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This week, our hosts get personal with stories of the biggest and dumbest rides they’ve done, the training book that had the biggest impact on their athletic development, and how they deal with the midseason dull drums.
Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Chris Case: Hey everyone. Welcome to another episode of Fast Talk, your source for the Science of Endurance performance. You can tell it’s summer. We’ve got four people in four different locations. Grant Billings, Montana, Trevor, somewhere on a road.
[00:00:20] Trevor Connor: Yeah. And I just noticed you didn’t even give me a chance to screw up the intro for the potluck.
[00:00:25] Chris Case: Nope. Definitely not.
[00:00:27] Trevor Connor: Well, you know, you can’t see it. We know you can’t read any, have I been demoted that much?
[00:00:33] Chris Case: Yes. Yes. And Julie, are you in Sacramento right now or are you in Tahoe right now or are you in neither?
[00:00:40] Julie Young: I’m in Truckee.
[00:00:41] Chris Case: You’re in Truckee? Yeah. Tahoe area. Truckee. Very good.
[00:00:45] Julie Young: Yep.
[00:00:45] Trevor Connor: So Chris holding down the floor in the studio,
[00:00:48] Chris Case: I am lonely here in the studio with all these cinder block walls and sound absorbing panels.
[00:00:55] Trevor Connor: Sorry,
[00:00:56] Chris Case: let’s get into some questions. Who wants to start? Julie, you had a couple good questions. Why don’t we start with one of yours?
[00:01:04] Julie Young: Well, I think the one that was voted in was how to help. Athletes through kind of the mid-season doldrums.
[00:01:13] Chris Case: Yes.
[00:01:14] Julie Young: And I think Grant liked that one.
[00:01:16] Grant Holicky: I did. I was a big fan of that one and I’m anxious to hear everybody else’s answer ’cause mine is overly simple.
I think one of the biggest issues we see with the athletes is especially cyclists and triathletes, now the seasons are super long, right? They’re starting their training. Let’s even be kind and say they’re starting their training January one new year. If they’re doing a full road schedule or a full triathlon schedule or a full mountain bike schedule.
They’re not done racing until October, so that’s a full on 10 months, nine and a half months of trying of a season. And I don’t know that anybody really looked at the season as that long, 10 years ago, 15 years. And we see it in the world tour too, right? Like you see tore down under start in January and you see the last races of the world tour are in October.
So when do those guys rest? And to me, that’s where the most of this mid-season doldrums comes from is fatigue. One of the things that I notice in my athletes more than anything else is race fatigue.
[00:02:16] Chris Case: And by that you don’t just mean the physical side of things, right? I assume you mean the psychological impact of being turned on for that whole time.
[00:02:25] Grant Holicky: A hundred percent. I really am a strong believer in that old adage that you can’t stay on a razor’s edge. For all that long is kind of false. Physically, you can stay there. I mean, you can rest, recover for a long period of time and physically be good. But what you can’t do forever is get up every weekend, eat race food, go to sleep, prep for a race, bring the intention, bring the stress, bring the anxiety, bring the excitement, bring all those things on a regular basis over and over and over again.
And what we expect out of our athletes now from a performance standpoint is that on their rest day, on their training days, not even on just their race days, we’re asking that on their training days. So what they’re bringing constantly. Think about it this way, from January 1st until now. That’s six months odd.
And to me it’s too much to me. What I think we need to do far more often is these little micro breaks. The old school mentality of, I’m gonna train and race all year round, then I’m gonna take two weeks completely off the bike and then I’m gonna get back to it. I just don’t think it works anymore. We don’t have these four month build sections of the training block.
We’re racing right away. And I think that makes it really hard. And so these, whether it’s a micro rest, whether. It’s a mini vacation, whether it’s a week off in the middle of the season. I mean, I think people, a lot of people would be pretty astounded at how much time, even World Tour Pros take off the bike.
They finish a grand tour, they go to the beach, they’re gone. They’re not anywhere near their bike for a number, like a at least a week. And that kind of rest is really important to kind of breaking the Midseason slum.
[00:04:15] Chris Case: And I would say to that grant, it sounds a little bit like you’re talking about pretty elite athletes since you’re talking about a very long season.
If we’re talking more about the master’s athlete, the more typical age category racer. That season isn’t 10 months long, but still it’s a long season if they want it to be. And they can be sort of hitting races a lot and often, and so I don’t think that it’s always a necessity for them to take a mini vacation or a break.
I would say that that would be great, but. Sometimes just putting the training plan aside and doing some adventurous rides. Or if you concentrate on road racing, just go do a mountain bike, ride up in the mountains, do something different to. Take away the stress of sticking to a plan. Take away the stress of always feeling like you have to get the green dots.
If you’re using training peaks or whatever the case may be. Always hitting all those items on a checklist. Just set that all aside and just enjoy riding a bike again. I think time off is great too. And I usually have a family vacation or something in the middle of the summer that makes that happen automatically.
So I think maybe that’s why I say I think you could work that in strategically or it just happens and you kind of. Build up to that point, or race to a certain point, and then you know that that is on the schedule and you take it and then you get back to things and then ramp it up again.
[00:05:48] Grant Holicky: Right. And I think that’s why there’s a couple things, like I learned this a few years back for the masters athlete, the season might not be as long.
But I do know an awful lot of people that are starting racing around here, and they’re going down the Tucson Bicycle Classic in February, and they’re racing their bikes through September for Road.
[00:06:07] Chris Case: Mm-hmm.
[00:06:07] Grant Holicky: That’s still an awful long season. And then maybe they might jump in cross or they might do something else, triathletes.
Amateur triathletes. My God, they race year round, so I don’t know that it’s a whole lot different for the amateurs. Plus you throw in family, you throw in work, you throw in all these other things that are asking their mental energy and their mental cognitive load, and all these things of piling onto these people.
