In episode 58, we talked with Colby Pearce about what it takes to make an attempt at the hour record on the track. Not long after, Pearce set the master’s 45-49 world record with a scorching 50.245 kilometer effort. For this special episode, we caught up with him to discuss his successful attempt, the training he did, the difficulties of selecting gears and training on a track that was different from the one where he set the record, and how he managed the pain.
Primary Guests
Colby Pearce: Hour record specialist, elite coach, and bike fitter
Episode Transcript
00:00
Welcome to Fast Talk the velonews podcast and everything you need to know to write a press.
Chris Case 00:12
Hello, and welcome to Fast Talk. I’m your host Chris case managing editor of velonews. Few weeks ago on episode 56, my co host Coach Trevor Connor and I talked with Colby Pierce about what it takes to make an attempt at the our record. We recorded that episode a few months prior to releasing it, and we posted it just a few days after Colby set the Masters 45 to 49 world record this scorching 50.245 kilometers 833 meters farther than the previous record. Trevor recently caught up with Colby to talk about his successful attempt for this special episode of fast doc Colby talked about the record itself, what was involved in training for it the difficulties of selecting gears and training on a track that was different from the one where he set the record and how he managed that god awful pain. And Colby wasn’t just there as an athlete. Several of the riders he coaches were there as well. And most of them said world or national records. We hope you enjoy this follow up to our episode on the our record. And if you take one thing away from it, we hope it’s that Colby wasn’t just talking a good game in the previous episode, he definitely put his money where his mouth is. So are you ready to learn what it takes to set a world record? Let’s make you fast.
Trevor Connor 01:38
So let’s start with my first question. You said the men’s 40 was 40 to 45 or 45 to 49.
01:48
Yeah, 45 to 49.
Trevor Connor 01:50
So you set that record and it sounds like you pretty much crushed that record. So what was the previous record? How long has it stood? And what did you do?
Colby Pearce 02:00
Yeah, the previous record was held by Ken Bostic, it sent it in Manchester, England, which is, of course at sea level, and that was in 99. And he wrote 49.3 kilometers for his hour. And I rode 50.24 or five K. So as I believe is 833 meters further,
Trevor Connor 02:18
in people who are unfamiliar with the our record, can you give a sense of how big 800 meters is?
Colby Pearce 02:25
Well, so each lap on the velodrome is 250 meters. So that means I would have lapped them three times over the hour. So that kind of gives you a sense of, of how much farther I went sorry, used further earlier had to look this up. And using these two terms. So frequently lately, farther is definitely the one you want to use for distance. But that’s to put it in further context, if you’re doing about a minute. And 12. Second pace is, that’s your pace for one kilometer at 50. k an hour. So if since I wasn’t quite, I was 833 meters ahead again, that means I would have been roughly a little bit less than a minute ahead of him. So if we had done an hour long time trial, I would have been around about a minute ahead of him, which is a significant gap but really isn’t like he watched us riding side by side, you really don’t see much of a speed difference, but it just slowly creeps out over time.
Trevor Connor 03:17
So what I hear about people having successful our record attempts, sometimes you’re just talking 1020 meters, so this was big.
Colby Pearce 03:26
Yeah, yeah, it can come down to really close our two at the end. You know, like when Chris Boardman set his record in the marks position, he just barely beat Eddie and he, he knew he was close, and you just kind of hung on and then sprint the last few laps and was able to eke out a gap. And then a more recent example that is Victoria Bucy, when she set the world record and beat Evelyn Stevens time, she was just barely hanging on, I guess, for that ride, it was pretty impressive. It was a little bit over a little bit under a little bit over a little bit under and at the end, she just dug herself into a hole and went nuclear and managed to get just a tiny gap. I think her final distance and permit was 40 something meters 48 meters or 42 meters, something like that. Not much at all. So
Trevor Connor 04:06
So you did 50.245 Can you give us a sense of how that stacks up just in general.
