Alright, thanks everyone, I'll just sort of recap what this whole event is.
It's five days, 670 odd kilometers of cycling around Victoria.
The athletes are, they're going to put themselves through a bit of pain.
Five days, reaching average speeds of probably 40 kph, heart rates that would probably make
most people pass out as they're going up, 220 odd beats a minute, they'll reach speeds
probably double 40 kph as they're coming down hills.
So there's a lot of intensity over the next five days and they have to do it day in and
day out.
And as spectators we sort of stand there and sort of are in awe and think, how do they
actually do that?
How do they actually put themselves through this sort of anguish and endurance and get
to the end?
And most of the time they're smiling at the end, which is quite interesting, which we
have time I can chat about that.
So if we look at an elite athlete in general and sort of peel away and look under the helmet,
it's quite interesting.
I get asked this question a lot.
What's the difference between good athletes and great athletes?
And really there's not a lot of significant difference between them.
There's marginal differences.
What's really interesting, and then the next question is, or statement that I usually get
is, what's 90% mental, 10% physical?
And it's just an absolute fallacy.
It really is.
If you think from an elite cyclist's perspective, they're spending 50, 60, 70 hours a week physically
doing something, whether it's cycling, weights, massage, and yes, massage can be physical.
And so there's no way that only 10% of their time is doing physical things.
So it's an absolute fallacy.
But what's interesting about that sort of anecdote or analogy is if you put competition
into that equation, it changes everything.
So when you're looking at the competitiveness that these athletes have to get to, that's
where there's periods of time where yes it is, a 90-10 sort of scenario.
So if we look at sort of the whole competitiveness of the elite athlete, it's really not about
the race.
The race is for spectators, and that's what everyone loves to see.
They go through this great orchestra of five days of absolute intense rivalry, upheals,
downheels, the criterium at the end, but it's really not about that.
Essentially for the elite athlete, all they're doing is they're executing a well laid out
sort of plan.
It's like a piece of sheet music.
They've just got every note that they have to be able to get out across those five days.
So it's really not about the race.
It's about the execution of their plan.
And there's a lot of players involved in that plan, if from a cycling perspective, if we
take away the other athletes on their team and the other teams and just focus on the
athlete, there's even a significant amount that we have to look at to really get inside
what they're doing.
Teammates are critically important, as is understanding the other teams as well.
We won't talk about that today.
So for the individual athlete, who are the players?
You've got the physical up here, you've got the muscles, the heart, the lungs, the physiology,
it's the grunting and the sweating and all those sorts of things.
And then you've got down here, which is, I sort of tell my athletes, it's the mechanics
of it.
So it's your equipment, your heart rate stuff, and then all the paperwork.
Yes, there's a lot of paperwork involved for elite athletes.
They have to do a lot of paperwork stuff.
The interesting thing about these two areas, though, is there's margins of error there.
In the elite athlete, they can accept that, yes, sometimes the equipment isn't going
to work, I'm going to get a flat.
Sometimes pedals fall off, sometimes brakes fail, sometimes spokes break, all these sorts
of things.
The physical side of things, sometimes they miss a feed stop or drop food or drop a bottle
or don't get a drink, so they have to account for a margin of error there, and they can
accept that.
Get down to this brain down here, which is the mind side of things.
Unfortunately, at the elite level, there's no margin for error there.
There's nothing that they can do, because as soon as they allow a margin of error to
come into their mental plan, let's say that it's game over, you can imagine 150 kays into
a race climbing up a 10% grade and then coming down the other side at 80 to 5 km an hour.
A few heads not in it, one wrong move, and let's say you're roadkill across the road,
so there's no margin for error.
If you take it one step further, even in the peloton, you could have 100 riders all smoking
along at 60 km an hour, you're touching shoulders sometimes.
Take your finger off the pulse, clip a rider with the pedal, shoulder, handle bar, anything,
and that's it.