And then I have them say much like, you’re sitting, Chris, I’m gonna go on vacation. I’m gonna bring my bike. Why are you bringing your bike? Well, I don’t wanna lose anything. I don’t want to get it. And I get it, you know, I’m 52. I think that riding and training is probably more part of my lifestyle and part of more of what I do to stay sane and to keep my mind quiet and to be a good partner and to be a good coach, and to be those things like I depend on training, but like go run for a week, go swim for a week, get off the bike, go not worry about what your CTL is for a week.
Go worry about relaxing and having an extra beer, like doing something along those lines. Don’t bring your bike on vacation.
[00:07:16] Trevor Connor: Chris, you said you don’t necessarily have to take time off. I am a huge proponent of having that week where you just go and sit on the beach and forget about all this. And Grant, I agree with you that athletes get too worried about, but my CTLs gonna drop.
And if I let that happen, I’m gonna lose all my fitness. I’m gonna lose all my form. I have an athlete who does a very long season. His last event is at Tucson Bicycle Classic in November. And I can show you his CTL graph. It looks like a saw tooth. We just have points in the season where it goes right down to 40, 50 or even lower, and then we just bring it back up.
And he has a great season that you can bring the form back, but you need those rests. And the one thing I would add here is athletes might be better able to handle it if it’s scheduled. So you just say, Hey, we got this race block here, or your last race is say May 20th. So May 21st and May 30th. We’re just taking a rest and it’s planned.
[00:08:17] Julie Young: Yeah, I, when I thought about this question, I thought about the U 23 mountain bike riders that I train. And while they’re young, they’re pretty sophisticated in their training and it is amazing what they do. And it’s, grant, you had kind of alluded to this, you know, you start in January, but you know, really we’re starting in.
September, October with that kind of,
[00:08:39] Grant Holicky: yeah,
[00:08:39] Julie Young: quote off season training where, but to me that’s pretty critical in terms of setting you up for the seasons because it looks so different. And I think a lot of people, when you’d say, oh, you train year round, they kind of cringe like, oh my gosh, year round training.
But. It looks so different and even though the objectives are, it’s kind of like physical objectives that we’re after, it also provides mental variety. So like that quote off season or base season where you’re doing kind of that base like different variety, like hiking, trail, running, long rides, and that strength work.
I think that kind of creates that freshness going into January or even December where you then start transitioning more to on the bike. And every athlete is so different. Some athletes have such incredible mental and physical tolerance. It’s just like they thrive on the structure and the regimented plan.
But I just feel like you kind of get to a point where every coach has a bit of a format. They kind of have those core workouts. They’re doing that sequence of the week, and I just feel like it can get a little monotonous for the rider too and the way the mountain bike season is set up. I think it’s actually really good because there is kind of this clear first half and then a clear second half, and it really gives us that opportunity to just reset and I’d love.
The idea of whether you take like a full week and you just kind of give them the green card, just do whatever sounds good, whether that’s complete rest or you do like active recovery of choice or just go adventure riding. I just think that gives them that hall pass and kind of breaks that sense of staleness or monotony and I love to just capitalize on the season.
And this goes for winter or summer, but as we’re entering into summer and just say, Hey, like rather than trunk stability go paddleboard, or go open water swim or go hike. And just being able to mix it up that way, you know, these athletes are so regimented. Just that little bit of a change can add so much freshness.
And kind of back to what you said, I think Grant, which kind of reminded me of something that it’s almost more the mental, like I feel like our mental energy is more finite than our physical, and it brought up two stories for me. One, when I was on the national team, we had a physiologist who just, this was just a example.
I’m not saying this is actually what he was promoting, but he had said if he put us all on Prozac. We wouldn’t overtrain because it’s like a mental phenomenon. And then I remember Jim Miller saying if he asks an athlete to do a, I don’t know, four times eight in March, and ask that same athlete to do that same workout in September, you know, March, they thrive and they crush it September, they fail.
So I think it’s, to me, it’s so much more a mental thing of providing that, that break.
[00:11:30] Grant Holicky: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. And I truly think that’s the key. And that’s why I think it’s so important, and maybe not. I mean, maybe for some people bringing their bike and doing an easy ride every day is what keeps them mentally.
Okay. And I think there is two fairly distinct conversations here. Our professional athletes who don’t have anything else. Well, actually, let me rephrase. There’s not a lot of professional athletes right now that have nothing else to focus on. Most of my pro cyclists are working some sort of a job. And even our U 20 threes are in college, or they’re doing something right, so their mental load is being piled on with what they’re doing from a training perspective already.
And man, we’re asking people to be so optimized now, right? You gotta hit, your diet has to be right. You gotta be thinking about macros. You gotta be thinking about rest. You’re wearing your wearables. You’re know when you’re recovering the wrong way. We’re adding mental load in a place where, when most of us were racing in training, we just showed up and went hard.
We weren’t worried about much else, so there’s so much more that these guys have to think about. And then when you throw in the off the bike, outside of sport, things that a master’s athlete has to do, it’s such an ask. So these little micro rests, two weeks in in October, ain’t gonna do it. You’re full-time at your job.
You’re full-time in school, you’re full-time with your family. Two weeks there ain’t gonna do it, but a week in June can make a huge difference. Four day long weekend can make a huge difference and so many people out there with their partners or with their family. They’re better in their family when they’re racing their bike or on their bike, but it takes a toll on the family too.
[00:13:22] Trevor Connor: The last thing I’m gonna add is sometimes it can be a real micro thing. When I am in the middle of the season and sometimes just starting to feel flat. I’ll have like a, a Friday where I come home, I’ve got a workout planned. I’m feeling that flatness come on. I’m not motivated for the workout. And I just, it’s the best feeling in the world.
