I’ll share a stylized story inspired from my racing days of many years ago. Imagine you are a competitive amateur racing road cyclist. After years of consistent training racing in the rain, wind, heat, and snow, you are ready for your biggest race of the year, a 60-something mile hilly road race. Having completed your warm-up, caffeination, and urination rituals, you line up with your team and look around. Having agreed you are the leader for the day (you are best suited to win given the course and relative fitness), you chat about the course, wind, rivals, feed zones, and so on.
Seventy or so brightly-colored participants surround you, all optimized to convert calories into rotational energy. You feel the camaraderie among this traveling band of weekend warriors. Lots of determination and shaved legs. You notice but don’t worry about the calves carved out of wood since they are relatively weak predictors of victory. Speaking of...
You hazard one of twenty some-odd contenders is likely to win. It will involve lots of fitness and some blend of grit, awareness, timing, team support, adaptability, and luck. You estimate you are in the top twenty based on previous events. So from the outside viewpoint, you estimate your chances of winning are low, roughly 5%.
What’s that? … You hear three out-of-state semi-pro mountain bikers are in the house. Teammates too. They have decided to “use this race for training”. Lovely. You update your P(win) to ~3%. Does this 2% drop bother you? It is actually a 40% decrease. For a moment maybe but not for long. What about the absolute probability? Does a 3% chance demotivate you? Hell no. A low chance of winning will not lower your level of effort.
You remember that time trial from the year before where your heart rate was pegged at your threshold for something like forty minutes. The heart-rate monitor reading was higher than you expected, but your body indicated it was doable. At the same time, your exertion level was right on the edge of unsustainable. Saying “it’s all mental” is cliché, but in that case, it was close enough to the truth. So you engaged in some helpful self-talk (a.k.a. repeating of the mantra “I’m not going to crack”) for the last twenty minutes. There was no voodoo nor divine intervention; it was just one way to focus the mind to steer the body in a narrow performance band.
How are you doing to win? You don’t know exactly. You can say this: you will harness your energy and abilities. You review your plan. Remain calm, pay attention, conserve energy until the key moments, trust your team to help, play to your strengths, and when the time is right, take a calculated risk. You have some possible scenarios in mind; get in a small breakaway, cooperate, get ready for cat-and-mouse at the end, maybe open your sprint from 800 meters or farther. (You know from past experiences your chances of winning a pack sprint are very low.)
Are we starting soon? Some people are twitchy. Lots of cycling computer beeping and heart-rate monitor fiddling. Ready to burst some capillaries? Ready to drop the hammer? Turn the pedals in anger? Yes! … and no. You wait some more. This is taking a while. (Is that person really peeing down their leg? Caffeine intake is not an exact science apparently. Better now than when the pistons are motion.)
After a seemingly endless sequence of moments, a whistle blows. The start! The clicking of shoes engaging with pedals. Leading to … not much … the race starts with a neutral roll out. Slower than anyone wants. But the suspense builds … until maybe a few minutes later … a cacophony of shifting of gears … and the first surge begins. This hurts. Getting dropped at the beginning is game-over. Even trading position to save energy is unwise right now—you have to be able to see the front of the pack until things calm down a bit. You give whatever level of energy is needed, right now.
I’ll share a stylized story inspired from my racing days of many years ago. Imagine you are a competitive amateur racing road cyclist. After years of consistent training racing in the rain, wind, heat, and snow, you are ready for your biggest race of the year, a 60-something mile hilly road race. Having completed your warm-up, caffeination, and urination rituals, you line up with your team and look around. Having agreed you are the leader for the day (you are best suited to win given the course and relative fitness), you chat about the course, wind, rivals, feed zones, and so on.
Seventy or so brightly-colored participants surround you, all optimized to convert calories into rotational energy. You feel the camaraderie among this traveling band of weekend warriors. Lots of determination and shaved legs. You notice but don’t worry about the calves carved out of wood since they are relatively weak predictors of victory. Speaking of...
You hazard one of twenty some-odd contenders is likely to win. It will involve lots of fitness and some blend of grit, awareness, timing, team support, adaptability, and luck. You estimate you are in the top twenty based on previous events. So from the outside viewpoint, you estimate your chances of winning are low, roughly 5%.
What’s that? … You hear three out-of-state semi-pro mountain bikers are in the house. Teammates too. They have decided to “use this race for training”. Lovely. You update your P(win) to ~3%. Does this 2% drop bother you? It is actually a 40% decrease. For a moment maybe but not for long. What about the absolute probability? Does a 3% chance demotivate you? Hell no. A low chance of winning will not lower your level of effort.
You remember that time trial from the year before where your heart rate was pegged at your threshold for something like forty minutes. The heart-rate monitor reading was higher than you expected, but your body indicated it was doable. At the same time, your exertion level was right on the edge of unsustainable. Saying “it’s all mental” is cliché, but in that case, it was close enough to the truth. So you engaged in some helpful self-talk (a.k.a. repeating of the mantra “I’m not going to crack”) for the last twenty minutes. There was no voodoo nor divine intervention; it was just one way to focus the mind to steer the body in a narrow performance band.
You can do that again, you think. You assume a mental state of “I’m going to win this” as a conviction, a way of enhancing your performance without changing your epistemic understanding.
How are you doing to win? You don’t know exactly. You can say this: you will harness your energy and abilities. You review your plan. Remain calm, pay attention, conserve energy until the key moments, trust your team to help, play to your strengths, and when the time is right, take a calculated risk. You have some possible scenarios in mind; get in a small breakaway, cooperate, get ready for cat-and-mouse at the end, maybe open your sprint from 800 meters or farther. (You know from past experiences your chances of winning a pack sprint are very low.)
Are we starting soon? Some people are twitchy. Lots of cycling computer beeping and heart-rate monitor fiddling. Ready to burst some capillaries? Ready to drop the hammer? Turn the pedals in anger? Yes! … and no. You wait some more. This is taking a while. (Is that person really peeing down their leg? Caffeine intake is not an exact science apparently. Better now than when the pistons are motion.)
After a seemingly endless sequence of moments, a whistle blows. The start! The clicking of shoes engaging with pedals. Leading to … not much … the race starts with a neutral roll out. Slower than anyone wants. But the suspense builds … until maybe a few minutes later … a cacophony of shifting of gears … and the first surge begins. This hurts. Getting dropped at the beginning is game-over. Even trading position to save energy is unwise right now—you have to be able to see the front of the pack until things calm down a bit. You give whatever level of energy is needed, right now.