Test. Test. Fail.
Today I finished evaluation week at St. Louis Power Up (my coach's indoor training facility in Chesterfield, Missouri). I'm smiling in the photo here, not because the week was all success, but because I'm happy to know where I stand and what I need to improve. This week my coach had me do three types of tests:
The Lactate-Threshold Test intervals increasing by 20 watts every 3 minutes + finger pricks to test blood lactate until the point of absolute misery then go 90 seconds further
The Cardiac Drift Test 1 hour in zone 2 with a heart rate monitor to see how my heart rate moves over an hour. This means no talking, no dancing, and certainly no pee breaks, as I've learned the hard way
The Power Test (pictured below) 20 minutes, all out, as hard as you can go. I think the hardest of the three because it requires me to reconcile the number in my head I think I should be able to hit and the one that will realistically get me to line without completely blowing up. Consider it a sort of humbling self-actualization
Over the course of three years I've learned to think of testing not as pass/fail, but as crucial data points that will allow my coach to cater my next training cycle to best fit my needs.
I haven't always thought about testing this way. I used to get more anxiety over a power test than I did going to to the line at races. I always expected too much from myself, trying to increase 10 watts from the previous test or hit my mid-season numbers in the off season. I wanted to feel constant progression, and I feared any sort of negative results. I'd panic that I didn't eat right or sleep well the night before. I’d be overwhelmed with the thought that I hadn't rested or recovered enough from my last workout, what if I was miserable three minutes in and still had 17 to go?! I think I failed more power tests in my first year as a cyclist than I completed successfully (failure meaning I had to stop before the full 20 minutes).
Fast forward to today: I'm still failing tests. Just yesterday I forgot to eat before my cardiac drift assessment and totally bonked in the last 20 minutes (AKA the most crucial part of the test). On Tuesday the results of my Lactate-Threshold test weren't what my coach expected. (For any data geeks and fitness wonks out there: my curve flattened around my threshold instead of in the aerobic section.) The difference is my perspective on these "failures". Instead of seeing them as a negative grade on my last training cycle, I view them as crucial off-season information to get me to my mid-season best. My coach knows how to identify my weak points and these tests help him adjust my training for the next cycle so that I can be the best me. These failures, or let's call them deviations from expectation, aren't occuring in a vaccuum, they're critical to my progress as an athlete and an integral part of achieving the goals I've set for myself.
The broader lesson here? As bike racers, we deal with a lot of failure, or deviation from expectation *wink wink*. So I'm trying to learn to be comfortable in the space between reality and expectation. I think the social media nature of our world encourages us to put successes forward and hide failure somewhere in the dusty corner behind the Time Trial, Fixed gear, and other seven bikes we own and don't regularly ride. I know I'm not the best at talking about it openly, but I've decided to not let the fear of failing stop me from openly committing to trying for success.
It's easy to say at the start of a race "I haven't really been training and my legs feel like garbage today" so that if I fail on the task at hand, it hurts a little less bad. After all, I didn't fully commit. It's a safety net I've set it out for myself on more than one occasion. But making that statement is a decision to fail before the race even starts. It allows me to settle for less than the result I really want. Instead of fearing failure, I'd rather plan for success, plan for the masterful time-trial, plan for the perfect team execution, envision the lead-out for the winning sprint, and should the result be less than expected? I'll know that's valuable information to learn and improve on in the future. Information I need to devour the space between reality and expectation.
P.S. After two less than stellar tests, I nailed my power test today, and I'd like to think it's because I didn't let the previous failures get to my head this morning :)