‘Mental’ power can be doubled even in trained racer
I think it’s an underdeveloped and underrated idea in modern training. I keep being surprised by it in my riding and was greatly impressed by it when I raced, but I didn’t always know how to handle it. Not much info on it out there.
Basically, you can be riding, say in a TT, at what you think is your trained max, you can be using all your imagery and focus and experience. Then suddenly something happens and available power/speed DOUBLES. Or just when you think by normal *highly experienced* standards that you should, say, lose or drop out or do bad….you suddenly win.
How does this happen? What power source gets accessed? How to control and predict it?
I’m not sure it’s a new pool of mental power. It might well be emotional instead.
It seems like perhaps there might be ordinary pools of power that are trained by ordinary methods, and maximized and such. But that there are other available energy sources that aren’t commonly known.
The other day it happened to me when I was just baked and dragging along after many hours of riding (untrained). I was clearly analyzing my situation and was glad that I hadn’t tried a certain big climb back when I was feeling good coz now I had many miles to go and was on empty. I had tried picking up the pace and could maintain only about 15mph! And then a guy came by almost doubling my speed. I found that I could ride with him after all. And even that I could access old speed ability that was quite a bit beyond his (not sprint speed either). It was very weird and surprising. I never knew if I was going to blow or what…it was all just try it and see. And suddenly the baked deadness was gone.
It happened to me many times in racing days. I’d win the day after being totally dropped. Or suddenly have access to a much larger pool of speed than others. I called it my quantum jump for last lap stuff when everyone thought the break was away and no one could go any faster. I would definitely try to predict this and control it and sometimes I could.
I also used something like this skill to AVOID CRASHES. It seemed to work very well. But I’ve never seen much coaching or writing about it.
