Journey to Myself from humblebee - sxc.hu
The first days when I started biking to work, I made a rookie mistake that I believe must be pretty common. See, every time a biker (or even a car) would approach me from behind I would speed up. Instinctively I believed that I should be travelling as fast as they were, after all we were on the same road and in the case of bikes, travelling using the same vehicle. The result was predictable, I usually burned myself out during the first part of my ride, making the second half much harder.
At the same time I found someone online talking about cadence. In biking terms, cadence is the rhythm at which you are pumping your legs. Many sites suggested that while biking, you should aim for a cadence of 60 - 120 full cycles per minute. Cadence became the solution to my speed problem. Here’s what I learned, and how I think it applies to life beyond biking.
- Use your cadence to determine your workload, not your speed: Aiming to travel at the same speed of the other bikers was counter-productive. It made it harder for me to finish the trip that I had started on. What worked was to find a rate of energy output that was appropriate for me, my level of fitness and my bike and use the amount that is healthy for me to work to determine the rate at which I got work done.
- Gear down to keep your cadence constant: While biking, if you are using such a high gear that you can’t keep up your cadence can be damage your knees. In biking, and in life, there is no shame in gearing down when the circumstances make your journey difficult, and no glory in trying to be badass about hills. In biking, it’s healthy to gear down when you are going up a hill. In life it’s healthy to cut back on things when life screws up, doing otherwise can be damaging.
- Gearing up is a good thing too: Here’s the funny thing about biking. Biking in too low of a gear ends up being more tiring than biking in a higher gear (or two). It’s unexpected, but you do yourself and your goal no favors by setting the bar so low that it takes very little effort to achieve it.
In essence, instead of determining your acceptable level of work by the level of work of those around you, you need to look at your own abilities and circumstances, and set a pace that is natural and challenging for you, and avoid trying too hard to match folks around you, not taking your circumstances into consideration, or setting the bar to low.
