Tag Archives: mountain bike blogger

Why I’m Trying a Social Media Detox

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First of all, sorry for being so unforgivably trendy.

I mean, really, social media detoxes are all the rage on social media right now and they are unbearably, awfully twee. And, as far as I can tell, pretty ineffective, unless of course, you’re the person cashing in on the phenomena.

Like this — Look, you can pay these assholes thousands of dollars to take away your phone for three days, and also, presumably, teach you how to make flower crowns and appreciate what their website completely un-ironically terms “analog art.” But don’t worry, the price tag includes “juicing and superfood smoothies” and “clarity, vision and enhanced creativity.”

I’m not saying that spending time without your phone won’t result in enhanced creativity — it probably will. I’m just saying that you should never pay someone thousands of dollars for something you can simply achieve by powering off your feckin phone and having your s/o hide it in your least favorite pair of socks. I also find it a little ironic that one of the trendiest things to do on social media right now is to RAGE ABOUT HOW SOCIAL MEDIA IS KILLING US ALL. (The second trendiest thing being raging about Instagram’s algorithm changes on Instagram, of course.)

I’m not immune to this trend, or to the so-called dark-side of social media. Here is a post I wrote for Carmichael Training systems about how social media might be ruining your bike ride. To paraphrase, IT’S KILLING US ALL. But, on another level, I truly love social media. It has given me an excellent platform to share my story. I’ve met new people with similar interests. I’ve made friends, I’ve kept up with old friends I most certainly would have lost touch with otherwise. I follow a lot of cute dogs, like this corgi who looks damn fine in goggles. And yeah, I’ve basically made a living off of it. So I have no intention of giving up social media, especially for a weekend of legos and laughter yoga.

I think my biggest problem with the concept of a “digital detox retreat” is that it’s just that, a retreat. It’s not real life. I spend enough time off the grid camping in a van to know that’s it’s not that hard to ignore your phone when you have no service, and when the alternative to scrolling mindlessly thought Twitter is sitting by the campfire enjoying a beer and then going to bed at 8pm. That is the life, no doubts about it.

But it’s not very sustainable — and my real life and my job require me to use the internet and social media, and I’m going to have to learn how to deal with that, preferably in a way that doesn’t require constant detoxing.

And for the most part, I’ve done that. I’ve developed a lot of coping mechanisms — I’ve turned off push notifications from Instgram, I deleted the facebook app from my phone, I had Macky install a variety of facebook blocking programs on my computer (once I figure out how to easily disable them, he has to find another). I unfollowed anyone who posts right-wing conspiracy theories or uses the term “fake news” unironically and also all the people who can’t distinguish between your/you’re and angle/angel or otherwise do things that irritate me in a wildly-out-of-proportion-with-the-offense kind of way. And, at long last, I’ve finally started to let go of the THIS PHOTO DIDN’T GET 500 LIKES panic and just post whatever the hell I want (within reason, of course). And while I occasionally experience a little FOMO or anxiety about what other people are doing, that has lessened significantly over the past few years, as I’ve gained more confidence in myself as a person and an athlete. That particular problem wasn’t Instagram — it was me.

No, currently, my main problem with social media is just that it’s a mindless time suck. I fill up my empty moments by scrolling through instagram. I procrastinate by finding random pseudo-intellectual articles on Facebook. I suddenly find myself reading the worst of the worst of clickbait articles — you know the ones that require you to click through 10,000 pages before you find out what happened and then inevitably the website freezes and you never find out whether or not the conjoined twins share a brain or what the iguana did that was so amazing and suddenly you break out of your trance and go WHAT AM I DOING WITH MY LIFE.

So, the problem isn’t negative emotions or thoughts, but rather lack of thoughts and emotions altogether. It’s the “micro-boredom” that Brendan Leonard from Semi-Rad talks about in this post. The more you use your phone to fill up those little moments of boredom, the more you get bored. It’s a vicious cycle, and I don’t even realize I’m doing it. My lack of intentionality, especially with the Instagram app on my phone, is pretty alarming. Sometimes I don’t even realize I picked up my phone. I stare at the same photos over and over again (since those are the only ones the new Instagram algorithm delivers to me #RAGE) without even really realizing I’ve seen them before. My brain is empty, absorbing nothing, and certainly not a poster-child for “clarity, vision and enhanced creativity.”

