Feeling Imprisoned by Your Cycling Expectations?

By Kevin Kolodziejski 

Wu-Wei Can Pardon You

It’s something I firmly believe and Teddy Roosevelt once said. “I am a part of everything I read.” Another belief I hold in common with the 26th president of the United States: To be a man “who strives valiantly . . . while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

Put the two together and you have the undercurrents of this article, one that starts with an admission about how I’ve felt on many recent Tuesday and Saturday rides, the two each week intended to be the hard ones. To borrow jailhouse jargon, I’ve been a dead man walking.

At least that’s the way it’s felt to me — as well as my cellmates working on the chain gangs of my quadriceps, hamstrings, and gluteus maximus muscles. In actuality, though, I’ve just been an old man cycling and feeling imprisoned by my expectations, particularly on Tuesdays.

What’s Become Hard-Time Tuesday

A typical Tuesday ride usually lasts about two and a half hours and begins with a warmup of 30 minutes or so that leads to the first of six to eight hard efforts. They generally take six to 10 minutes and take my heart rate from 80 percent to 95 percent of its maximum. But early in the summer, the heart rate monitor that’s become my prison chaplain and those aforementioned cellmates of mine were telling me the governor had no intention of ever pardoning me. Or, to escape the prison motif for a sentence — thereby creating two really bad puns and a bit of awful grammar — my get up and go had got up and went.

Those hard efforts were not ending with my heart rate at 95 percent of its max, although it felt that way by the middle of most. Worse, I felt even more like a dead man walking on Wednesdays. Clearly, I had lost my way.

Until I found wu-wei (pronounced woo way), that is.

The Wu-Wei Way

Before I further explain how to apply this principle in the Chinese philosophy of Taoism to your exercise to improve its efficacy — and your enjoyment of it — allow me to apply prison parlance to you. No amount of good behavior during your confinement in the big house will cause nature’s governor to grant you a death-sentence pardon. But in a roundabout way, Wu wei could delay the date of it. And it can certainly make your jail time, especially in the exercise yard, more enjoyable.

According to an overview of the principle published in the 2021 September-December issue of the Asian Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, wu-wei can help your “well-being and pursuit of goals” as well as “open new avenues” that lead to “optimal human functioning.” While that sounds promising, the definition of it sounds like pure bull: “an imperceptible form of action” that may “feel like [you’re] doing nothing.” But that nothing really is something. As explained in the Tao Dei Jing, one of the seminal texts of Taoism, it’s “moving in accordance with the flow of nature’s course, acting without forcing.”

The opposite of what I had been doing on Tuesday rides: casting aside my doubts and coaxing — often forcing — myself to ride hard.

Why Force a Hard Ride?

But in my mind, I wasn’t being foolish, stubborn, or even blindly following another one of T.R.’s quotations: “Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty.” I was just relying on past experience. For it had taught me there’s benefit at times in doing what you don’t want to do — or even feel you can’t do. Selecting the right times to do both, I believe, was a big part of what allowed me to become a cyclist of some note way back when.

But this is now and that was then and should the “right times” now be eight out of 10 Tuesday rides?  That question led me to do what I’ve consistently advised readers of my health and fitness column to do for more than 30 years: experiment. I learned lots from this one, so I shared it with them.  And since the lots learned occurred during a ride, I’d be foolish not to share it with you.

The Wu-Wei Tuesday

It’s recorded in my training log as “Wu-Wei Tuesday,” just above the stated goal: “To ride in accordance with the flow.” (Yes, yes, I know that goal makes it seem as if my riding’s done barefoot around a commune in Cali — and that it could use a healthy dose of technology — but bear with me, please.)  I didn’t know if the goal would keep me from doing the typical Tuesday hard efforts, only that if the effort became hard, it was never going to feel forced. To help insure that, I decided not to check my heart rate during the ride.

What I did check out at the start, though, was an incredibly clear sky. Which made me remember how such a sight used to motivate me to make the steep and seemingly never-ending climb outside of Jim Thorpe, PA to reach the Penn’s Peak concert hall, in order to enjoy what one tourist from Baltimore called — and so apropos for this article — the “breathtaking” view.

A not-so-pleasant remembrance, though, quickly followed.

One of struggling badly up a lesser climb just a week before on my Tuesday ride. So badly, that I had said to myself I’d never ascend Penn’s Peak again. To do so requires me to stand in my 36×25 in spots, really power the pedals, and take pains not to topple over — even on a good day. But that’s only part of why I felt I’d never get there again. To do so from my house, I need to make two other climbs just as tough.

The Amended Experiment

All of which amended the experiment: Could I do those three monster climbs and still ride “in accordance with the flow”? It required total focus and far more time than normal climbing in the 36×25, but yes.

Doing so felt so right, in fact, that after the Penn’s Peak climb I took the long way home and did two more.  Yet I still had enough in my legs to end a ride with 6 miles of what I call Running the Rollers. It’s a stay-seated drill where I push as big a gear as possible going down the roller and then rapidly reduce the gearing going up so my legs are turning over as crazily as a cartoon character’s who just run off the ridge and temporarily keeps from falling. Once it levels out, I attempt to keep close to that cadence for as long as possible.

The Encouraging Results

When I finally checked the heart rate info for the ride, I was not surprised to see that my heart rate never exceeded 88 percent of its max. But I was surprised to discover I had spent as much time between 80 and 88 percent of my max as I had on those recent Tuesday rides that had me feeling like a dead man walking. Better still, instead of feeling played out, I was feeling pumped up — and still that way the next day.

If your hard rides have been making you feel the former rather than the latter, why not conduct your own wu-wei experiment?

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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.