I just go, you know what? I’m gonna skip the workout. I go put my PJs on. I make a giant bowl of popcorn. And then here’s the trick. I watch a movie. It can’t be a good movie. It’s gotta be a really bad movie and just splay out on the couch and go, I’m gonna do everything wrong tonight. I’m going to eat crap.
I’m gonna watch crappy movies. I’m not gonna do my workout. And there’s just something mentally that just makes you go. Oh, I needed that.
[00:14:12] Grant Holicky: This is great coaching. This is phenomenal coaching, right? You’re
[00:14:15] Chris Case: a weird person.
[00:14:19] Grant Holicky: Does anybody really wanna see Trevor’s PJs? No,
[00:14:22] Trevor Connor: I didn’t say people could come over and watch me.
[00:14:26] Grant Holicky: I feel like they’re the Canadian Hockey National Team Kit in the PJ form. Right. Oh,
[00:14:33] Trevor Connor: they are. You’re gonna like this. They are plaid. They’re red and black, just because it drives Alina nuts
[00:14:41] Grant Holicky: with a giant Justin Trudeau picture on the front of them.
[00:14:44] Trevor Connor: I wish I did, but no
[00:14:46] Chris Case: moose slippers. Do you have moose slippers to go with it?
[00:14:48] Trevor Connor: I do have moose slippers. Yes I do.
[00:14:50] Chris Case: Of course. And you just lay on the couch, watch a really bad movie and drink maple syrup. Is that what you do?
[00:14:57] Trevor Connor: Yeah, I’ll tell you what, we’ll make this the picture for this potluck. I’ll take a picture of it. Me and my moose slippers and PJs for
[00:15:04] Chris Case: all right. Right. We’ll see how that goes for promotion.
[00:15:06] Grant Holicky: Watching great white noises.
[00:15:09] Trevor Connor: Do you know they were gonna make part two. All they needed was a million dollars and they couldn’t raise it.
[00:15:14] Grant Holicky: Very sad that they couldn’t raise it. You know, if Canada was the 51st state, they wouldn’t have had plenty of money.
[00:15:19] Trevor Connor: Yeah. Screw you. And by the way, called Strange Brew, not Gray, white, north.
[00:15:24] Grant Holicky: I always, same difference. It was the salt. I’m trying to think of the name of it.
[00:15:29] Chris Case: Okay. All right. Shall we move on to our next question?
[00:15:33] Trevor Connor: Yes. I’m excited about this one.
[00:15:35] Chris Case: Are we doing the big stupid ride?
[00:15:37] Trevor Connor: Oh, of course.
[00:15:38] Chris Case: So to the group, I’ll go last. What’s the stupidest ride? And by stupid, I don’t necessarily mean riding in traffic.
I mean longest or hardest, or just most ridiculous. What’s the big stupid ride that comes to mind that you’ve done, and what did you actually learn from this stupid thing that you did? Grant, we’ll start with you.
[00:16:05] Grant Holicky: I don’t do big stupid rides, but I will say part of why I don’t do them was a big stupid ride.
[00:16:11] Trevor Connor: Just to clarify, grant here, big stupid rides aren’t something you planned. They are something that happened to you.
[00:16:17] Grant Holicky: You know, I don’t know if I agree with that, but here’s the thing that doesn’t happen to me.
[00:16:21] Chris Case: Tell us about the Big Stupid Ride that ended all stupid rides for you.
[00:16:25] Grant Holicky: There you go. Fair enough.
So the big Stupid Ride that ended all stupid rides was a race. I did a 24 hour mountain bike race,
[00:16:33] Chris Case: ah,
[00:16:34] Grant Holicky: 24 hours in the Sage, which was Gunnison Growler course.
[00:16:37] Chris Case: Oh God.
[00:16:38] Grant Holicky: I did it solo and I did it on a single speed.
[00:16:41] Chris Case: Oh God, that’s beyond stupid.
[00:16:44] Grant Holicky: And I did it probably in 2005, so I was not fit. I had just done four years racing Xterra, and I stopped.
I joked that I can’t retire. I wasn’t good enough to retire, so I stopped racing, triathlon. I stopped racing Xterra, and my goal for the next few years was just to be fit enough to say yes to anything that came up. I did a marathon with my wife because the person she was getting ready to do the marathon with dropped out.
And I did this race 24 hours in the Sage ’cause my brother signed up for it and much friend signed up for it. And I said, you know what, I’m gonna do it solo on a single speed. And I was doing really, really pretty well. And I crashed at about three in the morning, dark and crashed hard. And I remember going into camp, and this wasn’t like a planned thing, right?
So it wasn’t like I rolled into camp and people were feeding me and chain washing the pike and lube and things. It wasn’t like a unbound pit stop. I was rolling into camp and going, I need some more bacon, or I need some more pasta, or whatever the heck we had made. And I had crashed and I sat down, which was the end all, and I sat down at three 30 in the morning and I fell asleep.
And I woke up at five 30 in the morning. And when I woke up, I was not disappointed that I had fallen asleep. I wasn’t like, oh man, I missed two laps. I woke up and went, oh, thank God I don’t have to ride in the dark anymore.
[00:18:10] Chris Case: Mm.
[00:18:10] Grant Holicky: But I came outta that, so beat up so sore. So. Demoralized that I just, the big, long, stupid ride is not a thing for me.
The only other one that kind of comes to mind is Trevor. I went on a ride with a local guy, pat Brown, who I used to race exter with, and we rode up to this section outside of Boulder and we’re probably four hours in, or three and a half hours in, we’re on our mountain bikes and we follow this trail up and it curls around the tree.
