies and/or inconsistencies that could be modified or emphasized in a beneficial way.