About Syd Schulz

Pro mountain biker.

Average human.

I write about bikes and life and trying to get better at both.

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I deleted Facebook… here’s what didn’t happen…

Posted on February 13, 2019 by Syd Schulz

I deactivated my facebook account and the sky didn’t crash down around me.

Duh.

But wait, let’s back up and start this story at the beginning.

A few months ago I sat through a webinar about social media put on by one of my sponsors. I won’t mention what brand, because it doesn’t really matter, and if it’s a surprise to you that brands are using social media to market in increasingly insidious ways — well, did you sleep through 2018?

Most of the advice in this webinar sounded familiar. Post consistently. Interact with fans. Show your personality (but heaven forbid don’t be weird about it). Blah blah blah. Don’t buy followers or use sketchy services to grow your following, but by the way, we will be watching your monthly follower growth, so do make sure it’s growing.

The bottom line is that this company will be using an algorithm that calculates following, engagement, how many times you tag the brand, etc. to generate a number that tells them what an athlete is worth. It’s by no means a bad way of doing it, and if I were a marketing manager right now I would probably do something similar. I mean, honestly, I cannot IMAGINE having to wade through the sponsorship applications that this company gets. Helloooo nightmare. And in the interest of full disclosure, I will probably benefit from this system: my Instagram is usually pretty engaged and Macky and my Youtube channel has huge engagement and is growing organically.

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Thank you for all the kind, thoughtful, and heartfelt comments on my last post. It means a lot, and I hear you loud and clear — social media is (like most things) only as good as it is true 🙏🙏 Lots of good things on the horizon for 2019, and I will try to share them in the truest way I can. It won't be every day. It won't be polished. But it will be true, because if not, what the hell is the point?

A post shared by Syd Schulz (@sydgschulz) on Jan 4, 2019 at 5:33pm PST

But still, the timing was bad. It was hard to sit through this webinar only hours after Facebook was indicted over Cambridge Analytica, while privacy concerns were hitting a boiling point world-wide, while #deleteFacebook became a thing, hours after reading how Russian bots used Facebook to specifically target low income and minority communities and not have a moment of “ummm holy shit maybe I am way more complicit in this than I ever realized.”

Mind you, I’ve never had any delusions over my role as a sponsored athlete. I know that even though I have wonderful personal relationships with many of my sponsors, even though I really do only represent brands that I believe in and use on a regular basis, even though I really am as candid as possible on the internet, at the end of the day my value is a number in a column next to my name and that column is labeled ROI.

I want to be a good return on investment. I really do. And I don’t mind repping sponsored products on my social media, because, like I said, I make an effort to only work with companies who create products that are worth repping. But I want to be more than a return on investment. I want to be a good person who creates things (I cannot bring myself to call it “content”). And I want to wake up in the morning and do something other than check to see how many likes my latest Instagram post got. I’m really really sick of chasing numbers that are, essentially, meaningless.

My disenchantment with social media started about two years ago — November 2016 to be precise — when I sat on a plane to Arkansas crying my face off about the fate of the world and more specifically about a mean and ignorant post on facebook from a friend of friend’s uncle. And then I had this moment of “What the hell, Syd? You don’t even know this person. Why on earth do you care?” That was the day I deleted the facebook app from my phone. I thought I would reinstall it once the election fervor died down, but maybe it never did, or maybe I just realized how little I needed that particular IV drip of bull shit.

Around that time I had Macky install a desktop extension that limited me to ten minutes a day of Facebook on my computer. While I’ve been known to disable that on occasion (usually while up against a deadline and in dire need of procrastination), for the most part that limit has stayed. Ten minutes of Facebook a day was enough. Way, way, way more than enough, it turns out.

Throughout this period I still had a serious Instagram problem, partially because I was able to delude myself into thinking that growing my instagram following was part of my “job.” Interactions like the aforementioned webinar really drill this mindset in. Oh, I just spent three hours liking photos of people I don’t even know (whose photos I don’t even really “like” TBH), following people, unfollowing people to preserve that #ratio, etc. etc.? Well, it’s my job. I never purchased followers — because I guess I drew an imaginary line in the sand right around there — but I did, like pretty much everyone else with over 1000 followers who isn’t a Kardashian, try to game the system. And it worked. In a really, shallow artificial kind of way. And in a way that was detrimental to my overall mental health.