Colby Pearce 04:14
So a buddy of mine guy named Mike malad has a quite an extensive list of our records that include pretty much every record in distance ever written, pretty much ever. And the only exclusions from that are like hpvs are vehicles where people are writing recumbent positions and things like that that’s a different category. But he includes all the records meaning, you know, gram Superman position and grabs egg position and the modern positions and Portman Superman and all those and I’m somewhere around for a long time I was around the top 20 of all time world farthest distances. There’s been such a rash of records attempts recently, that even though I went farther than I did when I was 23 years old, and in 1995 I’m now just barely in the top 30. So I think I’m ready On 27th or eighth or something like that in terms of total total distance written in an hour,
Trevor Connor 05:05
but that is still top 30 in the world of any record attempt, you have a very, very respectable distance for, for anybody.
Colby Pearce 05:13
Yeah, I mean, to be feel grateful that I popped in there and I’m able to be on the same first pages. Guys like ns Boyd and Chris Boardman and, and, and people like that I mean even you know Tom’s durable, he holds our US record and his distances quite far. He’s actually eighth on that list. So that’s pretty cool. I mean, I’m in some top companies, so I feel honored to be on that list. Yeah, for sure. What was Tom’s herbal distance? Tom also wrote an Aguascalientes and he wrote just over 53 hours 53.037 which is an incredible ride. I mean, Tom is just a machine that guy’s a beast. So I gotta correct myself here. I just pulled I actually pulled up the list. I couldn’t find it a minute ago. And I’m actually just outside the top 30 on 32nd, just behind Francesco Mosier, which is pretty cool and Graeme Obree and ahead of lever Tongan who’s in New Zealand rider, a kiwi who wrote a 50.2 to six way back in 1997, on a sea level track. So that’s an incredible achievement.
Trevor Connor 06:11
So let’s get back to your our record, tell us a little bit about the experience, how you approached it, how you handled the pain and what you feel led to such a successful attempt? Well, I
Colby Pearce 06:21
live in Boulder, and we’ve got the boulder Valley velodrome it’s about a 40 minute ride from my house. So I train there as often as I could, I definitely did weekly sessions there and end up doing quite a bit of 10 k efforts. That kind of was my bread and butter. So I was doing four by 10, K and five by 10. k. So I’m doing 50 k riding on that track, I figured that’s going to be duplicating my workload, and I’d pretty much would try to do them at race pace. The challenge there is that our track is it’s a little bit, it’s about three and a half years old now. And at this point in the season, just late summer is getting a bit bumpy. So it wasn’t super fast, not as fast as it has been. It’s got some little bit of Colorado weather hitting it. And also usually it’s windy. So I’m not actually looking at my speed and saying, well, I need to be on pace for what I what the distance is that I want to do in the final hour, it’s more about just making the power and doing the work. So that was a bread and butter workout. And that helped prepare me physically for the demands of the hour, which, you know, we talked about that the other podcast, like Chris was saying in his hour, he felt like his head weighed 55 pounds by the end of it from all the G’s in the corner, you your body really has to deal with that stress and that load of just repeated laps. So I did 201 laps during the ride. So that’s really 400 corners, where you’re probably experiencing definitely more than one g in the corners. I don’t know exactly how much probably depends a bit on the track and the speed and some other stuff in the way of the rider but that that load in and of itself is a different load that you don’t really get when you just do a 10 k interval on a TT bike, for example, on a flat road. So I was really trying to look at the demands of the event from that perspective and say I need to be sport specific or event specific. So did a lot of preparation there. And that helped me in some respects, for sure deal with that load. One of the things that worked against me was that when I got there, we actually did a bit of quite a bit Aero testing in the last couple days to refine a few things, we looked at a few details like socks and did a little bit of work with some tires, different tire size and different wheel and tire options by all the same wheels, but with different tires, and a few other bits and pieces. And I didn’t expect to find this but my lowest position I can possibly achieve ended up being my fastest. And that position was a little bit lower than what I was training on Apple or belly velodrome so it was like, okay, while I’m riding the lowest position, my challenge that I experienced after about 40 minutes was I started to get some pretty significant hamstring and lower back pain. And that probably was because I lowered my position I didn’t lower dramatically in the last few days before the event, but it was definitely lower than I had been training on.
