Dead Presidents: Denominations
1) It’s our President’s Day Ride.“Denomination’s Ride.” There are effort blocks (errr, denominations) of one, two, five, ten and TWENTY minutes. The goal is to challenge your cardiovascular system across varied durations.
2) Research shows it takes five to twenty minutes to warm up while cycling. Remember, heart rate is not a measure of effort, it’s a measure of your body’s response to effort. This week’s profile challenges you to identify intensity and intelligently engage both your aerobic and anaerobic energy systems in each effort block.
Baechle TR, and Earle WE, (2008). Essentials of Strength Training and Conditioning (3rd). Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics.
3) Time to Exhaustion (more here | or here), how long it takes you to lose your breath, is an emerging metric that is important in endurance sports. Taken with Recovery Rate, how long it takes to stabilize your heart rate, paints a good picture of your ability to push, recover, and be ready to surge again. Training/power/heart-rate zones are fantastic quantitative measures of intensity. Understanding at least one goes a long way to avoiding exhaustion. Get that heart rate monitor!
4) Speaking of staying calm, I look to climbers for life lessons on self-confidence and understanding one’s limitations. Academy Award-winning documentary Free Solo, is about a dude who climbs a 3000-foot mountain with no ropes. In the movie, the climber (Alex Hannold) responds to critics who claim he is taking too big of a risk: “It’s not like I am just pushing pushing pushing until something bad happens.” He prepared for years. And then took the risk. At several points in the film he talks about “expanding [his] comfort zone.” Bringin it back to cycling, the ability to control one’s breathing and not take unnecessary risks by allowing your heart rate to spike is very similar to expanding one’s comfort zone.
5) Something I’ve admired in people who accomplish such big feats is their willingness to fail — even Alex Hannold fails! I love this Tim Tebow interview where he was asked about why he switched from football to baseball. The interviewee said he was hurting his marketability should he (continue to) fail. Tebow’s response was GOLDEN:
"If we go after something and we fall short ... who said that's a bad thing? Sometimes we don't make it," Tebow said. "Not everyone is going to be the best in the world. At least I don't have to live with regret. I didn't want my life to be defined by hypotheticals. I wanted to go after my dreams. My dreams were more valuable than other people's opinions."
Listen to the full interview here . . clip of Tebow quote below courtesy of WFAN/Audacy
Patrick Mahomes, after winning his second Super Bowl (and MVP), also spoke on failure:
But the first Super Bowl was kind of like, ‘This is amazing. We won the Super Bowl.’ Just happy, just like a little kid winning a prize at the fair. . . .Whereas this one, you’ve dealt with failure. You understand how hard it is to get back on this stage and win this game.
Lastly, if you’ve never seen the movie Dead Presidents (our banner for this post), or heard the soundtrack, you are missing out.