And it just stopped, but the trail just stopped and he was like, oh, it all connects, it comes through. We, it just, the trail ended and we had to backtrack the way we had come in, and it turned into a solid eight hour death march. I just don’t like it. I don’t wanna do that again. It’s not fun. I ran outta food, I ran outta water, I ran out of patience.
It’s just, I’m not good in that setting. So I’m out. I’m out, man.
[00:19:10] Chris Case: So you, you learned nothing at the 24 hour race except for the fact that you do not want to ever do something like that again.
[00:19:18] Grant Holicky: Yeah, but the biggest problem was I thought I had learned my lesson and then I followed somebody else.
[00:19:24] Chris Case: Yeah.
[00:19:25] Grant Holicky: When somebody else says, don’t worry, it’ll be great.
[00:19:28] Chris Case: You’ve heard those words before and you’re, that’s a warning to you.
[00:19:31] Grant Holicky: That’s out.
[00:19:32] Chris Case: Not an invitation.
[00:19:33] Grant Holicky: I know where this trail goes. It’s just over here. Don’t worry. It’s a great loop. It’s only a little bit of hike a bike. That’s famous last words when you hear that. Get out man. Just run. Get out,
[00:19:50] Chris Case: Julie.
[00:19:51] Julie Young: Oh gosh. I have to be honest, I’m a bit deflated because I think Grant outdid me on the stupid.
[00:19:58] Chris Case: I mean, that was pretty stupid what he described. I could see why he didn’t wanna ever do that again. Single speed. The growler course is, yeah, very technical. Doing that at night, oh my God.
[00:20:08] Grant Holicky: In 2005 on a hard tail.
[00:20:10] Chris Case: Yeah, and a probably a blown front chalk or something.
[00:20:14] Grant Holicky: You calling me fat?
[00:20:16] Chris Case: I am not.
[00:20:18] Julie Young: So my, my stupid was entering the Leadville 100 on a single speed.
[00:20:25] Chris Case: Mm.
[00:20:26] Julie Young: And you know, it’s funny, I don’t know if you guys ever have these situations where you’re like, you look at someone and they’re doing something and you’re like, God, I would never do that.
And it comes back to bite you.
[00:20:36] Chris Case: Yeah.
[00:20:36] Julie Young: And that’s like exactly what happened to me. So I got a single speed, I don’t know what came upon me, but I decided I’m gonna get a single speed and that’s all. I’m gonna ride exclusively for a mountain bike. And I started doing like all these events and I actually did the Tahoe Trail 100.
Mm-hmm. And that’s a qualifier for Leadville. And I ended up winning that overall. And so you get. A coin. And so I’m like, okay. You know, things were lining up. And it’s funny ’cause it’s, I know from the outside, like anytime I show up on a ride on my single speed, I kind of get that you’re crazy, you’re stupid, all the things.
But for me, like entering Leadville didn’t feel stupid, I guess when you feel prepared, things don’t feel crazy and things don’t feel stupid. And I also felt like my intention for doing it was. Really strong. Like I was really just drawn by the challenge of it. That was super exciting for me and I just like, I really honestly had a great time out there all day.
Like I had such a good time. I ended up setting the course record and I mean, towards the end of course then a hundred mile. Race. It’s not gonna be beautiful all the time, but for the most part it was a pretty good experience. And again, I think it was like my preparedness going in and my intention of like, I was totally doing it for myself, like the challenge of it and just was really like thriving on the challenge.
And so kind of present in that race of, ’cause I think for, I don’t know if you guys have ridden Leadville or. You know, like the flat parts, like that’s really where you gain your time.
[00:22:17] Chris Case: Yes. When you have gears.
[00:22:19] Julie Young: Yeah, exactly. So when, I just remember hitting that first bit of flat on the pavement and just being with a good group, but being at 120 RPMs and so thinking, well, this isn’t gonna last.
So I mean, I was totally okay with riding that course on my own and just doing the best I could and got to Columbine and I don’t know, I think I passed 50 people on Columbine, so it was kind of, I don’t know, it was fun. Like I just, it was a different kind of game. It didn’t feel like. Necessarily a bike race.
It was just like riding it in a very different way, a very different mindset, and I actually had a ton of fun.
[00:22:52] Grant Holicky: Hmm. Julie, this doesn’t sound like a big dumb ride.
[00:22:55] Julie Young: But it was to everybody else.
[00:22:58] Grant Holicky: Mm-hmm. Okay. Okay. I was almost gonna say that by definition, I think a big dumb ride is not being prepared.
[00:23:04] Julie Young: Yeah. I think my point is like from the outside it will look stupid and it looked crazy, but actually it’s like how you go into it, you know?
Absolutely. And I think what, when I was thinking about this question, I was thinking about that like very, very different. But the movie free solo. And where people think he’s crazy, but he’s so prepared and he rehearses things over and over and over, and it’s not crazy to him, but from the outside it looks crazy.
[00:23:30] Chris Case: I also think that the art or the act of choosing to ride a single speed and putting yourself at that disadvantage. Sometimes allows you to just let a bunch of other stuff fall away because you’re like, if I pass people and I’m on a single speed, that’s amazing. If I do this event and I have a good day and I’m at.
Such a disadvantage in quotes. That’s a great thing. So I feel like it actually keeps you more positive about what you’re able to achieve because of that.
[00:24:03] Julie Young: Yeah. There’s no pressure.
[00:24:05] Chris Case: There’s no pressure. Exactly.
[00:24:06] Grant Holicky: Exactly. That’s what I was gonna say. It takes the pressure off, and I remember when I started riding single speed.
It was because I had come off of triathlon and Exterra specifically, and I was going and I was riding with my brother and my friends that weren’t in the same level of fitness as me. But one of the things it did for me was take the pressure off of having to be the good mountain biker in the group, or the fit one in the group.
