In the fitness and recreation context I have seen plenty of people choose to participate in an endurance sport and then search high and low for a way to do less of the activity while still trying to achieve the stated goal. Mark Twight from the essay Cheaters.
This is the reality on every mountain bike park in Australia: the overwhelming majority of riders are on electric bikes, even young people who should be at the acme of their fitness. It’s worth reading through Twight’s entire essay to understand why this is not the win that everyone thinks it is. Every time you take the easy route, you give up a little more of your own ability to do the hard thing. And hard things will come, no matter how young, old, rich or poor you are. By learning to enjoy the hard thing, you not only push the boundary of what you can do right now, but you future proof yourself against growing old as a weakling. Weaklings fall over and break hips, end up in care homes and spend their last years watching their capacity shrink away. It’s no way to live and it is certainly no way to approach death.
I’ve given up thinking that myself, or Twight, or anyone else who rails against this will ever swing around the majority of the populace. The shackles are simply too comfortable in the present time and visualising the future if you continue to remain shackled in comfort too hard to imagine accurately. Everyone thinks they will be the one who escapes death, taxes, and sarcopenia but no-one does, most particularly no-one on an electric bicycle.
My brain thinks up challenges. Most of them are meaningless to anyone but me and are non-randomly attached to round number digits. In winter, for example, which is my off-season for sea kayaking, I always try to paddle at least 20 kilometres in one go once per week. This is not hard. If I remain modestly fit, 20 kilometres takes 3 or 3.5 hours, not a big effort, and means I can have breakfast before I leave, and lunch when I get home. It’s a minimal effort meant to keep me minimally paddle fit over the winter months.
When I first hit 700 metres gain on the mountain bike on our local (and new) mountain bike trails, I thought, in my non-random way, adding up 1000 metres in day of elevation gain would be a good goal to shoot for. Quite a few times, I hit the mid-700’s or even 800 metres over the course of six months or so but usually found that my legs were disturbingly shaky on the last uphill ride to home. I’ll train, I thought, and, I did, a bit, but not with any detailed plan or definite intensity or schedule. I did, however, stop running, and tried to ride the trails a bit more often, and, went back to Crossfit workouts (for no real reason other than I like the variety of Crossfit training). Abstractly and with no concrete metrics being measured, I thought I was getting stronger.
On Saturday, I was out riding around and eventually, after a few ups and downs – our trails are mostly up and down – I found myself descending The Mogo at Mogo and having coffee at a cafe in the sun in the tourist village of Mogo. This is a nice little leg break even if it means riding The Mogo at least three times. The first time you see The Mogo (the name for the heavily switchbacked track out of Mogo) you think “wow, what a cool trail feature!” After riding it a few times, you think “this is a slow and somewhat annoying way to gain 30 to 40 metres of elevation gain!”
Out of Mogo, I did an extra lap because I’d never ridden the new blue uptrack (Grandstand) which runs uphill to Mitchell’s and the new jump lines (way too hard for me); nor had I ridden the new blue skills run (Flipping Pancakes). The up-track, ironically enough given all the young riders were too lazy to ride up and were shuttling the 80 metre ascent Grandstand is probably one of the easiest up-tracks in the system (possibly the easiest). Yes, a paltry 80 metres. If ever there was an argument for bringing back shame, it is the ubiquity of electric bicycles.
By the time I had gone up and down the required number of times to get back to Mogo trig my watch was reading 843 metres of gain. Only 170 metres more and I would hit my 1000 metre goal! My legs felt pretty good so I took a blue line down to Jackhammer and rode up that. Jackhammer is an up-track, but has some downs, and I thought if I was lucky, I would manage all the rest of the elevation gain on one loop, but, I got down to the Curtis Road trail-head around 60 metres shy of the goal. So, I did what any self-respecting rider should do and I rode back up until my watch had ticked over 1000 metres and then blasted back down to the trail head and home. My final tally 1050 metres of gain and 45 kilometres of riding.
It felt really good to tick off that goal, not least because I don’ t have to do that particular goal again. A not unfamiliar state of affairs to most goal oriented individuals. The truth is, we enjoy the journey at least as much, if not more, as actually attaining the goal. No doubt, I’ll find another goal, but it will likely be a goal that emphasises technical difficulty not merely elevation gain. I am more intrigued by those kind of goals than simply going further for longer. In the early days of ultra-running when ultra-running was not really a thing, I had a friend who would cobble together his own endurance events which generally involved bashing up and down scree slopes to various mountain peaks. There was little to no technical difficulty and I never understood the appeal. A classic arete like the NW Ridge of Sir Donald offers superb but easy climbing in a scenic position or you could scree bash up half a dozen peaks in Kananaskis Country, I know which I would choose.
The next day, Sunday, I did my 20 kilometre paddle (21.5 kilometres) at an easy pace but no other training as we were climbing the next day and I had big goals. You can prepare but you cannot always win, and I had no idea I was as fatigued as I was until I started climbing and, on the first route of the day, I got the dreaded flash pump. The forearm pump quickly spread and I fell off many times on routes I can normally climb. It was horridly frustrating and, obviously, I didn’t meet any of my goals. I simply could not get my tired body to perform.
Consistency and conscientiousness are important in both sport and life. If you say you are going to do something, you should, and the only way to really improve at anything is to persevere even if you don’t feel like it. I am pretty good at that. If my training plan says paddle 20 km and it’s cold, wet and windy, I’ll find a way to get it done. The hardest step, most frequently, is just walking out the door, particularly on days when you feel a bit tired or the weather is a bit rubbish. I’m used to doing that. What I am not used to doing is recognising when I’m too fatigued to benefit and dialling the program back or, most horrific of all, having a rest day. It’s a reminder and a lesson that your greatest strength is at the same time, your greatest weakness.
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