You could be taking out half the peloton, so there's zero margin for error on this side
of that equation.
This stuff's easy to understand.
It's this stuff that seems elusive to good athletes, but great athletes do everything
and anything to try to get into that space.
So if we really look at what's going on under the helmet for these athletes, and I call
them the zones of functioning that athletes need to be actually be focusing on in order
to get to that next level, if we start here, this sort of the body association, they have
to be in tune with their bodies every second of that race as soon as they start off the
gun.
They understand what their heart rate is, what their breathing is, what their muscles
are doing, all those sorts of things.
On the flip side, what they're feeling, athletes need to be some of the best emotional people
and understanding their emotions than most people, because from a performance perspective,
as soon as emotions get out of hand, that's it, that can ruin your performance as well.
I'll talk a little bit more about that.
Behavioral things.
So what's going on?
What speed is actually happening?
Are they 50 kilometers an hour when they should be at 48?
Are they going up a hill too fast?
These sorts of performance things, they have to be monitoring.
They have to understand what that is, because what their brain's doing constantly, and everyone's
brain does this, as it evaluates, it perceives, and it acts.
They're constantly evaluating, thinking, interpreting all of these signals, and they
all sort of work together in this system inside the athlete's head to determine what action
or inaction they're actually going to do.
So you can imagine at the start of a stage, like this morning, when they're ready to get
out of Whittlesley, most athletes, their emotions, a bit of nervous energy, a bit of excitement,
a bit of tension, but it's in check.
The athletes that don't have it in check usually start off too fast, or they do something
silly.
I'm feeling good, all right, I won't take a drink when I'm supposed to have a drink.
They won't do that sort of thing.
They're monitoring the body, have I warmed up enough?
Did I do enough this morning?
What speed are we starting at?
Is the peloton going to be nuts this morning and go out of the gun?
If so, what are we going to do about that in order to compensate for that?
Meanwhile, how am I thinking?
What sort of thoughts am I having?
Am I thinking I'm feeling strong today?
Am I thinking my legs are going to make it over those category climbs today?
Those sorts of thoughts.
You need to have this in check because you can imagine, they're too excited, their heart
rate's too high, they're starting to produce too much stress chemicals, their thinking's
too negative, they're going to be distracted, and then something's going to go wrong in
their body, and then their performance is going to decline.
This whole cycle is going on second by second as they're going, so you can think about not
only do they have to ride, what was it today, 170 odd kilometers up a few hills along the
way and down the other side, but they have to be doing this all the time in order to
make sure that their performance is on.
So in five hours, just think of the mental strain of doing this every day through that
whole ride compared to the physical.
So if they're not actually paying attention to this in their planning and their training,
it's going to be very, very hard to turn up on the day and get through that sort of rise.
To get through the times when, it's the third category two or three climb during the day
and they're tired, say their emotions are in the toilet, their legs are killing them,
their thoughts saying, I can't get up here, I'm not pedaling fast enough, so then they
slow down.
This is their job.
They can't afford to do that.
It's not like us at the end of the day where we get to go home and go into bed, we still
get paid.
These guys, if they don't perform, they don't get paid, so they can't afford to do that
sort of thing.
So these athletes at this level are really on that knife edge, and this becomes more
important particularly toward the end.
If you think those last two kilometers of a race, if you're not a sprinter, then okay,
you don't have to worry about it, but you just got to get to the end.
The sprinters in particular, because they've also had to ride the whole way, but now it's
their job to sprint to the end.
So their whole race plan is to get them to that last 100, 250 meters where they need
to sprint.
Being up to that, if they haven't done this, the extra pressure that they have to put on
themselves to get through that is next to impossible.
Their thoughts have to be right.
Their body has to be perfect.
Their emotions either better be very positive or at least neutral.
If they're feeling negative and not very confident towards that sprint finish, then they're
not going to do their job.
So how do they manage with all of this?
There's lots of tools out there.