I’m not, I’m never the good technical rider anywhere that I go.
[00:24:32] Chris Case: Yeah.
[00:24:32] Grant Holicky: But from a fitness standpoint, it took some of the pressure off. And I’ve had athletes that. Have raced single speed cyclocross at A UCI level because it just lets them race harder. They’re just a little more free. They’re just not worried about it.
[00:24:47] Chris Case: Not to put a negative spin on it, but I feel like part of it is the fact that you have a built-in excuse.
[00:24:54] Grant Holicky: Absolutely.
[00:24:55] Chris Case: If you don’t do well, eh? I was on a single speed. What do you expect?
[00:24:59] Grant Holicky: I even had an athlete say that to me one time. They’re like, listen, I know this is part of it. I know I’m creating an excuse for myself.
I know I’m taking the pressure off and at some point I can’t do this anymore. And I, I was like, well, hey man, if you’re saying it out loud, then I’m with you. I’m okay. I mean, if, yeah. Right. If you’re admitting that, if you know what you’re getting yourself into, I’m all for it. Mm-hmm.
[00:25:21] Trevor Connor: Okay, so I’ll go next. I kind of went into.
Overload. Trying to think of which story to tell, because I could tell stories like getting caught in the mountains in the cold and breaking into a church to heat up. That ended up with my friend in a pizza place sitting beside the pizza oven for 45 minutes. Or Chris, there was that stupid gravel race that you and I did a four person team.
On the steepest hills in Boulder County and I showed up with an 1123 and raced you up lick, skillet, and almost fell over.
[00:25:55] Chris Case: Yeah, that was officially dumb.
[00:25:57] Trevor Connor: That was really dumb. But yeah, my, probably my dumbest ride. When I lived in Vancouver Island, we had this route that we did. It was the soup ride that was 120 miles of nothing but up and down, 15% grades.
It was a ride. We’d take new guys on every once in a while just to see if we could make ’em cry. And it went all the way out to this little town. There was a logging town and you turned around there not because it was convenient, you turned around there because you couldn’t go any further. There were no more roads.
And it was a tiny town, but there was a gas station there, so I was doing this ride by myself, and my plan was I’d get out there, I’d stop at the gas station, refuel, and then head back, but I was doing the ride on a Monday. And sorry. Another important thing to know about this route is that is a logging town.
So you have logging trucks going back and forth on this road, and if anybody hasn’t seen a true logging truck, they are bigger than an 18 wheeler. They are enormous, they are dangerous. They’re like a train they take forever to stop. They will take you out. So you have to be really careful. And first part of the ride went fine.
I got to the town. I was outta food. I was outta water. It was on a Monday. And I got there and found out that the gas station was closed on Mondays. So I couldn’t get any fuel. I couldn’t get any water. And I’m going, oh crap, I’ve got three hours back. And there’s not a single store on the way. And then did the math.
It was three hours back and the sun was setting in two hours, and I was looking at an hour in the dark with the logging trucks going, okay, I’m gonna die now. So with no food and water, I basically had to time trial back. To try to not get caught in the dark. I ended up doing it in two hours, 15, got home, walked into my apartment or kinda limped into my apartment and just collapsed on the floor in my kitchen and then couldn’t even get up to get food.
There was some place mats on my counter. I reached up and started pulling on those, ’cause I knew there was some food on them. So got the food to fall off of my counter and just basically ate whatever hit the floor. So that was probably my dumbest ride ever.
[00:28:30] Chris Case: But the most important part of this question is what did you learn from this experience?
[00:28:37] Trevor Connor: Absolutely nothing because I had done that sort of stuff. Sense. Maybe make sure that you have an exit strategy when you do a ride like that, or you bring enough food
[00:28:48] Chris Case: Plan B. Yeah,
[00:28:49] Trevor Connor: I don’t know. It was just,
[00:28:51] Chris Case: yeah.
[00:28:51] Trevor Connor: Uh, check when the sun is setting before you go for a long ride. I don’t know. There’s things that most people would take for granted.
[00:28:58] Chris Case: Okay. Let’s talk about one of the biggest mistakes we see athletes make when they start training with power. They assume all power data is created equal, and that’s just not true. If your numbers aren’t accurate, then your zones are off. Your intervals are off, and suddenly all that structure we talk about starts to break down.
That’s why we’re big believers and starting with a system you can trust stages. Cycling has been in this space since 2013 and they focused on solving that exact problem. While there are other meters out there that look like a stages meter, what’s inside and behind stages is what really counts,
[00:29:35] Trevor Connor: and that’s why one of the things I appreciate is their approach to calibration.
Every single unit is individually calibrated. That level of precision matters more than most athletes realize. And then there’s temperature. Anyone who’s trained outdoors knows the environment is constantly changing. Stages brought the concept of active temperature compensation to power meter technology stages, meters, adjust in real time for temperature changes so your power doesn’t drift as environmental conditions change.
And that’s huge because if your power drifts by even a few percent, that can completely change the intent of a workout
[00:30:10] Chris Case: and stages takes it a step further by preventing users from manually altering force or temperature calibration. That might sound restrictive, but it’s actually protecting your data integrity and maintaining the device’s accuracy and consistency.
And then there’s the flexibility in how you measure power. You can start simple with a left only meter, use the right only option on hard to fit bikes or go full dual-sided. If you want deeper insight into balance and efficiency, which makes it accessible, whether you’re just getting into structured training or you’re already deep into performance optimization.
[00:30:43] Trevor Connor: The end of the day, power is one of the best tools you have as an athlete, but only if the data is trustworthy. If you’re serious about improving, it’s worth taking a look at stages cycling and seeing how accurate consistent data can sharpen your training. To learn more, go to stages cycling.com.
