She’s a Super Cycling Coach . . . Sort Of: 78 Years Old, a Harvard Professor — and a Smoker

By Kevin Kolodziejski 

Could you ever see yourself spending $10,000 a year for a cycling coach?

Back in the aughts, I raced against a guy who told me he was paying $1 less than that. That his coach is Canadian Brian Walton, a former 18-year road cycling pro whose palmarès also included winning a silver medal in the points race on the track in the 1996 Olympics. That besides being able to contact him 24/7, Walton rides with him once a week to discuss his training and check out his form. That based on all that and the fact that he’s finally won a few races he feels the deal’s a bargain.

Without a doubt, the rider did get better under Walton’s tutelage. Before that, whether it be road race or criterium, the guy had been pack fodder. What is in doubt, however, is the bargain part. For the sorts of races he finally started winning typically offered $100 first-place payouts.  So let me ask you a different question.

Would You Spend $25 for a Cycling Coach?

I did — albeit unknowingly.

In the creation of my last column for RoadBikeRider, “We Need to Let Things Vary,” I came across a belief of Ellen Langer’s that I felt could lead to an article for the weekly health and fitness newspaper column I write. “That the mind is a primary determinant of the body’s health, and that simple interventions to change the way we think can dramatically improve our well-being.” So about six weeks ago, I bought the book that contained the quote — The Mindful Body (Ballantine, 2023) — took notes as I read it, and then, as often is the case, struggled a bit to write the article. But with the struggle came a realization.  Langer’s belief had rubbed off on me and that had led to a few mental adjustments in the middle of recent rides that had essentially given life to a pair of dead legs.

Moreover, if you replace “well-being” with “cycling,” the quotation remains true. But the best proof of that is not in my pedaling, or even your pudding, but in the pancreas on a platter in Paris.

Eating Pancreas in Paris

In The Mindful Body, Langer tells of the time she was honeymooning in Paris and became ill from a restaurant meal. She had ordered the mixed grill even though it contained one item she had never eaten, ris de veau — and the thought of doing so made her queasy. If you’re not well-versed in French, ris de veau translates as sweetbread, a culinary euphemism if there ever was one. Most often it’s made from the pancreas of a calf, pig, or lamb.

Upon the meal’s arrival, Langer asked her husband which piece of meat was the pancreas and decided to eat that last. When the “dreaded moment” came, she became “more and more nauseated.” Her husband found this amusing, and she wanted to know why. Because he had lied to her before, he explained, and she had eaten the pancreas a while ago. What was now making her ill was chicken.

This story is more than just another example of the power of a placebo. Sharing her husband’s prank illustrates what Langer sets out to show in her book. Though stated before, it merits being stated again to emphasize a key word. “That the mind is a primary determinant of the body’s health and that simple interventions to change the way we think can dramatically improve our well-being.”

How dramatically? Dramatically enough to improve the vision and hearing of elderly men in one week.

The ‘Counterclockwise’ Study

In 1979, Langer and colleagues recruited elderly men to live for a week at a retreat that had been “retrofitted to resemble life twenty years earlier — in every way possible.” Once there, the men “watched news broadcasts and other television shows and movies of that era, listened to jukebox favorites.”  Beforehand, however, about half were asked “to talk about it all in the present tense, as if these things were happening in real time” during their stay. The others had not.

A comparison of posttests to pretests done on the men clearly showed their time at the retreat helped in a number of biological, psychological, and physical ways, but there were certain measures — joint flexibility, manual dexterity, posture, and gait to name a few — where those who had spent the week speaking solely in the present tense outperformed those who hadn’t.

What may even be more noteworthy, though, is that all the men recorded better hearing and vision scores after a week at the retro-retreat, a fact Langer calls remarkable “since hearing and vision . . . rarely improve without medical intervention in any age group and especially in an older population.” Additionally, the study of the elderly men that’s come to be known as the counterclockwise study doesn’t appear to be an outlier. When Langer and colleagues replicated it in 1989, they again found improvement in physical functioning.

All this make a strong case for what Langer (and I) strongly assert. “We can make bodily changes by changing the mind.”

So if you fear you’ve reached your maximum cycling performance because there’s no way to get anything more out of your body, why not “hire” the sort-of cycling coach who just might get more out of your mind?

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Kevin Kolodziejski began his writing career in earnest in 1989. Since then he’s written a weekly health and fitness column and his articles have appeared in magazines such as “MuscleMag,” “Ironman,” “Vegetarian Times,” and “Bicycle Guide.” He has Bachelor and Masters degrees in English from DeSales and Kutztown Universities.

A competitive cyclist for more than 30 years, Kevin won two Pennsylvania State Time Trial championships in his 30’s, the aptly named Pain Mountain Time Trial 4 out of 5 times in his 40s, two more state TT’s in his 50’s, and the season-long Pennsylvania 40+ BAR championship at 43.