I don’t want to stop using social media. I just want to stop letting it seep in and fill up all those blank spaces with vapid nothing-ness.

I want to use it with purpose and intention and mindfulness. I want to be able to make decisions like “today I’m not going to look at my phone, because I want to focus on the here and now” without it being a big thing. I want to be able to step away from social media, without someone having to hide my phone in a stinky pair of socks.

The first step to doing that is to TAKE A BIG STEP BACK, because oh brother, we are in deep. Now seems like a good time to do that because A) it’s the holidays and nobody cares what random mountain bike athletes are doing at this time of year and B) I’m going to Thailand for Christmas without my bike and the hustle of trying to find daily content was going to be a pain in the ass anyway and C) I want to focus on experiencing Thailand WITHOUT my phone/work being a constant distraction and D) I’d like to go into the New Year with a healthier relationship with social media and my role as an influencer/athlete.

So I’m going dark. For at least a week. Possibly longer if I want to. This is my game, so my rules.

Of course, because I can’t leave well enough alone, I’ve scheduled a bunch of posts on my Facebook page, as well as a few blog posts. This is the first time I’ve attempted to put my blog on “autopilot” so hopefully it works out and Mailchimp doesn’t run amok with my subscriber list. Since there’s no decent way to schedule on Instagram, I’ll be de-activating the app on my phone and staying A-WAY. I’ll still be checking my email and Whats-App, just to make sure the sky isn’t falling, but other than that, NO SOCIAL MEDIA FOR ME.

Am I a little nervous that a week of no posts will tank my Instagram engagement levels to prehistoric lows? Yeah, sure, but I’m hoping this worry will evaporate when I’m sitting on a beach sipping coconut water out of an ACTUAL COCONUT. These are the things we miss out on when we’re slaves to an algorithm, people.

Have you ever tried a social media detox? Would you? Do you need it? How have you created a healthy relationship with social media?

Celebrate Your Small Wins

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Celebrate your small wins.

This is a pretty well-trodden subject in the inspiration/self-care blog world. “Set big goals, but celebrate the small wins, like getting out of bed every day and brushing your hair and not being the sort of person who clubs baby seals for fun.” Like most self-help tropes, this one makes me roll my eyes. While I understand the importance of self-care on a theoretical level (you have to take care of yourself before you can take care of others), the movement’s online manifestation often comes off as a justification for spending $100 on hair product and drinking green juice instead of, like, getting shit done.

And to be honest, beneath the heavy layer of inspirational fluff on this blog, I am a pretty cynical person. I believe that some things, like getting out of bed every day and getting shitty race results and writing bad blog posts, don’t deserve to be celebrated. A big part of supposed self-care is that “as long as you’re doing your best, it’s okay” or “if all you can do on a certain day is drag yourself out of bed and do five minutes of yoga, then you have done your best.”

And look, I get it. Some days you just don’t have it. And I do believe that, at least in the context of bike racing, if you honestly give it everything you have, and you do your very best, and you’re still last, then who the f$ck cares? Celebrate that shit. But I also think that, much of the time, we aren’t really doing our best. We aren’t even close to tapping our potential. Instead, we’re using “well, I did my best” as a cop-out.

To really, truly, do the best that you can, to perform at the best of your abilities, to not be sabotaged by your mind, to not be distracted by thoughts of what you’re going to have for dinner, to be fully present — that is probably the hardest thing in the world. I can think of maybe one or two bike races where I have honestly done my best. And probably about 1000 shitty races I have explained away by saying some variation of “well, that was all I could do.”

The point of this is not to start an argument about what “doing your best” really means (that’s another post blog post entirely), but rather to demonstrate that, at the end of the day, I am really hard on myself. There is a dark side to knowing what you’re capable of — a razor-sharp awareness of when you’re not living up to that standard.