[00:31:00] Julie Young: Hey, Chris.
We’re on the edge of our seats. Let’s hear it.
[00:31:03] Trevor Connor: Is this a yogurt story?
[00:31:05] Chris Case: No, this isn’t a yogurt story. This is from, um, a bike packing race that I did in Ireland. So the route is 1500 miles. So you can make the ride as long or as short as you want because it’s a single stage. And the clock starts ticking. I had three goals for this race, which were to ride more than 24 hours straight as objective number one.
Number two was to ride the longest distance I’d ever ridden before, which would have had to be over 205 ish miles. ’cause I’ve done unbound a couple times. And I wanted to finish the race in under about seven days, something like that, because a friend of mine had previously done it and I wanted to beat him basically.
So we start off in, uh, dairy up in the north of, it’s actually Northern Ireland, and you immediately cross the bridge and then you’re on the route. It’s a fixed route. Everybody’s going. And I rode and I rode, and I rode and I rode, and I got to 24 hours and kept going. I checked that one off on the first day, which is a really dumb way to start a really, really long bike race is to go incredibly deep.
The gist of the story is that I ended up riding. 36 straight hours. I rode 360 miles in that time and did 30,000 feet of climbing.
[00:32:33] Trevor Connor: Nice.
[00:32:35] Chris Case: And I would say oof, there were so many incredibly low moments in that 36 hours, and there were some incredibly high moments driven by who knows what, brain chemistry and all sorts of stuff that was going on inside my body.
It was a. A massive rollercoaster and I would say I learned a lot. I don’t know that I learned it in the moment, so follow that big stupid ride with six more that were approximately 200 miles. To finish this race. So I got finished with that ride and I walked to the nearest gas station in my cycling shoes and my kit because I had no other clothing.
And I bought a box of really stale granola and some yogurt, and I ate that ’cause that’s basically all I could find at the gas station. And I fell asleep for a few hours and then I got up and I started riding again. And that is a bike packing race in a nutshell, and that’s a really big and stupid thing to do, but it comes with rewards.
It completely reset. Everything I’ve ever done since then is if I think I’m doing something hard, I just remember back to that day and I’m like. I’ve only been riding for four hours. I’ve only been riding for eight hours. I’ve only been riding for 10 hours. This is easy. It just completely resets what me as a human being is capable of doing.
It’s unbelievable in that way. I would also say it taught me a lesson about bike pack racing that it wasn’t for me because. I wanted to stop and take in the views and I wanted to linger in certain places and I wanted to enjoy it a bit more, and being a competitive person and going into this with the intention of it being a race.
I couldn’t let myself linger too long, and there was constantly this conflict within me like, Ooh, this is so beautiful. Ooh, I gotta keep going. Ooh, I wanna stop here. Ooh, I shouldn’t stop here. And so I don’t know that I’ll ever do a bike packing race like that again. We’ll see. But mostly I think on the positive side, it really just reset so many things about my just overall capabilities and also my.
Tolerance for discomfort and lack of nutrition. I mean, I ate, I probably was in 10,000 calorie deficit after that day or day and a half. I don’t know what it,
[00:35:23] Trevor Connor: yeah.
[00:35:24] Chris Case: So in any case, I kept going.
[00:35:26] Trevor Connor: So Chris, I’m gonna say on the contest of, of big stupid ride. You clearly won on big and impressive, but I think as usual, I still beat you on stupid.
[00:35:37] Chris Case: I mean, yeah, you can have the stupid part if you wanna. If you want it, you can have it,
[00:35:41] Trevor Connor: so we’ll call it a draw.
[00:35:42] Grant Holicky: Congrats.
[00:35:45] Chris Case: I hope that somebody out there learned a little something too from listening to us about, maybe they were inspired. Maybe they were like, nah, single speed at the Growler sounds really dumb.
I’m not gonna do that because Grant did it for me.
[00:35:59] Trevor Connor: Yeah, well, there was a dude doing it there on a fixie. That year.
[00:36:03] Chris Case: Oh God. Oh man.
[00:36:05] Trevor Connor: I think the lesson they, they all learned is stop listening to these people for advice.
[00:36:09] Chris Case: Nah, that’s not good. I raced against somebody at Lata and they did it on a single speed.
So incredibly impressive. Like he was a well-known, really strong, I’m not sure if he was a national champion, but he probably was a national champion, single speed mountain biker. And it was unbelievable to watch him ride, but that was his thing. He was the person that every ride he did was on a single speed.
So his body was a absolute rock. And he could pull it off. In any case, there are big and stupid things out there that none of us have done, and maybe some people can send us some letters about the big stupid rides that they’ve done and we can learn from them.
[00:36:50] Grant Holicky: Yeah, I’d love to hear about ’em. Please share the stories.
[00:36:53] Julie Young: Yeah. I do think in the big stupid things, you learn a lot about yourself though, like you said, Chris, like the highs and the lows and kind of how you pull yourself through those lows. It’s pretty empowering.
[00:37:04] Chris Case: It is. It is very much empowering if you’re able to pay attention to the ways and the methods by which you work through those hard periods.
If you just go into it and it’s your brain is so pissed off or starved of attention for what you’re doing or starved of the nutrition, it needs to actually absorb what you’re doing, then you probably, all that is lost. But if there’s reflection on it or in the moment you’re kind of like, how am I gonna work through this process?
There’s no other option but to keep going. What am I gonna do to keep myself going and find that motivation? I feel like that is a, a powerful. Lesson.
[00:37:47] Trevor Connor: My little bit of philosophy is life is all about having good stories to tell, and those are the rides that you’ll still be telling the stories in your eighties.
[00:37:55] Chris Case: Yep.