Trevor Connor 08:54
Right. And in this specialized an event. Any even minor gi you’re gonna feel
Colby Pearce 09:00
definitely. So the other interesting part was I didn’t sense I was always training on an outdoor track. And I was doing that kind of speed conversion. I was looking at my speed for my efforts and going okay, how much speed how much faster is I was Kelly and he’s going to be and going into the event. I wasn’t super optimistic, to be honest, because most of the efforts that I had done Apple availability almost getting around 47 and a half to 50 or two, excuse me to 48 and a half k an hour. So I knew my goal was 49 three, so we’re talking to K an hour faster at aguas to make the record and I’m going okay, there’s a way and there’s some bumps here but man two k is a lot. I don’t know and it’s not like I was turning on box, clincher rims and jersey like I’m turning into skinsuit I’m turning with my arrow helmet I do have a disc on. So there wasn’t massive gains to be made from my training setup to my race setup. And then I got there got to agosto did some Aero testing and then the day before I did a 10 k test and looked at my average speed and look at Hurry and I knew at that moment I knew I was going to be okay I did a 10 k test and I barely basically got to temple heart rate and I was at or above pace. So I went okay I’m in the green all I have to do is just execute this ride and not fall apart in the last 20 minutes and I should be okay. So that was a huge relief
Trevor Connor 10:17
was a difficult picking your gear ratio because obviously the what you were using in Boulder wasn’t what you used in in the attempt, it had to be difficult to select the gearing
Colby Pearce 10:26
so I had my previous our records to to use as some basis for my gear selection and also my training. But yeah, the gearing and boulder frequently since I was battling wind, I would gear down a little bit. Initially I was gearing down like in July and August so that I could handle it and later I was intentionally writing a heavier gear because I’m a writer who’s challenged to make good force and I figured if I was a little over gear, that would be good train it would add to the training load. So it’s kind of slogging through the headwind stretches and then you know, use it trying to wind up the year in the tail wind. But when I did my our record in 95, in Colorado Springs, I had written a 5514. And that was very close to 100 RPM average. When I went that distance, which was very close to the distance I’d have going in Aguascalientes It was 50.191 K. And so I had that as a baseline. The big variable being that Colorado Springs is a 333 meter track. And aguas is a 250. And so your variability in speed and cadence between the straights and the corners in August is much higher than it is in the springs, like dramatically higher. So really, if you’re averaging 100 rpm and aguas, you’re hitting maybe 100 and 506 in the corners, and you know, 9495 in the, in the straights, there’s potentially almost a 10 RPM swing, depending on the lab, it’s it’s probably more like 68 RPM, but it’s not insignificant. And when you do that, when your cadence varies like that, then of course your power varies. And when your power varies, you’re basically that means you’re introducing accelerations. And anytime you’re introducing accelerations for most riders, it works to gear down a touch. So you can ride a bigger gear if your power is going to be extremely steady. But as you accelerate, so now I’m looking at, you know, I was 400 accelerations, and my tactic was to push coming through the turns and into entering into the street and then relax on the street and then pushing the turns. So when I did my 10 k test, I intentionally wrote a slightly smaller gear just to see how it feel. And I finished that 10 k test. And I looked at the data and said, I’m going to stick with that exact gear. So I end up going smaller, I wrote a 5815. In aguas, which I believe is a 104. I remember correctly and a 5514 is a 106 if my math is right after looking at your chart, but so that’s why I’m going with and it I believe it was the right gear for me on that day. And I did average 103 RPM for that ride.
Trevor Connor 12:50
What I love about all this is just the amount of detail that a lot of people unless they’ve done this attempt or have experienced with it would even think about but it’s so important because you really get used to a particular cadence. You also talked about the different sizes of the track and have an effect on you. And ultimately, you have to go into this and say, I have to select the gear and I’m stuck with that gear. And that could be the difference between setting the record and having a really bad day. Yep,
Colby Pearce 13:19
yep. You’re stuck with it. Once you make it. That’s it.