I've got some screenshots here.
This is from stage six of the Tour de France this year, Christian Vandevelde, if anyone's
heard of him, a fairly good cyclist.
This is from the Garmin Cervelo upload site on the web.
So from a heart rate and cycling computer stuff, they get all this information.
We've got average bike cadence, so how fast their speeds and average speeds.
Here this was a 230K stage.
He averaged 43 kilometers per hour.
Meanwhile, the elevation changes, I don't have them there, but you can get the elevation
changes.
On today's stage, here's where they started down at Whittlesey.
Imagine going from there all the way up to there.
It's like an uphill climb all the way.
Three quarters of the day was almost riding uphill.
These cyclists use all this information and the really great athletes use this information.
They know what their heart rate should be here, here, here, here, here, here, all the
way along there.
They know what speed they should be going.
They know typically what stages of the race they're going to feel like absolute rubbish
because they know because they train it.
And if they don't train it, then they can't plan for it.
I always tell my athletes, if you want to be great, you can't plan for the worst, hope
for the best.
You plan for the worst to be the best because you've got to understand when you're going
to be at your worst to understand how you can be at your best because they can't afford
to be bad, they just can't afford it.
So they break it down, use all of this sort of information to really get an understanding.
This is even, they even talk about power, the amount of wattage that the cyclist is
putting out.
And they know every bit of the race, how much they should be putting into it.
On the flip side, they have strategies in place on how to deal with heels, how to deal
with descents.
If they're coming down a hill at 80 kilometers an hour, and all of a sudden if they stop
and think, oh, I'm feeling a bit nervous here, again, that's it.
So if they know they get nervous on descents, they need to have a mental strategy to deal
with that.
They need to put something into place to ensure that that nervousness doesn't get in the way
of the actual performance.
Because the goal is about getting to the end and getting into the end in the best possible
way that they can.
So this again, more of these really practical, easy things, the mechanics and the physical
side of things.
From the mental side of things, again, it always comes back to paperwork and paperwork,
which is why good athletes don't necessarily like it too much, but the great athletes,
they're pedantic about the paperwork, their training journals, their food diaries, their
mental state diaries, all these sorts of things.
So whenever I've had an athlete, I typically will get them to complete this, which is the
athlete's mental edge inventory.
There's lots of them out there, but it covers things like their awareness and awareness
to things around them, as well as awareness to things inside them.
How good are they at strategizing and using strategies?
Athletes have to be really good strategizers.
What's their focus like?
Confidence, competitive, will, discipline, and actually get an understanding, and then
the athlete can say, well, these guys, if their will is down here at 30%, boy, they're
in trouble.
Some athletes come to me, and that's where they're at in their phase of their career.
Unfortunately, that's when they come, when they should have come much sooner, when it
was around 60.
But then because it's typically, athletes are never individuals.
We always talk about athletes as being these reclusive type people.
They're always in teams.
You've got your coach, your nutritionist, your physio, your massage, your psychologist
if you're lucky enough to have one.
So you need to understand how they interact in a team as well.
So it's not just the internal stuff, it's the external stuff.
So being an athlete is not just about getting on the bike and pedaling.
It's about doing a lot of different things in order to go from good to great, and to
be able to manage those times when they're at their worst.
And there's no margin fairer, again, on the mental side of things.
So they need to put this into practice, and they need to do it on a day in and day out
basis.
Most of them, by the time they get to race day, their whole race plan, they don't even
think about it.
They know kilometer by kilometer what's going to happen, and what they're going to do from
the physical to the mental.
That's what makes them great, and that's how they perform at the top level on a regular
basis because they have all these three things in place along the way, the mental, the physical
and the mechanics.
And that's what an elite athlete does across all sports.
There's not a significant difference.
You take cycling away, go into any elite sport, whether it's marathon running, triathlon,
AFL football, dancing, diving, anything like that, they all do this.
And the great ones do it very, very well.
