In the zone

“You’re solo out front with 7 miles to go! You have a 30 second gap over the two man chase and one minute gap over the main group,” shouts the race official over the swirling dry clutch noise of his red Ducati street bike as he rides formation with me. He makes eye contact with me for a brief moment sizing me up. I give him a brief smile, then turn my focus back to passing the pavement beneath my road bike as fast as possible. My eyes are facing forward, but my attention is focused inward. I listen intently to every sensation of my body and fine tune my peddling stroke to maximize power output, all the while minimizing my aero-profile. As a cyclist traveling at high speed on flat and rolling terrain, your main adversary is the aerodynamic drag created by air resistance.

An analogy would be something to the effect of small hands grabbing all over your clothing and dragging you to a crawl. If you listen carefully, you can hear and feel how tiny adjustments to your riding position improves or degrades your forward speed. However this technique can be very cramped at times and requires great flexibility. It’s kind of like trying to run cross county with your head lower than your hips.

The objective of this technique is to find the sweet spot between being as small as possible but still being able to breathe and peddle with power. Wind conditions can add to the technicality of the situation by causing air disturbances and extremely high amounts of drag. You can even feel cars speed you up or slow you down with the air vortices left behind in their wake. In other words, factoring in air and wind in a race can make a course very technically and physically challenging.

“Five miles to go!” The race official yells and nods to me, as he watches my riding with curious eyes. Right about now is where the course starts to get even more technical with the addition of three major climbs. Five miles may not seem very hard, or very far, until you are all alone with 50 other racers trying to run you down. The gravity of this sort of situation cannot be fully appreciated unless you raced bikes before. For those of you who haven’t been in a situation such as this, I’ll use a cheesy analogy so you can form a mental image: It would be something to the effect of an old Bruce Lee movie where it’s him versus twenty other guys.

In other words the level of exertion, focus and timing required is extreme to make a solo breakaway successful. Usually bike races are won by a rider’s number one effort and these efforts can be sometimes just a few seconds, which are preceded by hours of patience, pacing, conserving and timing. In my case, an eight mile individual time trial around San Pablo reservoir on my way to the finish of the 58th annual Berkeley Hills Road Race.

The race official on the pace bike looks at me again and studies my effort for a moment, says nothing, smiles at me briefly, then returns to enjoying the scenery on his weekend ride through the countryside. At a moment like this all sorts of things can appear in a rider’s mind, such as: Did I go at the right time? Am I going fast enough? Are they catching up? What’s my time gap?

At times like this it is important to keep yourself one hundred percent present and focused. In my opinion this part of a bicycle race is what it’s truly about; when you start pushing the limits and seeing what you are really truly capable of. You versus the competition; you versus the race course; you versus the elements; and, most notably, you versus yourself.

To get the human body to work flawlessly in a bike race is one thing, but to get the human mind and body to work as one unit is entirely different. The mind usually clouds up with thoughts of quitting, failure, fatigue, negativity, day dreaming or another way to distract you altogether. You have to give it something specific and analytical to focus on, something like your aerodynamic position, the mechanics of your peddling stroke, nutrition timing or any other technicality of cycling.

In cycling the mind is very technically orientated, whereas the body is very mechanically orientated;. It gives you constant feedback on its status and what it needs to continue functioning like a piece of machinery at peak efficiency. The mind and the body are pretty straight forward and are really a match made in heaven. One can feed data all day long, while the other can calculate solutions for the given data until you are blue in the face.

Now the human “will” is tricky, it’s hard to train and even hard to understand. In my opinion will is of the most powerful weapons a cyclist can possess. Without a will the other two systems really don’t have anything driving them.

I sweep around a right hand turn, cranking the biggest gear I can, focusing on staying attuned with the moment. I glance up the first of three climbs between me and the finish. The first one is not too long but fairly steep. Normally I would slide back and open up my chest for breathing because aerodynamics are less of a factor than gravity while climbing a steep hill, but, due to the head wind, I opt to stay low. That’s the thing with cycling, it can be full of all sorts of unforeseeable difficulties that you have to be able to adapt to on-demand. If not, then the only other alternative is to throw in the towel.

“I accept,” I mutter to myself as I face the windy hill like some great adversary challenging me to a duel. I know in the back of my mind I have to clear this hill before the race group can spot me. Reason being is that if the chase group can’t see you then they will usually give up. Out of sight, out of mind. In situations like this will becomes crucial, if you know how to motivate it. The will is a source of strength and power that is not quantifiable by watts, watts per kilo or any other means of cycling science. It just simply is. It is the source of your single greatest inspirations and efforts as a cyclist, but it usually comes with an asterisk. Your will is like a fire breathing dragon on a leash or at least mine is. The majority of the race you are using your mind and body and keeping that beast on an extremely tight leash. This requires so much patience it cannot be understated, because the beast is snarling and wanting to attack the first thing it sees. You don’t dare let go of that leash until it is time because once you do, you will never get it back. When you feel the time is right, you can slowly let out the leash until the time comes to fully unleash the beast.