Trevor Connor 13:22
So moving on, when you were doing the actual attempt, we interviewed you before you talked about in some of your past attempts, you’ve had really good attempts that you You said you had a good music track playing in your head. And it wasn’t that painful experience. You talked about somewhere you went to a pretty dark place. Was there dark moments of this one or sets? You said that you you essentially lapped the previous record holder three times you had to have been aware very early on that you were on pace for the record that hell
Colby Pearce 13:54
yeah, yeah, that helps tremendously. I mean, and we we did speak about this with Chris and I pointed out to him that he set himself up for a hard ride because he really didn’t have a bar that was close to his goal that he knew he had to kind of jump over. When you have a line in the sand that you know that there’s going to be a big positive consequence. If you cross that line, then it gives you that guiding light or that motivation to throttle yourself. And Chris didn’t have that. So it was challenging for him. But I definitely had that. So you know, Robin helling, who’s the husband of a writer that I coach Molly, they’ve been going to Mexico for a few years. And he’s got this cool timing system. He’s one of the people organize this trip. And he’s got a timing system with a with a timing tape, and an iPad setup. And so I literally saw every single lab split for the entire hour to the 10th of a second. And I knew what my schedule had to be to beat cancer record to the 10th of a second. And so I was getting constant feedback every 17 seconds. I knew whether I was offered down. And then additionally, the guys had a big whiteboard and about every 10 minutes they would write on the whiteboard of what my cumulative average speed was to that point. So I knew exactly the distance that I was on target for. And I knew that I was ahead and that is just you can you can tolerate an insane amount of pain, well, you know, you’re already ahead of the record. And that’s a good thing, because I will definitely say that I put up with a very, very intense level of discomfort during this record, about 40 minutes, and it got it got really dark for me, I was in a lot of pain. my hamstrings and back were were pretty lit off from the effort. And it got to the point where at the during the ride, I actually thought those were my rate limiting factor. I was like, Man, I’m really in the hole here. This is not good. I could go, I could be going faster if I was capable of if my hamstrings weren’t hurting so badly. After the ride, I realized that that’s what was talking to me the most. But it really wasn’t the case because I went to walk down the stairs and my both my quads were just annihilated. I was having a big trouble standing up right after the ride. But I also couldn’t sit down afterwards, because my glutes and hamstrings were so torched. So I did do doping control afterwards. And I didn’t sit for three hours I just paced because I just couldn’t sit on my butt. My muscles were too smoked.
Trevor Connor 16:08
So how did you get yourself through that pain? Well,
Colby Pearce 16:12
I’ll say that, you know, having been in the sport for 30 years, and done racing of all different varieties, you get a really good feel for what you’re good at and what you’re not. And the sport is just so incredibly humbling. I mean, I’ve gotten my ass kicked in so many different levels so many different times. I know what I’m not good at, quite clearly. But the probably the our records probably the single tiniest sliver of what I’m naturally best at for some reason, I’m really good at just setting the throttle at a certain level and just holding it there in spite of what’s happening. And I don’t know why I have that kind of capacity. But that’s what I did. And for me, even though it was a tremendous amount of pain and discomfort, there’s, for some reason, I can just hold the throttle there when there’s when I am determined to. And you just you just keep going. And for me Even though 20 minutes is, excuse me, so I’m getting a cold sound like I got a frog in my throat. For me, even though 20 minutes is a long period of time, especially when you’re in it, the clock can almost stop. It’s really also only 20 minutes. And I know that when it was over, I would be a world record holder, all I had to do was hold that throttle open. So when you boil it down to that very simple binary choice, are you going to keep going at the speed or are you going to let the gas off, it becomes very simple. And my choice was I’m just going to keep going. It’s only pain and discomfort. And I feel like after 30 years in this sport, I’ve developed a relatively high pain tolerance for when I decide to walk through the door and deal with the pain. That’s how I handled it.
Trevor Connor 17:41
That’s one of kind of the underlying messages we’ve had with this, we’ve talked about all the details that go into the our record all the preparation that goes into it. But ultimately, anybody who’s going to be successful at it, there is a point where the pain gets pretty unbearable. And it’s simply comes down to your ability to when your body is screaming at you to stop to say no, I’m going to keep going.
Colby Pearce 18:05
Yeah, it’s just a choice you make. I mean, you know, the pain is coming, it’s just a choice, you just say I’m just going to, I’m going to list I’m going to ignore all these distractions from the one who one thing I have to do, which is just go as fast as possible. Yeah. And that effort requires a very deep emotional reserve of commitment to the event. And it’s something that takes its toll on you, I think you can’t always rely on that or do that it has to be the right place in the right moment. And after months of training for the event and having in the back of your head, you’re prepared to make that step and walk to that door. It’s not something I could do. You know, at this point, certainly tomorrow, I couldn’t go you know, write up a local climb and reach that level of commitment to it. Because there wouldn’t be as much on the line. So it’s about the context of the relationship, what you have in the line, your relationship to the event and what you’ve built up to it to put into it. So that’s a big part of it, too.