I started racing bikes with what were, one might argue, unreasonable expectations. My perspective was warped because most of my friends were professional racers and so when I achieved things that were 1/10th of what they were capable of, I didn’t celebrate these wins, I just took them as par for the course, if I noticed them at all. I can think of very few times over the past four years that I have celebrated a small win, or even a large one.

To be honest, it’s difficult for me to think of any wins at all.

Clearly, they’ve happened. In four years I’ve progressed from popping off a curb (with difficulty) to doing eight foot drops. I’ve gone from someone who was usually the slowest person at the bike park (and constantly watching for people to catch me from behind), to someone who is routinely held up by others. I’ve gone from sliding down the steepest trails at Angel Fire on my ass, to cleaning all of them on my trail bike.

And yet, despite all that, I can think of maybe three times I have stepped out of my “trying to be better” bubble and thought, wow, it’s really cool that I rode that. One of them was a few weeks ago in Angel Fire. It was a cool moment. I rode a section flawlessly that used to make cry. It was so perfect I couldn’t even find anything to kvetch about, which is a rarity. Usually, I feel like my accomplishments are more of a “day late dollar short” variety. I hit the drop in Glorieta that scared me the day AFTER the race. I rode a lot of sketchy things in Northstar but everyone else rode them better. I finally learned how to corner properly. I cleared the medium line at Valmont but my form was sketchy.

(Regarding that last one, I remember explaining to my skills coach Lee why it could be better and him saying “when you’re in a session with me, only I get to tell you when something is bad, and I’m telling you that was good, so stop thinking and do it again.” This is why coaches are great.)

Two weeks ago, Macky and I took some local 16-year-old rippers out for an informal clinic to help them hit drops safely. They’re good kids with good bike skills plus all the bravery that comes from being 16. It was cool to see them progress from pretty sketchy to perfectly controlled with just a little bit of guidance (a trajectory that arguably took me like three years). We ended the session at one of the larger drops in the area — a drop that they were extremely excited to hit and that I kind of dreaded because I had been eyeing it for over a year. Possibly you can see where this is going, but all three boys sailed off the drop with varying degrees of control and then whooped and hollered and high-fived each other and ran up to do it again, and again, and again. I hit the drop and…

Well, nothing.

No excitement, no whooping, not even a single thought given to the fact that last fall I hadn’t even thought to attempt this feature. Just a laundry list of everything that could be better… too slow, not enough pop, too rear-wheel heavy. I did it three more times and the list just got longer. I never hit it well — I felt tense and sketchy and off. I knew I could do better, I knew my fear and insecurity was making me ride it poorly and that frustrated me. At some point it dawned on my that I was missing the point — that I had finally hit this drop, finally accomplished this goal that I had written down in my goal notebook, and yet there was no joy. The moment I committed to the drop and safely landed on the ground, I revised the goal from “hitting the drop” to “hitting the drop perfectly,” gliding over the mental victory that was getting myself to commit to it in the first place. You’d think, given the extent to which my mental game has been holding me back, this would have been worth celebrating in its own right, even if I had landed straight on my face. And yet, my habits of critiquing and striving for perfection kicked in and well, all I can say is, I kind of didn’t notice that I had just achieved a goal.

I have yet to decide whether my perfectionism is what has made me a good athlete — or if it’s what has prevented me from being a great one. At times like this, I suspect it’s a little bit of both.

Here’s what I’ve been trying to tell myself — it’s okay to celebrate small wins, even if they are not perfect. It’s okay to celebrate accomplishing a goal, even if it doesn’t go down exactly like you envisioned it. It doesn’t make you less driven and it won’t make you less likely to be successful. It might even make you better. Celebrating a work in progress won’t make you less likely to achieve the finished product. Celebrating a step forward does not have to be the same as settling for mediocrity.

So, from here on out, I’m going to be celebrating my small wins. I’m going to celebrate doing the things that are hard for me, even if other people make these things look easy. I’m going to celebrate the shit out of doing my best — and when my best is out of reach, I’m going to celebrate the fact that my “bad day riding” is still light years ahead of my best from three years ago and that is reason enough to crack out the champagne.