In December of 2017 I tried a social media detox. I took three weeks off social media completely, a project aided by the fact that I was in Thailand for the holidays with Macky’s family and going to the beach every day. (Avoiding Instagram is less hard when you can drink coconut water out of literal coconut and then go snorkeling with brightly colored fish. WHADAYAKNOW.) It was a good experiment for a few reasons, namely in that not much of anything happened. I lost a few followers but not enough to make a difference. My photos still got a reasonable amount of likes (define “reasonable” anyway) once I returned. The earth did not shatter. And when I came back to social media I pretty much stopped all best practices on Instagram. I no longer posted everyday. I no longer “interacted” (code for trying to game the system by liking an absurd amount of posts). My postings were random, unpolished and mainly cellphone photos. Since the beginning of 2018, I have lost about 500 followers, which is, frankly, a small price to pay for my sanity.

Unfortunately the other part of the equation that didn’t change was the gross amount of time I was spending on Instagram, scrolling through my feed, mindlessly exploring hashtags (not with an intention to grow my following, but just to satisfy my perverse curiosity about random topics) and generally just wasting time. After these scroll sessions I would come up for air and and wonder where the time had gone. And so, in early December of 2018, I deleted Instagram off my phone. I would use it every few days on Macky’s phone, to post a photo, answer some comments, have a little scroll, whatever. This was supposed to be a short-term solution, but now it’s February and I still haven’t put Instagram back on my phone.

And then I found myself lying awake one night fantasizing about something really strange: completely deleting my facebook. Why was this so appealing? Honestly, I don’t know. But suddenly, I had to do it.

Naturally, Facebook doesn’t make this easy. The process was further complicated by the fact that I have to keep my FB business page (see above comments about sponsor webinar), so I had to create a shadow account, which was hard because Facebook kept being like “hey sure you don’t want to log in to your old account?” “won’t you miss your friends?” “how will you even cope!?!?!” (Seriously, if you’ve never tried to delete your facebook, go give it a go. It’s eye opening. They literally send you photos of your friends and say “WON”T YOU MISS THIS PERSON?” It’s super creepy and weird and I can’t believe it actually convinces anyone to stay.)

The next step was deactivating my facebook to see how many things were connected via that “log in with facebook” feature. Turns out, lots. My Strava account stopped working. The meditation app I use every morning went on the fritz. Out of sheer laziness (clicking that “log in with facebook” button instead of creating a new account) I had allowed Facebook to creep into many unrelated areas of my life. Finally I fixed all these issues, and deactivated Facebook. I figured I would leave it for a few weeks, and then log back on, download all of my data, and delete Facebook permanently. I probably will do this eventually, but somehow it’s February, and I haven’t gotten around to it, largely because I just have no interest in logging into my Facebook at all. It feels gross. At the moment it’s just another one of those tasks hanging over my head like organizing my email inbox or writing our monthly-ish newsletter. (Don’t get this highly procrastinated newsletter? Sign up here).

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I WANT YOUR INPUT!! I've been taking some time off social media recently to refocus for next year. While Instagram can be great (and thanks for following me BTW 🙋 ), I find this platform difficult, especially at this time of year, and with recent news about how social media can be used to manipulate the way we think/buy/etc. The more time I spend on Instagram, the less I seem to understand what I am trying to do with the this account. Last year around this time I stopped posting daily and trying to actively build this following because, I guess, the whole "game" of Instagram started to feel gross to me. But I think there is good to be found here. And I'm determined to do better. Please leave a comment and let me know what you would like to see on this space and I'll try to make it happen ⬇️⬇️ . Photo from @skipajarito in July. I was so psyched to hit this jump 😁😁

A post shared by Syd Schulz (@sydgschulz) on Jan 2, 2019 at 10:35am PST

I should be clear — my motivations for deleting Facebook are neither political nor motivated by privacy concerns, although both of those are completely legitimate reasons for throwing FB to the curb. But caring about FB’s privacy violations at this point would be a little silly, since I won’t be deleting instagram or WhatsApp and huge swaths of my life are documented on YouTube and this blog. And while I think Facebook created a platform for some really shitty, manipulative political actors, I’m under no illusion that me deleting my account will have any noticeable impact. So, it’s not a boycott.

