pro mountain bike blog

I’ve learned a lot about being an athlete through meditation. Or rather, I’ve learned a lot about being an athlete through the process of failing and succeeding and failing and succeeding to cultivate a daily meditation practice over the past two years.

I’ve learned to let go of progress as my barometer for success. I’ve learned to sit still (ish) for ten to fifteen minutes a day. But most importantly, I’ve learned to fail.

I fail to keep my mind in check. I fail to focus on my breath. I fail to count my breaths, or if I do succeed at this, I lose count at five or six. If I make it past five or six I usually forget that I was going to start over at 10 and go until 14 or 15 until I realize my mistake. I fail to visualize warm sunlight filling me up from the tips of my toes to the top of my head. Sometimes I visualize the warm sunlight starting at the top of my head and going the wrong way. Sometimes I visualize it outside of my body completely. Usually I visualize the steaming mug of coffee I will drink when all of this is over, or the witty retort I’m going to make to that rude YouTube comment about how my voice sounds weird.

And occasionally I fail because a hot air balloon lands 100 yards away while I’m trying to meditate…

But for 88 days in a row (the Headspace App conveniently keeps track of this for you, which adds an extra layer of guilt to skipping a day), I have sat down in the morning and failed. I have never once made it through a ten minute session without at least once thinking “oh shit what am I supposed to be doing right now? empty mind? warm sunlight? counting breaths? Get it together, Syd!”

But here’s a thing someone told me about meditation once — “the only way to be bad at meditation is to not meditate.” In other words, if you are showing up and sitting, then you are doing all that is required. It’s kind of like being an athlete. If you’re showing up and doing your training and putting in the work, then you are an athlete. All those other details like results and rankings and mile times are irrelevant. You don’t have to be an Olympian to be an athlete. And you don’t have to be a monk to meditate.

Meditation teaches you to fail and to put those failures into perspective. The bigger failure, it teaches you, is to dwell on those failures and let them affect the present moment. So you were supposed to be focused on your breath and instead you’re thinking about what you’re going to make for dinner? That failure is already in the past so who cares? Let it go. Focus on your breath NOW. So you were supposed to do a workout yesterday but life happened and the workout didn’t? Who cares, let it go, do the workout NOW. So you crashed in the top corner of the first stage? Who cares, let it go, race your best NOW.

Is this the lesson you’re “supposed to” glean from meditation? I don’t know. It certainly “seems” like most other people are better at sitting still and connecting with their inner-breath. Then again, isn’t the entire point of meditation letting go of all those “supposed-to”s and “seems”s and just focusing on what is?

So maybe the path to “enlightenment” is not as complicated as we make it sound. Maybe it’s just showing up, day after day, failing, and then — without judgement — starting again.

A few weeks ago I stumbled upon this sentence in a book I was reading, and it kind of summed up everything I’ve been trying to say with this post.

“We don’t sit in meditation to become good meditators. We sit in meditation to so that we’ll be more awake in our lives.” (From When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron)

And maybe, at the end of the day when I peel away my goals and results and rankings and all that external bullshit, I don’t really ride bikes to be a “good” athlete, either. Maybe I just ride to be more awake in my life. And maybe that’s enough.

A few of you have been asking for an update on my knee, and some others have inquired about how my 2018 goal of returning to running is going — so I figured I would mush both of those questions into one update post. Here goes.

To read the last installment of “wtf is wrong with Syd’s knee” — Knee Update + Advice for Anyone Dealing with Chronic Injuries — click here.

Basically, my knee is still my knee. Which is to say, I have no idea how to answer these questions. At the moment — like right now this very instant — it seems to be happy. I’m starting to ride more after a few months focused on strength work, core stability and mental health, and, well, so far so good. I’ve been riding my dirt bike more frequently, and last weekend Macky and I snow-shoe hiked 3,000 vertical feet in three miles, which was pretty insane and something that in the past would have probably meant IMMEDIATE KNEE BLOW-OUT.

Got all the way up here on my own two knees.

Or, like, maybe not because my knee is notoriously unpredictable with these things. And therein lies the problem. I have a lot of ideas about what makes my knee irritated — front squats, long drives, walking on concrete, running, hiking downhill, standing in line for extended periods of time, telling someone my knee is better — but the reality is that those things only sometimes cause me problems. This results in a lot of anxiety and fretting over “should I do this” “should I do that” blother blather blither, not to mention a lot of 20/20 hindsight. And of course, ironically, avoiding all potential triggers for my knee has made it weaker and more likely to be triggered. KIND OF A LOSE-LOSE SITUATION, AMIRITE?

The point of the above paragraph is that I haven’t been writing updates on this issue because, while I am cautiously optimistic, I have no effing clue.

But in the interest of transparency and the hopes that maybe my process can help some others, here’s what I’ve been doing to get my knee ready to try running again:

1. CORE STRENGTH, STABILITY + MOTOR CONTROL — After my flare-up in November, my physical therapist Dane (from Revo PT and Performance in Boulder) and I decided to take a big step back to the basics with my strength program. Since starting to work with Dane in 2016, I had gained a TON of strength but unfortunately beneath all that strength I had some fundamental motor control issues, largely thanks to tip-toeing around my knee and toe issues for the past nine years. So for the past two months, I’ve been doing box jumps, lateral hops, step-ups and HEAPS of core work. The jury is still out as to whether this is fixing my knee, but it isn’t hurting it (and I’m not going to lie, i had some SERIOUS doubts about what would happen when I started doing jumps and hops, so this is good progress…).

2. TOE YOGA, INSOLES + CALF STRENGTH — For the past two years, we have spent a lot of time focused on my hips. My hip mobility was definitely a contributing issue to my knee problems, but now that it’s gotten a lot better, it’s clear that there is more going on. The next frontier? Ankle mobility, calf strength and toe dexterity. As Dane told me, most cyclists with anterior knee pain like mine can resolve their issues by improving hip mobility, but I’m special. I guess in this case being special is not great, but one positive is that I have learned a TON about body awareness and proprioception.

So I’ve installed some new insoles in my bike shoes, I’m doing some calf strengthening exercises and I’ve started a daily toe yoga practice. This is not as exciting as it sounds (er, does it sound exciting?), and mainly involves me staring at my toes and willing them to move in ways they are not inclined to move. But, you know, baby steps. Or in this case, baby toe twitches.

3. TAPING, STRETCHING + FOAM ROLLING — Basically, just continuing what I’ve been doing with a good stretching practice, daily foam rolling of my cranky quads and keeping my knee taped with RockTape to relieve some of the pressure on the patellar tendon. None of these are fixes in and of themselves, but they are all incredibly necessary. If I’ve learned anything from this process, it’s that the little things done consistently are actually the biggest things.

New kicks and rainbow rocktape!

Sooooo…..what about the running thing? I got the go ahead from Dane to start incorporating VERY short runs (like, 30 seconds of running, 30 seconds of walking), but it’s going to be a slow process. At the moment, I’m focusing on getting back into riding, continuing with core and motor control work, and adjusting to my new bike shoes and a few other set-up tweaks. Not much good can come from rushing this process, but hopefully I’ll have a running update for you sometime in the next few months.