Trevor Connor 18:58
So it sounds like position was a big factor like that that small change in your position really had an effect on your back your hamstrings Was there anything else about your position that affected you in the in the attempt?
Colby Pearce 19:11
So one interesting thing that we’ve kind of been looking at a lot recently and challenge that I’ve had as a writer is head position. You know, some athletes are really good at burying their head and, and others maybe not so much. I’ve been on the not so much category, I’m certainly not a head up kind of guy. But so having Rob’s feed his timing system during the hour, it’s it’s accurate to the 10th of a second so you see instant feedback on every lap. So if you make a little waiver in your line, for example, you don’t write the black line in the corner, you’ll see it immediately in the splits. And one thing I started playing with during the hour was my head position in the corners. And so since I was accelerating in the corners and applying more power there, and also because you naturally accelerate corners anyway, the faster you go, the more important aerodynamics are and I started playing with rubbing my head in the corners and instantly saw it proven to my splits. And that, of course, is a powerful motivator to when you’re out there going as hard as you can. As soon as I saw that, I started doing it more and more. And when you drop your head, I mean, I’m talking like, My nose is touching my forearms dropping, so I cannot see where I’m going. Just to be clear, I don’t advise people do this, unless you’re on a close track. And even then there’s some risk, because when you drop your head, of course, your vestibular system gets challenged, your balance system gets challenged already going through a corner and increased Geez, you know, you have to sense where you are in the velodrome. Now I can look down and see kind of like a swimmer does in the pool, I can see the black line, but it becomes quite hard to control the bike going through the corner turning at an angle at speed, while you’re Of course going fast. And so even though my line would sometimes be worse through the corners, if I kept my head dropped, my split would usually be faster, I could see a 10th or two tenths faster immediately. And so as soon as I saw that, I started doing it as many laps as I could, which requires an immense amount of concentration. I mean, you’re already focused the whole time. It was really interesting to see that achievement, which goes back to I think one of the comments I made in our old, older our previous podcast, which is that being arrow at speed on a bike is an act of contortion. It’s, it’s, you have to put yourself in an arrow box, and then go as hard as you can make no mistake about it. So
Trevor Connor 21:19
it will also say these sorts of tactics are for experienced track riders only.
Colby Pearce 21:25
Agreed 100%. Yeah. And you know, it’s even a challenge trying to train in that position. Because if other people are on the track, you can’t be riding a lap around with your head barrier between your elbows. I mean, it’s just way too dangerous.
Trevor Connor 21:36
So well. We’ve talked with Colby, the the athlete and the world record holder. Now let’s kind of finish up with five minutes talking to Kobe, the coach, because you had several of your athletes there with you. And I’m looking at the whole list here. And you’re not the only one on the list who actually set a world record. So can you talk a little bit about some of the athletes you had there and some of their accomplishments?
Colby Pearce 21:59
Yeah, it was. It’s super cool to be there and experience it with athletes. I worked with a couple people on the ground there that I just sort of helped on the day. But um, I had Molly going, Helen, who was there, and she had just aged up to the 45 to 49. So she the previous record was for her pretty low hanging fruit. I
Trevor Connor 22:20
believe it was 42 was 41.2390. Wow.
Colby Pearce 22:24
Yeah. Okay. So yeah, she’s read number 47. Before so we knew she was going to get that. But she also wanted to try just to two attempts. While we were there, she wanted to see if she get close to Evelyn’s record pace, which was almost 48 K. And the first night she set out to do that. And she was on pace for that for about 20 minutes or so. And then she started falling behind. And then we saw a couple mushroom clouds, which were her right and left legs. And she she kind of hit the wall. And so we we pulled her off the track and agree that she should not drill herself into oblivion with that. She kind of sometimes you have to go to the edge of the cliff. And when you do that, sometimes you fall off, right? Yep. So she gave it a good crack. And then the next night she came back and wanted to just try to set a PR and she was very close to doing that. She finished just a few meters behind her her best ride. So it was a very, very high 46. And so that established the 45 record.
