Never a Pro

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...