I ride past a few riders who had fallen out of the main group on the previous lap as I make my way up the first hill of three. At this point I feel it’s time to let the beast stretch its legs a bit. I drop from spinning high RPM to put my body on the torque peak and begin to breathe a little fire. I’m not a small guy for road bike racer, being 6’2” and 170 pounds plus riding gear and water. Comparatively speaking, the average road bike racer would resemble a horse jockey, which means, while under high power efforts I turn over a pretty big gear, kind of like a destroyer. I tap the paddle shifter into a bigger gear and start making revolutions at 90 RPM, setting my course for the top of the hill. I use the chase group looming somewhere in the background as motivation to crank harder. My legs really begin to feel the effects of the pace as the muscle tissue starts burning deep down. I crest the hill and give a quick look over my shoulder.

“No one in sight!”

The trick here is to down the hill as fast as you can, which usually helps stretch out your lead.

After 30 seconds or so of rollers in the big chainring, the road begins to ascend beneath me for the second climb of three. I carry my momentum as far as it will take me up the hill, then I start up shifting one gear on the cassette at a time till I feel it is necessary to cross shift and begin the climbing grind. This hill is a short one, so you can really run the effort right at red line and still recover in time. As I crest the second hill there is still no one in sight. I am managing to hold off the 50-strong chase group. I race my way back and forth, twisting and turning down the downhill, eventually rolling out onto a flat section of road which is about a mile or so long away from the base of the finish climb. The second the twisting decent ended and the road straightened up, I leaned myself forward and laid onto the handle bars again to make myself more aerodynamic.

In the opening miles of the 70-mile road race today, there were a flurry of attacks and attempted breakaways. Lap after lap people would attack, making the pace very high. In a race with so many attacks it tends to take its toll on everyone. The effort involved in these sorts of situations can be compared to throwing in sprint intervals every few minutes during your average three-hour bike ride. Every time someone tries to attack and breakaway, the whole pack has to accelerate and chase them down. It’s hard to quantify the amount of suffering that goes on in a bike race in just a few sentences. All I can say is that most average people couldn’t even imagine the level of suffering an endurance athlete would consider manageable and the amount of suffering it takes week after week to prepare for an event.

I have the bike geared out on the flat right now, if were to guess, I hit this flat section and I’m holding at about 30 MPH right now, laid out on the handle bars, trying squeeze every last ounce of speed out.

The funny thing about aerodynamics is that the faster you go, the harder it is to go faster. For example, if I were to ride at 20 MPH and speed up to 21 MPH, it would be a piece of cake. Now if I were to try to ride from 29.5 MPH to 30 MPH it would take a herculean effort. This is because of the drag increase by the square root of the speed.

The race official has dropped in back to give me space, because I am coming in fast. I take the right hand turn at the base of that final climb flat out to carry as much speed as possible up the hill. I use the whole lane like I am a race car driver, drift wide to the yellow line, apex to the curb and drifting out at the exit.

“Now is the time to unleash the beast,” I think to myself. I don’t even bother looking over my shoulder at this point because I know it’s now or never.

I go past the feed zone at the base of the hill, race officials and crew people start yelling up the road from of me, “Get out of the way, racers coming through! Get out of the way!” The road starts emptying of spectators and now it’s just me versus that final hill. At this point in time I am all out as my facial expression shows (on the photo on the front page of this issue) with narrow eyes and gritted teeth. This is the point where all the imaginary indicator lights in your head start flashing red like crazy because you are over the top. “Time to let go of that leash,” I tell myself.

At this point in a bike race, the level of suffering is tremendous, and it really shows who is willing to go the distance. After a moment of extreme pain and effort, a strange thing starts to happen. The noise fades away; the pain slides into the background; your mind goes into neutral; and you gently step aside to watch like a spectator, looking through your own eyes like windows out onto the world. For a brief moment in time you feel as though you’re no longer even riding a bicycle but instead floating up the road towards the finish line.

You see the facial expressions of fans cheering and smiling, some are totally blown away; while others are oblivious to the small miracle that is unfolding as you witness it firsthand. The moment is so present to you that time disappears altogether and the only thing you are aware of is the second that you are existing in. The finish line glides under you effortlessly as you slowly return to yourself. You realize you have just won the race in electric fashion and will spend the rest of the day replaying in your mind exactly what you had done to win. Everything in those last few moments happened like you weren’t even present, but you were there just as a witness to see firsthand the race unfolding before you second by second.

Next time one of your friends brings up being in the zone while discussing one of your favorite sports, you will have some idea of what it is like in a bicycle race.