[00:37:55] Trevor Connor: I don’t know. I love to tell my friends about the nice three hour ride that I went on where I had enough food and enough water
[00:38:03] Grant Holicky: and you drink the recovery and I had a nice dinner, I had a beer and went to bed. I don’t know that. Maybe a odd,
[00:38:10] Chris Case: it’s sometimes nice to talk about the rides where you end up at a French bakery and you eat a nice pastry and then you go home.
[00:38:17] Grant Holicky: Yep, absolutely.
[00:38:19] Chris Case: So let’s finish up with a last question here. What. Is the most influential book you’ve read on training or being an athlete or something in the endurance sports? Rem Trevor, let’s start with you.
[00:38:32] Trevor Connor: Yeah, hands down, I’ve read a bunch of books. I’ve gotten a great value out of many of them, but the one that was just life changing for me and it was, it was recommended to me, was Jack Daniel’s running Formula.
And I will tell you half of it I didn’t understand particularly ’cause I was a cyclist and when I got into the the deep running stuff, I just didn’t understand at the time the terminology. Well, what I loved about this book, and I recommend for everybody, is the first couple chapters where he really explains the principles extraordinarily well, just the principles of physiology.
Talks about the nature of athletes, just gives those core understandings that you really need before you can get into the sort of details of training. It just changed how I trained overall and just made me understand what’s gonna push burnout, how adaptation works. It’s a book I’d recommend to anybody.
[00:39:32] Chris Case: Excellent. Grant, what would you say here?
[00:39:37] Trevor Connor: I
[00:39:37] Chris Case: have never, you’ve got a lot of books behind you right now, by the way.
[00:39:41] Trevor Connor: Yeah.
[00:39:42] Chris Case: And they’re probably not at all about endurance sports.
[00:39:45] Grant Holicky: Nope.
[00:39:45] Chris Case: Because I know that’s not your office. Nope. But go ahead.
[00:39:48] Grant Holicky: Not my office. No, but I would say this, that very, very few books in my library are about endurance sport.
I think the majority of the books that I read and try to apply to my coaching or sport are. Psychology.
[00:40:03] Chris Case: Mm-hmm.
[00:40:03] Grant Holicky: Books
[00:40:04] Chris Case: no
[00:40:04] Grant Holicky: surprise. Um, yeah, not a shock, right? But probably it changed my outlook on sport. It changed my outlook on life. It was a book by Daniel Gilbert called Stumbling on Happiness, and it’s basically talking about what.
Causes happiness in our lives and how bad we are at predicting future in our own lives, like our own future feelings. If I complete this race or if I win this race, this is how I’m going to feel. And none of it’s about racing. It’s all about. How we see ourselves and how we can develop happiness and how we can develop joy in our lives.
And to me, I grew up as a swimmer. I will always say this, and I’ve said this before on this show, but the hardest thing about swimming is when you’re growing up. If you go one 100th of a second slower than your best time, it’s a bad day. If you go one 100th faster than your best time, it’s a good day. So having your good and bad hinge on two, one hundredths of a second over the course of a minute, race is crazy.
It’s insane, but it calibrates your brain in a certain way. And I think runners can be this way too. Track runners, it’s so, it’s so cut and dry. The time is defining how you performed and. I had a really hard time bringing that to cycling and triathlon because it was so binary. It was so black and white.
It was a good day, bad day, and I really struggled for a long time understanding how to perform poorly, but feel like have a bad result, but feel good about my race or have a great result and still be critical of my race. And I think. That book and some other books that don’t have anything to do with sport.
They have everything to do with the mind and how we see ourselves and how we build the world around us. That, to me, was really critical in understanding how to kind of build a career in sport that I could be proud of, and that that made me happy that as a coach, I wasn’t constantly beating myself up over the performance of my athletes.
And so for me that was really important is to understand that.
[00:42:14] Chris Case: Very good. Julie.
[00:42:16] Julie Young: So this, this is gonna seem like a strange one, but the really influential book for me was Greg Lamont’s book of Complete Bicycling, I think it was called. And the reason why is I came into the sport, I was, I had been a soccer player and an alpine ski racer, and as a sophomore in high school tore my ACL.
And was on my way to play collegiate soccer, and so I was devastated. Wanted to figure because I really wanted to play. We really wanted to play sport in college. And so I thought to myself, well, like after I picked myself up mentally, what can I do? And so I figured, okay, with a bad knee I can play golf.
So I like put my head down. Became super determined, learned how to play golf. I got into UCLA, made the golf team, played golf for a couple years on, on the team, and then had at that point kind of decided I don’t think golf is for me. Like it’s just not kind of. Float my boat. It’s not giving me that exhilaration.
And at that point I started. Doing some like 10 K runs with my sorority sisters and bought a bike. And from my Alpine ski racing, we had used the bike as like training. And so I kind of like remembered the bike, like, okay, I’ll get a bike and would go up PCH and go up into the Malibu canyons and, and then I came home from, once I graduated from UCLA, I was back in Sacramento and had a job in foreign investment and would just ride my bike up and down the bike path like 40 miles.
You know, I had no idea there was this world of bike. Sickle racing. And fortunately at that time, for whatever reason, Sacramento was like this hub, like so many of the seven 11 riders were there, the McKinley brothers, norm Alvis, Eric Hyden, Harvey Knits. And so there were some human interest stories about these guys and so I was like, oh my gosh, there’s bike racing is a thing.
Like I had no clue. So that like the next day, ran down to the bike shop, figure out how I could do this. I think somebody at the bike shop mentioned that book. So I bought that book and I just like literally followed it verbatim. That was like kind of the only thing in those days. There wasn’t the web, there weren’t these pathways, like through Nica, there was no real mentors and literally it was just that book for me.