Then what is the point of all this? I don’t know, exactly, but I do know that over the past two years I have slowly changed my relationship with social media. I am no longer willing to be a passive consumer. I still want to create, and share videos and writing and photos, and I want to be connected to other creative people, but I don’t want to be ruled by the technology. This has been a gradual process, and not the result of a single “detox” or social media diet – – and that process is ongoing. I’m sharing this because I think many other people are in the midst of a similar reckoning — how do we possibly use this technology wisely? And where do we draw the line?

I’d love to hear your thoughts. Would you consider deleting Facebook and/or Instagram? Am I crazy? Or was I crazy to even use social media in the first place?

What does determination look like?

Posted on January 30, 2019 by Syd Schulz

Here’s something I’ve realized over the past year: culturally, we have a really WONK definition of “determination.” This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently, especially with regards to skills progression.

Riding that infamous jump line at Ray’s.

A few weeks ago we headed up to Cleveland for a day at Ray’s Indoor Bike Park. Ray’s is a huge ware house full of jumps, skinnies, a pump track and tons of other fun things to play on on a mountain bike. It’s basically the best, and even though it’s a three hour drive from where my parents live in Ohio it is ALWAYS worth the trip when we are here visiting. But this blog post isn’t really about Ray’s… {{If you’re like WHAT is this magical bicycle wonderland you have described, pllleeease don’t leave me hanging like that let me direct you this video where you can learn all you wanted to know and (probably) then some.}}

No, this blog post isn’t about Ray’s at all. It’s about me. Which, I guess, is an apt description for most of the blog posts I write (why do you guys put up with me?).

But here’s the thing — I can use our annual Ray’s trip as a bit of a barometer for my mental state over the past few years, and well, the story that this tells is pretty damning.

2014 — very enthusiastic, completely clueless, returned from Ray’s with two sprained wrists (yes, I sprained both wrists in the same crash! Good job, Syd!)

2015 — determined to teach myself how to jump in one day, spent four hours lapping the same jump line

2016 — stressed about the fact that I hadn’t ridden jumps for a month (dirt jumps are not plentiful in Ohio), went to Ray’s with the goal of learning how to jump in one day (again), spent four plus hours lapping the same jump line (again)

2017 — didn’t even go because my knee was so messed up, Macky went without me.

And then there was this year.

I didn’t set goals. I just went. We filmed a video for our youtube channel and collaborated with our friend Bobo for a video on his channel. I accomplished some of the things I wanted to do — clearing the transition in the skate park, finally getting the longest skinny after 15 tries — and didn’t accomplish some other things I sort of wanted to do — like doing a 180 turn on the skate park wall. That one I’ll save for another day. And somehow, miraculously, I was totally okay with that. I didn’t obsess on any one feature. I celebrated the things I did accomplish, even when I felt like I *should* have gotten them on the first try. Better 15th try than never, right?

Oh, and I cleared all the jumps on that dumb jump line on my second run through, which I guess tells me two things:

1. I have progressed
2. HOLY SHIT THINGS ARE ACTUALLY EASIER WHEN YOU DON’T STAKE YOUR ENTIRE SENSE OF SELF WORTH ON THEM OMG WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT.

I walked away from several things at Ray’s that 2014-15-16 me probably wouldn’t have been able to leave well enough alone. Why? Well, partially because my priorities have shifted and we were there first and foremost to shoot a video. But that’s not the whole truth. The whole truth is a little more complicated, and it has something to do with my shifting definition of determination. In the past, I might have defined determination as NOT EVER GIVING UP, but I’ve realized recently that determination can take many forms. And unfortunately, sometimes determination and stubborn stupidity are a little hard to tell apart. I learn best when I’m having fun and when I’m open and receptive to trying new things. In other words, I learn when I’m flowing not when I’m frustrated and overthinking every little nit-picky thing I am doing. On previous trips, my determination to get better EVERY SECOND OF EVERY DAY overrode any common sense I might have had and I rarely sat with myself and asked the question: “are you enjoying this right now? Is this working for you?”

So, here is the reassurance you didn’t know you needed: Taking a break to eat a sandwich is not quitting. Leaving something for another day is not quitting. Being kind to yourself is not quitting.

