Never a Pro

For those that don't know, Steve Magness is a well known author, researcher, and performance coach. His newsletter, The Growth Equation , is worth subscribing to. In addition to coaching world class endurance athletes, Magness himself was an accomplished miler and although he may have been a bit quicker than me, I still feel some sense of connectedness to what he has to say about performance. I happened to listen to him recently on the Rich Roll podcast and in addition to talking about the Nike Oregon Project scandal of which he played a key role first as an assistant coach and then whistleblower, Magness also spoke at length about his latest book, Do Hard Things . What follows is a reminder to myself, an encouragement, hopefully, to my kids to seek out the true source of confidence, and to people I work with to always be in touch with what they truly do control.  Magness tees up his thesis by going into a good amount of detail in debunking the traditional definitions of toughnes

 In October 2021, I hit the pause button on my cyclocross season mainly due to the extensive family commitments that come with having 3 young kids (8, 11, 13). In the Fall, we are juggling tennis, soccer, x-country, school, and a number of other commitments that crop up on the calendar from week to week. It’s an especially stressful time for my wife who runs her own successful real estate business while juggling car pool duties and a hundred other things that demand her time. Having that kind of stress in the house while you are in your own world, focused on training and the next race simply isn’t tenable and ultimately not fair on everyone else who’s trying to make it all work. So, after just two races in the 2021 cx season, I pulled the plug. I told my coach I needed to stop for now, and even sold my cyclocross bike on the Pros Closet. As disappointed as I was, in a strange way, I was also relieved to let go of that stress. Driving my daughter to tennis on Saturday morning and help

  In the Practice of Groundedness , the first principle is to Accept Where You Are to Get Where You Want to Go . This weekend was one of those times where my expectations met headlong with reality and it wasn't pleasant.  I was really looking forward to facing a strong field - the local guys in the Pacific Northwest are some of the strongest riders in the nation. I was fortunate to be on the front row thanks to my 3rd place a couple of weeks ago. As the clock ticked down, I wasn't feeling too nervous, which was unusual. Sometimes my legs are shaking, I'm so nervous! Perhaps I wasn't focused enough, but when we started, I couldn't get my right foot clipped in cleanly and botched the start. Heading into the first corner, I found myself probably in 12th - 15th spot. Over the first set of 3 mini-barriers we went, I decided to dismount instead of riding over them. That meant I needed to run the next couple of off-camber corners before I could get back on the bike, only f

On Twitter, I'm not much of a poster, or influencer as one might say, but I do use Twitter to follow content on topics that are interesting to me, such as Sports Science. One such person I follow is Steve Magness and the other day he promoted a book by Brad Stulberg called The Practice of Groundedness . The premise of the book is that high achievers are prone to what Stulberg calls heroic individualism - "...an ongoing game of one-upmanship, against both yourself and others, paired with the limiting belief that measurable achievement is the only arbiter of success." Stulberg sums it up as, "...chronically feel(ing) like you never quite reach the finish line that is lasting fulfillment." I thought this book would be about athletic performance and in a way it is, but it's also much broader than that. Really, it's about human performance in all walks of life. Stulberg goes on to describe his own experience with being diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive

 A question that I'm often asking myself is, "Am I a better cyclist?" The answer to that question is often that it depends. Cycling is littered with metrics and there's enough seemingly objective benchmarks to answer that question however we want. One way to answer this question is simply by observing this Training Peaks chart of Fitness over time. Another way to consider the question is one of workload. Am I able to handle more work this year versus last year? Well, consider that in 2021 over the past 180 days, my weekly Kilojoules (KJ) have averaged 7,421 KJ whereas in 2020 for the same period, I averaged 4,044 KJ per week, an 83% increase Year over Year. Similarly, I've averaged 627 Training Stress Score (TSS) and Intensity Factor (IF) of 0.77 per week for the past 180 days in 2021 compared to 570 TSS and the same 0.77 IF for the same period in 2020. So, when comparing TSS year over year, that's a 10% increase. So, is all that increased work translating int