Trevor Connor 23:19
That’s the women’s 45 to 49.
Colby Pearce 23:23
Correct, yeah. And Molly is just an amazing athlete. She She, she’s a mutant. One interesting thing about Mali that people might find to be a bit a bit of a fascinating fact is that she uses preposterously big gears. She’s averaging around the mid 70s for her kids for our records. And I’ve never seen an athlete like her, it seems we’ve done a lot of testing with her. Her husband, Rob is he does a lot of Aero testing and a lot of he’s got a lot of spreadsheets going on. And he’s a really smart guy. And we’ve done a lot of work together, looking at her, her times and her power and her cadence and seemingly there’s almost no bottom with her. We keep putting bigger ears on and she just goes faster. So there’s a long time where the rate limiting factor was how big of a gear can we fit on her bike? Like literally will the chain ring fit on there without hitting a change day. So she did set that record. Unfortunately, she went so deep in her second attempt that night that after she crossed the line, she got a little cross eyed and she ended up falling off a bike in turn one. I think it was the change of you know you do almost 200 laps in the poll at a certain rhythm. And then she swung off track as you usually do after you cross the line and then the banking just she got a little disoriented she had gone so deep in the last five minutes of that record. She crashed fortunately it wasn’t too bad but she did she brew some ribs pretty heavily and Bangor hip up pretty bad. So you know an outstanding effort. It just shows how deep you can go in an effort like that. You just really go to the to the depths, and Molly’s got a huge capacity to push herself. She’s worlds champion in the Masters world champion in our age group in the time trial this year as well, which were in Italy. So quite an accomplished writer. And then another writer that I work with Alan vukan. Sick, who is out of the San Jose area, he set the kilo record for the men’s 45 to 49, which was really cool to see him do that I actually gave that record a crack myself last year and missed it by a few thousands. And Ellen went and got it by, I think he got it by seven or eight tents, if I remember correctly, I’m not looking at the list right now. But
Trevor Connor 25:31
so I’m looking at right now. And he was 106 point 262 in the old record was 106, point nine, six.
Colby Pearce 25:40
Yep, run some intense. So that was pretty cool. And Alan’s just a mountain of a man, he’s he’s a giant, powerful rider, pretty much the direct opposite of me. So he worked for that all season. And that was really cool to be there with him and have him set that record. So it was pretty, pretty neat. And then I helped lineata a bit with her lineata Anthony with her two K, and she bettered her own two k Mark from the previous year, by a bit as well. So that was pretty neat to see. And then a few other rock retter a few other writers that that I work with, you know, and give some advice to and help them out while we’re there. It’s a tight knit group, and everybody’s there kind of as the Americans going to set the record. So we all work together a bit helped Peter metall a bit with him. He did a few rides, this was really he’s quite new to the track. So he did his first 4k ever, he was working on establishing some para records that had not been established. And then he was also hoping just to see how he stacked up against the Masters records in his own age category. And that was a big, he was on a big learning curve that weekend and experienced some difficulty during his first hour for sure, but on top and came back and improved his own distance the next night. And that is pretty remarkable to go back and do that. You know, for people who, who go down there, you know, we have the track rented for four or five days. So you can conceivably do records on attempts on multiple nights. And that’s why sometimes people do an hour and they say, Oh, I need to refine this or improve that. And they’ll stop it. And then they’ll come back the next night. Or maybe wait 24 hours and come back again. And I know that for me, I could barely pedal a bike The next day, I was absolutely throttled. So I couldn’t imagine trying to do like a three k attempt or something like that, there’s just no way I would have been able to dig deep. That’s just where I was at. So when other riders come and do multiple attempts, on multiple days, I’ve got nothing but respect for him, because you’re going for a world record, you’re gonna take yourself in a pretty deep hole. So it’s, it’s pretty cool to see.
Trevor Connor 27:29
And he went 800 meters further on the second night.
Colby Pearce 27:34
So obviously, he’s not gaining fitness at 24 hours, that was him just figuring out how to pace himself a little better. Probably figuring out how to ride the lines a little better in the corners, you know, maybe we’re finding some things like head position. So that’s pretty cool.