Determination doesn’t always have to look like beating your head against a brick wall. Sometimes it looks like walking away and trying to find a ladder.

Big Changes for 2019

Posted on January 9, 2019 by Syd Schulz

I went into 2018 thinking it might be my last year of racing.

I came out of 2018 full of stoke and feeling a huge fire for racing and being a better mountain biker.

BUT (and this is a rather large but) that fire isn’t really burning for enduro racing.

If 2018 taught me anything, it is that I have options, and what felt like black and white landscape in January of 2018 — to race or not to race — now feels painted in shades of gray.

That is just a flowery way of saying that I will be taking a step back from enduro racing in 2019. And I’m really psyched about it.

I’m still going to be doing a few enduro races, but they’ll be cherry-picked for fun and experience — i.e. Andes Pacifico in Chile — and the big focus of my year will be racing BC Bike Race as a co-ed duo team with Macky in July. So yeah, an endurance cross country race, and not just any endurance cross country race, but an eight day one. Am I insane? Maybe. Am I stoked? Definitely.

This was me after just ONE day of endurance racing.

The reasons for this shift are many and somewhat difficult to quantify. I’ve been feeling the urge to try endurance racing for awhile. I’ve always loved big days on the bike and the long wait times at enduro races tend to make me antsy. Waiting is my least favorite part of enduro. And I love the feeling of being absolutely and completely wrecked after a long day on the bike. I have also been somewhat dissatisfied with my overall physical fitness over the past few years (read: I cannot hang with XC riders!), and I have a theory that improving my base level of fitness will help out my knee issues (this theory remains to be truly tested but I’m cautiously optimistic). The reality is that I have felt this way for awhile, but I have also felt *stuck* in enduro racing, because it seemed like turning away from it would be selling myself short, chickening out, what have you. This is another example of that kind of black and white thinking — now I am embracing the philosophy that exploring endurance racing will make me a better overall athlete, abetter mountain biker, and maybe even a better enduro racer, too, but that’s no longer the one-and-only-holy-grail goal. It would just be, like, a fun bonus if it happened to work out that way.

Earlier this year, one of the coaches for the Taos NICA team told me that he doesn’t let the kids say anything like “I’m an enduro racer” or “I’m an XC racer.” He makes them say “I’m a mountain biker.” And that really stuck with me.

And here’s the truth? Being a great enduro racer has never been that inspiring to me. I can’t explain why. Being a well-rounded, fit, strong AND technically proficient mountain biker? That’s a way bigger drive. That’s the big picture.

I can’t explain why I feel like an eight day endurance race will be more fun (or at least more fulfilling), but I do feel that way, and maybe I’m not obligated to provide an explanation. I’m just going to follow my gut.

I’m just going to keep trying to be a better mountain biker.

Head down, suffer on. Photo: PJ Etcheverry

Sometimes it’s okay not to achieve your goals

Posted on December 26, 2018 by Syd Schulz

I know, I know. Odd title this time of year, but hear me out.

Last year I set one big goal for 2018 — run 3 miles without hurting my knee. If you’ve been following this blog you can probably make an educated guess as to how well this has gone. If you guessed “not great” well, ding ding ding, you are correct. I didn’t achieve my goal. And you know what? That’s okay.

From one of my 30 sec on / 30 sec off runs.

It’s okay for a few reasons. For one, I didn’t just give up on this goal like I have many other goals in the past (including but not limited to, start doing yoga, teach myself Japanese, learn to play an instrument). I didn’t just stop trying and let it fade into obscurity. I kept trying, even when I was only making baby steps.

Secondly, I did make tangible progress, although not as much as I might have hoped. For example, I haven’t had any issues with my left knee for over a year, and while I’m still figuring out some issues with the right knee, I am in a much better place now than I was a year ago, both in terms of general athleticism and with regards to future running. I can run for short periods of time now without any negative effects, and I hope to build on that in 2019.

Thirdly, some stuff happened that was out of my control. Both of my knees were doing great going into the off-season and I was optimistic about ramping up the running. Then I had a dumb crash which left me with a minor hamstring/calf tear. Pretty minor injury by mountain biking standards, but absolute kryptonite for running.