And like within a half a year I was able to take myself just training myself through that book, take myself from a Cat four to cat one, and then that next year. Had been identified by the national team, then it subsequently invited to national team training camps and made the national team. But again, it was just that book and basically following verbatim that book, I’m like literally nothing else.
And so that’s why that book is so meaningful to me. And I, it was interesting. I was listening to a podcast with Dr. San Milan like recently, and he mentioned that book and how it’s, he feels that it’s still relevant and I was like. Shocked by that because I mean, just personally, it just, it had that personal story for me and that I felt like it was so powerful through that personal story.
But it was also interesting to hear him say it. He thought it was relevant,
[00:45:26] Chris Case: so mine’s a little bit odd as well in that it didn’t contain a whole lot of training advice. I honestly don’t remember how much methodology was in there, or physiology was in there, but I had, when I was a young kid and I was getting into running at a serious level, my dad bought me a book that was mostly a training diary.
Before the days of any data analytics, before the days of Strava, you had to use a piece of paper and a pencil or a pen to write it all down and log it all, and that as a kid. We’re talking like a 10-year-old is when I got serious, 10 or 12 or something like that. I started running when I was probably eight.
The act of recording that, the act of looking back on that and reflecting on what training worked and what didn’t as in a 10 year old’s mind and in a at that level, was something that I think set the stage for my life style as an athlete. I was never a professional, but. I probably at times had a professional’s mindset and I lived sort of as much as I could while always having a job and going to school and all that.
Because I just thought it was a serious endeavor and I wanted to be my best. And it all started with recording what I did, knowing what I did, knowing what worked by looking back on it. And so that book, that simple diary, was extremely influential and set the stage. I transitioned at some point. We all do.
I think it’s rare. It’s very rare to have somebody devote their lives to single sport throughout their life. But I switched from running to cycling at some point and didn’t really know a whole lot about the sport when I did, and I think any list of most influential books. Is bound to include Joe reel’s, cyclist training, Bible or the other versions, triathletes, training, Bible, things like that.
And I think to this day, that book is probably influenced in some way more cyclists than maybe any other book. You know, it’s got so much information and it lays it out in such a way, and it would be. Unfair if we didn’t mention that book in some way, if people out there haven’t read that book and it’s what in its eighth edition at this point?
[00:47:48] Grant Holicky: Yeah. It’s something ridiculous. Yeah.
[00:47:50] Chris Case: Yeah. It remains extremely influential. It’s packed with good stuff. It’s not as if Joe hasn’t changed and updated it immensely over the years and added. To it as the sport has changed and as technology has entered the game and all that sort of stuff. So it’s up to date, it’s current and it’s still relevant.
[00:48:09] Grant Holicky: I think those books, there’s so much in those, right? I remember moving to Boulder in 99 in a friend where I worked at Rally Sport at the time saying, you’re a swimmer, you should be a triathlete. And me kind of going, okay. And getting that the Joe Frills complete Triathlon Training handbook or whatever he called it, and reading this and going much like you, Julie, with Lamont’s book going, okay, this is exactly how I’m going to do it.
And it felt attainable the way they presented it. It felt like something I could actually do. And so I did it and I had this athlete’s mindset that doesn’t like to compromise and tries to do a little bit more, and I think we’re all like that. And it turned into something, right? I was like racing at a pretty high level for triathlon in a fringe aspect of triathlon.
But yeah, those books, like you’re saying, may seem like a silly thing, but whatever drives us into this stuff is what really matters. Because if those things didn’t exist, we wouldn’t even be doing this stuff.
[00:49:18] Chris Case: That’s right.
[00:49:19] Grant Holicky: And that’s what matters.
[00:49:21] Chris Case: Yeah.
[00:49:21] Julie Young: But Grant, you’re right. I mean, I think that’s true about these books.
Like you said, maybe it’s not heavy science right now, but at the time it felt very attainable and like for me, I just think. A case study, like I didn’t come from an aerobic sport, alpine ski racing, golfing, soccer. I had no idea of, like I wasn’t a rower, I wasn’t a runner, I wasn’t a speed skater. I had no idea of what like endurance sport looked like.
And it was, yeah, it was such a good little entry book for me and I don’t know, it just like I have a special place for that book.
[00:49:55] Chris Case: Do you have a signed copy?
[00:49:56] Julie Young: I wish,
[00:49:59] Grant Holicky: Greg, we need a signed copy. Yes. Somebody who knows. Greg, we need a signed copy.
[00:50:03] Julie Young: Yes.
[00:50:03] Grant Holicky: I, I wish I still had it. I lo, I think I lost that book, Joe’s book in the fire.
My, I know I lost my original like triathlon training diary in the fire
[00:50:12] Julie Young: probably underlined and all the things.
[00:50:15] Grant Holicky: Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. Like yeah, for sure. I had so much of that stuff saved, but I, I think you’re right, Julie. You know, coming from, I, I was a swimmer, but swimming’s not endurance sport. We train like it is, but it’s not, and.
We’re training two hours a day for a one minute event, which is just insane. But yeah, I also played baseball and soccer. And you’re standing there as a baseball player going, yeah, cardio. What is that? Let’s go lay in the outfield while the other guys take batting practice. It was great. I gotta get back into that sport.
It was way more fun.
[00:50:52] Chris Case: Alright, well thank you all for another great discussion. That was another episode of Fast Talk. Subscribe to Fast Talk wherever you prefer to find your favorite podcast. And hey, don’t forget we’re now on YouTube. Give us a like, subscribe there and help us grow our reach. As always, remember that thoughts and opinions expressed on Fast Talk are those of the individual.
Join us on social media at Fast Talk Labs for access to our endurance sports content and continuing education. For coaches, head to Fast talk labs.com. For Julie Young, grant Hokey and Trevor Connor. I’m Chris Case. Thanks for listening.