Trevor Connor 27:47
Been a special episode, we’re gonna keep this one a little bit shorter. But we always like to finish with some some take homes for our listeners. So having gone through this experience working with all these athletes and seeing their success, if there’s one bit of advice or suggestion or take home you can give our listeners what would it be?
Colby Pearce 28:08
I would say you’re tougher than you think you are meaning the people it’s easy for people to perhaps listen to a podcast like this and and say, Wow, you know, think about their own goals and think about how they might want to go to Aguascalientes someday and try it and go to a super fast track and see what they can do. Or maybe it’s simpler than that. Maybe it’s that they want to set their own, you know, a best time and a local 10 mile time trial or, or up a local Hill Climb or something like that. And, you know, it’s kind of the same principle as people who are learning how to sprint, you go to a criterium. And if you’re not a sprinter, what happens you you mix it up in the in the final five minutes of the race, and as soon as someone bumps an elbow with you, you tap out you say, Oh, I you know, I can’t do that that sprint was too crazy. People were doing nuts, nutty things, they were diving into holes and flying into corners, and I just can’t take that kind of risk, you know, I don’t, and then they walk away from the race sometimes feeling bad about themselves going, Well, you know, I just don’t have what it takes to be a sprinter. I don’t have the balls or the ovaries, however you want to phrase it, I don’t have the guts to put myself on the line, you know, to worry about crashing? Well, you have to understand there’s a relationship between the reward that you proceed, you can win and your own ability to put yourself out there to throw down. And that that the throwdown can come in the form of diving into a corner at a speed that you think is, is unsafe, or also digging that much deeper to get that last half a percent or 1%, or whatever it is. It’s really the same thing for the purposes of how you’re going to put yourself out there. And so if you’re 129 pound rider in a criterium, full of a bunch of sprinters and there’s $10,000 on the line. Yeah, there’s a chance that you’re not going to find yourself having enough balls to throw down and do a real effort at the end. On the other hand, if you’ve got let’s say the criterium is the last stage of a five day stage race and you’ve written well all week, and there’s a 10 second time bonus, and you can move from fifth to the podium, or have a chance to win. Suddenly, your balls get bigger. Sorry to use a bad analogy. But all of a sudden, if you believe that you think you can do it, and there’s a lot on the line, and you’re riding really well, you’re spreading better than you’ve ever had in your life, then all of a sudden, you’ve got this ability to dig deep, and fly through the corner and also throw down and sprint against someone who you would never consider sprinting against in a different paradigm. It’s the same thing when you put yourself down on record. If you train all year and decide I’m going to really throw down for this hillclimb and you invest your emotional energy, you invest your time, you really visualize that happening. Every time you do your interval workouts, your interval workouts are specifically designed for that task, your endurance rides, you’re thinking about it every day, it gets you out of bed, on race day, you’re going to have that ability to dig deeper than you ever have before. So it’s about emotional investment. It’s about forward intent, it’s about positive thought. So that’s something I would say might be a good takeaway for for people who are sort of wondering how I or any of these writers can dig this deep. During this event. It’s it’s about your total emotional and physical investment in that moment. Even if you don’t necessarily succeed, it’s you walk away from it saying, I went to the end, I went to the bottom or the top, I guess I would say,
Trevor Connor 31:18
it’s great advice. And I think if you could summarize that down to one sentence, it’s find a motivator, find a powerful motivator because it’s amazing what you can do when you have that high level of motivation. Alright, well Colby, thank you really appreciate the interview. Hopefully we will get you back on the show again soon. our listeners have absolutely loved you.
Chris Case 31:41
That was another episode of Fast Talk. As always, we love your feedback. Email us at Fast Talk at velonews. com. Subscribe to fast dock on iTunes, Stitcher, SoundCloud and Google Play. Be sure to leave us a rating and a comment. Become a fan of Fast Talk on facebook@facebook.com slash velonews and on twitter@twitter.com slash velonews. Fast dock is a joint production between velonews and Connor coaching the thoughts and opinions expressed on fast doc are those of the individual for Trevor Connor Colby piers. I’m Chris case. Thanks for listening.