Fourth, I achieved most of my process goals for the year. Some of these were related to running and better health, and some were related to this blog (write one post a week — this is post #52 btw) or Youtube. The point is these were all goals where I could control the outcome. I could do my core workouts, be smart about my knee pain, follow my training plan and sit down to write a blog post no matter what else was whirling around in my life. And I did that. And that is really all I can ask.

Photo: Eddie Clark Media

I set a goal of running 3 miles in 2018 and I didn’t do that. I could put it that way and be disappointed, but the reality is that I made a lot of progress this year in so many avenues of my life, and a lot of that happened due to having this bigger-picture goal that kept me focused on prioritizing my health and well-being. Trying to be a better “athlete” (and not just a better mountain biker) made me a way better mountain biker. So I can’t be disappointed.

The reality, which I have now come to accept, is that my timeline was really inaccurate for this goal. As somebody smarter than me once said, “most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.” Running is still on the table for me — the table is just a lot longer than I had anticipated.

Goals are tricky, slippery, slimy beasts. There are 110 billion articles on the internet dedicated to telling you how to crush your new years resolutions and make your dreams come true, and in 90% of those articles there is this assumption that if you do not achieve the end result, then you have failed. In some cases, maybe this is true. But I think that most of the time if you kept trying, controlled what you could control, crushed your process goals and moved in the right direction, then there is no failure to be found there.

I didn’t achieve my goal, but it’s okay, because I gained so much from trying.

The gym makes me uncomfortable

Posted on December 12, 2018 by Syd Schulz

This photo is a fairly concise summary of this post, but do keep reading.

The gym makes me uncomfortable. That’s why I go.

Well, that and the fact that the key to better health and faster bike racing and stronger knees, according to like every expert I’ve had the opportunity to corner and interrogate on the subject, lies somewhere in those hallowed rows of kettlebells and dumbbells and other things I am only just now learning the names of. I mean, if I thought I could be a halfway decent bike racer by only riding my bike — or doing other straight-line sports like swimming and running — that’s what I would do. There is very little appeal to me in being in a gym. Both the being-inside part and the lifting-heavy-things-around part are equally unappealing. I don’t enjoy the gym, and like almost everything else I don’t enjoy (knitting, washing dishes, running the updates on my computer, to name a few), I’m pretty bad at it. I say this from a place of self-love and also, I don’t know, reality or something, so don’t jump down my throat.

I just don’t know how to push myself in the gym. I never learned that. Can I make myself vomit during my bike intervals? Sure (although I have recently learned that that perhaps shouldn’t always be the goal! whaddayaknow!). Circuit training, core workouts, jump rope, all of these aerobic things that you can do in a gym — I have a handle on those. But picking up really heavy weights? I seem to have a hard time distinguishing between “this sucks because it’s supposed to suck” and “wow you’re about to put out your back dumbass.” And so I tend to veer way to the side of caution, as I discussed in my last post, which is obviously better than the alternative, but still can be frustrating.

I should clarify that I am getting much, much, much better. After three years of working with REVO PT my squat and deadlift form only sucks a little bit, as opposed to the complete dumpster fire it was before. I am learning, and even if I don’t love being in the gym, learning is gratifying. But the reality is that I am still really uncomfortable in this space. And for me, that has been a very good thing.

We say “growth happens outside of your comfort zone” and a million other cliches like that, but sometimes I think the people who say these things (implicating myself here) are often really unaware of what being outside of that comfort zone really, truly feels like. Working out in the gym has given me a lot of empathy for people who show up to group rides or mountain bike parks with the wrong equipment or no experience, because for three years I have been doing gym workouts and while I do okay most of the time, I still don’t feel like I own the space. I am so comfortable in a mountain biking arena that I forget how long it took for that comfort to grow and flourish, and also how damn stressful and anxiety-producing it can be to do something new, challenging and that — to be blunt — I completely and totally suck at. It is humbling, and an excellent reminder that, well, improvement is measured in years, not days, and certainly not hours. I need that reminder. Preferably at least twice a week.

So I am going to keep going to the gym. Not in spite of the fact that it makes me uncomfortable, but because of it. And besides, I may not like lifting weights, but I do like getting strong.

