Coach Carter

I've been reminded a few times this week how challenging it can be getting a balance: both in my role as a sport scientist / cycling coach; and also in observing the behaviour patterns of the athletes I train.

I mentioned in my last blog post that this time of year is tough on athletes: they come out of a winter's training, wanting to test their levels of fitness, hoping that this year is going to be THEIR year. Perhaps naively, they expect to be better from the off - in their minds, if they are about to have a better season, it means being a step up on last year right from the first race. I have to remind them that this time of year is still about training: you can't sacrifice the training in order to race.

I am reminded of the concept detailed by Stephen Covey in his ‘7 habits of highly effective people' (a must read in my opinion!), one he calls the "P/PC balance", with ‘P' standing for production and ‘PC' production capability. The most famous example of this concept is that of the golden egg laying goose - you may have read this fable of Aesop: where the greedy farmer and his wife kill the goose, hoping they will find it full of gold. A rather simple illustration how people sacrifice the capability to produce in order to get the product, and to get it now! Training is the development of that ‘PC', and long term, this is what is going to make you the better athlete: this investment in time (and patience) is well worth the effort. If you focus on ‘P' too often, while you might appear to be ahead of the game, its short lived - soon you see those who have invested in PC overtaking. How often we see ‘early season stars' burn out.

I'm often asked as a sport scientist, why racing yourself fit doesn't work. Of course, it does to some extent: we have all experienced as novice racers the honeymoon period, where we raced every week, sometimes twice a week, and just kept getting faster! Sure, going hard will cause the body to adapt - but I would argue, only to a certain level. Once we begin to reach that plateau (where performance gains tail off), we need to start thinking more about how to eek more improvement out of the body. This is where periodisation comes in: the scientific progression of training load - structuring the training year, working on building intensity in a stepwise manner, means we slowly nudge the body towards race pace: miss a step (i.e. start racing too soon) and you have missed out on a vital link in the chain. Think about how the body must build more structures, the proteins it must lay down, in order to cope with increasing workload. A classic example would be how zone 3 training is needed to boost capillary growth in the muscle bed before you work at zone 4 where lactic acid clearance determines performance level - less capillaries, less clearance. Start racing too soon, you jump steps (PC) that will ultimately limit your performance (P).

Of course it is no different for me as a cycling coach. Since we founded PBscience last summer, I have been balancing a whole host of roles:  the sport scientist (performance testing and data analysis each time a rider comes into the lab); the coach (writing training programmes based on test results or my daily analysis of training files); manager (of a team helping me build the resources on the website such as videos and factsheets); entrepreneur (understanding how to build the PBscience service); business woman (keeping on top of the accounts and administration); researcher (making sure I keep abreast of the latest journal publications). I could go on! Balancing these roles and making sure I devote enough time to my own PC and the business PC is critical. Sometimes you can get so caught up IN the business (being the coach) you can neglect working ON the business (moving PBscience forward with new ideas and developing my skills as a coach). I want to give my best daily - but just like I explain with the physiology of training adaptation, there has to be an awareness that always delivering will ultimately blunt my ability as a cycling coach. I owe it to my athletes to make sure I keep learning and improving: stepping back from hands on tasks, and putting effort into my long term development.

"Learning and improving" - how often we forget the importance of that, so I will finish with a reminder. I attended a talk given by one of my mentors, Julia Armstrong, this week. Julia, a performance coach, talked about how we are so attached to outcomes, like race results. If we ‘succeed' we are happy, if we ‘fail' we take it as a great hit to our esteem. We need to get comfortable with ‘failing', seeing them as opportunities to ‘learn and improve'. So, by all means, do these early season races, but see them as learning experiences - getting the warm-up right, getting used to being in race scenarios again - but take the pressure off: don't expect to be at your best ALL of the time - think about the ‘PC' bank account into which you are investing - you might just harvest some golden eggs this season!