This year, I changed the way I deal with injury

Posted on December 5, 2018 by Syd Schulz

The flip switched in May of this year. We were in St. George, Utah and I was having knee problems again. This was a shitty position to be in because the riding in St. George is amazing and the weather was amazing and our campsite was amazing and pretty much everything about the present moment was amazing except for my knee. This was also, unfortunately, a position that I was somewhat familiar with.

See this post about the time my knee blew up in Scotland in 2017. Or this one about the time it blew up in Ohio in November last year. The most frustrating thing about my knee issues over the past few years has been the fact that I am able to recognize the patterns, yet am helpless to change them.

Views in St. George were alright

Here’s the pattern:

Acquire knee pain –> pretend it is fine –> do whatever is in my training schedule as if I didn’t have knee pain because I AM GOOD ATHLETE FOLLOW INSTRUCTIONS REAL GOOD –> end up having to take two weeks off of everything

Over the past year, I have tried very, very hard to find an “explanation” for my knee issues. I got an MRI (I’m “fine”), I did blood tests (I’m vitamin D deficient, like everyone else!) and I even did an elimination diet that required going an entire two months without cheese (unlike everyone else, I don’t appear to be gluten intolerant).

I am finally starting to accept that there may be no explanation. I might just be a perfectly healthy adult with diva knees. The only explanation, such that it is, might lie in the pattern above. I don’t listen to my pain.

And this year, I finally started to change that. Instead of riding in St. George, I went to the gym and did the hardest core workout I have ever done in my life. My abs were sore for days. When we were in Moab the next week and my knee still wasn’t 100%, I bought a $14 pair of goggles (do not recommend) and started working out in the pool. Instead of racing that weekend, I did another core workout outside the van. Obviously, none of this was as fun as racing or riding in Moab or St. George, but it was oddly satisfying. I knew I was doing everything I could. Was it everything I wanted to be able to do? Nope. But it was my best effort given the situation.

That has been my philosophy this year — do what I can. Sometimes this means that I take the workouts that Dane gives me and scale them down so much they are barely recognizable. Heavy squats turn into body weight squats turn into no squats at all and push-ups instead. But the point is that, even when I was having knee issues, I was still getting some benefit. I was still getting fitter. And I wasn’t as tempted to immediately jump back onto the bike since I still felt like I was accomplishing something.

Oh, and I actually have a pretty strong core, now, for the first time in my life.

If this strategy sounds obvious to you, let me tell you — it’s not as easy as it sounds, especially when the line between what you “can” do and what you “really shouldn’t be doing but theoretically can survive” is difficult to distinguish. In the past, this strategy may not have worked for me as well because if I even entered a gym when my knee was hurting I would overdo it. I simply did not understand the extent to which I needed to scale down. Or I was uncomfortable doing so because frankly going into a gym to do 10 body weight squats and a core workout makes a person feel a little, um, I don’t know, lame? self-conscious? guilty about not following the training plan to the letter?

Sometimes all you can do is sit in the creek.

Getting to this point was more than just acknowledging injury and my pain. I had to find my starting point (like I talked about in my last post), and most crucially, I had to get over being ashamed of where that starting point was. I had to stop caring what other people thought of me (why aren’t you riding? why are you doing this, that or the other?), and I had to take care of myself. It was a long process, but it worked.

Start where you are

Posted on November 28, 2018 by Syd Schulz

Start where you are. Find your personal starting point — where you are right now! — and start there. No where else. Right there.

This is one of the core pieces of advice I give new mountain bikers, racers and pretty much any other human being who asks my advice on basically any topic ever. (I’m really original.)

Naturally, it is also a core piece of advice that I manage to ignore time and time again, usually to my own detriment. Why are the most important lessons so often the ones we have to learn over and over again? Or, um, is it just me?

Fortunately, I’m pretty sure it’s not me.

I have a theory as to why “starting where we are” is so damn difficult. Here it is: most of us have no idea where we are. So, obviously, that makes it pretty hard to start there if we don’t know where “THERE” is. It takes a lot of self-awareness and perspective to know where you are. And maybe you have that self awareness in one aspect of your life (your job), but not in another (mountain biking).

Or, like me, you have that self-awareness with technical mountain biking but you’re kind of clueless about where you are physically. Which is to say, maybe you always think you’re fitter than you are — because, like a few weeks ago you were fit enough for this, what’s the big deal? (This is me, currently, in case you can’t tell.)

Started at the bottom… now we’re… slightly above the bottom?

Here’s an example from today. I decided to do a swim workout to give my knees a bit of a break. I figured I’d do 3 rounds of 500yards at a moderate clip, because this is something I used to do all the time when I was 18 and training for a triathlon (you know, ten years ago). I got halfway through the second set and my shoulders went NOPE. Or maybe it was more like “hey dumbass what were you thinking you haven’t swam since FREAKING MAY.” Either way, the message was clear, and I stopped. Could I have finished the workout? Yes, for sure. Would it have been a bad idea? Undoubtedly.

Clearly, I was not where I thought I was, at least as far as swimming is concerned. Luckily I have — over the past few years — cultivated enough body awareness to be able to allow myself to stop mid workout or adjust my training plan as needed (this has not always been the case).

Here are my suggestions for anyone who finds themselves consistently NOT starting at their starting point:

1. Spend a few weeks consciously “under-doing it.” Obviously you don’t want to do this leading up to an event, but it’s a helpful off-season activity. If you give yourself space to identify what is easy, you will slowly grow your awareness of where your limits are — and you’ll know when, and in what way, you need to push yourself to overcome weaknesses. This applies to technical skills, too. If you’re the kind of person who crashes on nearly every ride, spend a few rides focused on riding completely safely. This will require you to go slower, naturally, but it should draw your attention to problem skills and features (i.e. where do you find yourself needing to be *extra* careful?).

2. Write it out One symptom of not knowing your starting point is a tendency to jump right into the middle of a project or goal. A good way to subvert this is to write it out — you know, with good old fashioned paper and pen. Write a list of all the skills required to achieve your goal, assemble some benchmarks that will let you know when you’ve mastered a certain skill and away you go. Sometimes the simple act of writing it down forces you to be realistic about your skill set and might shed some light on where you are.

3. Ask an expert. It’s important to be able to identify your starting points on your own, too, for those moments when you can’t have someone looking over your shoulder. But doing a skills clinic or working with a coach is a great way to give yourself some perspective on your strengths and weaknesses. Having an objective set of eyes on the situation is a good idea for pretty much everything.

Want to explore these ideas further? Here are a few related posts:
5 Reasons to Work with a Skills Coach
Why it’s sometimes good to exceed your limits
Advice I wanted to give my former self

Gratitude

Posted on November 21, 2018 by Syd Schulz

This year, I am grateful for progress.

I am grateful that I have, at long last, learned to unhitch progress from the heavy cart that is perfection. I am grateful that I have learned to celebrate, appreciate, nurture the progress I have made, without a laundry list of caveats and exemptions. I am grateful that I have, at least for the most part, silenced (or at least drowned out) the voice that likes to say you might be better, but you’re still not good enough.

I am grateful for resiliency and new opportunities and old opportunities reframed in a more positive way.

I am grateful to have met almost all of the goals I set for myself this year.

Photo: Ty Hathaway

I am also grateful for the goals that I didn’t meet, because in the act of trying, I found purpose and peace.

I am grateful to discover that small changes can have a huge impact. A little over a year ago, I thought I would have to raze my life down if I wanted to be an athlete. I thought I had to start over. I am grateful that that wasn’t the case — small changes, like a van with air conditioning and a few more rest days, did the trick.

I am grateful for growth and growing pains.

I am grateful for the opportunity to further “unbox” myself in 2019 and try new types of racing and training. I am grateful that I no longer feel there is “only one way” to be successful as a mountain biker.

I am grateful for the bike community, both in real life at races, events, etc. and online through this blog, our Youtube channel and Patreon. I have never felt so supported and encouraged as I have this year.

I am grateful to not feel the way I did last year at this time.

I am grateful for the people who have helped me get to where I am now, who believed in me even when I was a mess, and still believe in me now.

I am grateful that I gave myself time to rest over the past six weeks, but I am also grateful that I get to start training again soon.

I am grateful that I still love bikes.

I am grateful that things have gotten better, and I am grateful that I am still excited to race.

I am grateful for the opportunity I have to progress, and that I have the resources and ability to do what I need to do to be a better athlete and human.

I am grateful for progress, and I’m grateful for what comes next.

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I would love to hear what you’re grateful for this Thanksgiving. Let me know in the comments below.