Passion Blindness in Cycling

When loving the sport gets in the way

The riders who care the most are often the worst judges of their own training. The fix is objectivity, and you can get it three ways: a coach, a plan written before the season gets stressful, and honest numbers from a power meter and a heart rate strap.

We call it passion blindness: you are so close to the thing you love that you stop seeing it clearly. A big race is three weeks out, you feel flat, and the voice in your head says the answer is more intervals, more hours, and one more hard day. Sometimes that voice is right, but a lot of the time it is the reason a rider shows up to the start line cooked.

We have coached riders for years, and this is a mistake we see a lot, often from the riders we like best, and it comes from caring, not from laziness.

Hire objectivity

The first fix is a coach, not because a coach knows secrets you don't, but because a coach is not you. A good coach loves a peak performance as much as you do and still looks at the numbers in a cold, plain way.

Think about how many experienced riders keep paying a coach long after they have learned how to train. They are not paying for the workouts, but for someone who stays calm when they don't.

What a coach really gives you is a calm outside opinion when you are too close to your own training to judge it.That matters most when a big race is close and the pressure is on.

Write the plan while you are calm

The second fix is to make your big decisions in the off season, before the race nerves show up.

1. Pick your key races and put them on the calendar.
2. Pen in the heavy training blocks around those races.
3. Mark the rest weeks and the taper, and treat them as training, not as time off.
4. When the season gets loud, lean on the plan you made when it was quiet.

Seeing the whole year from that relaxed, big-picture view is what keeps you from adding a hard week three days before a race because you panicked. Plan your work, then work your plan on purpose. A coach can build the plan with you, and the confidence of having it on paper takes a lot of the guesswork stress out of the season.

Let the numbers tell on you

The third fix is honest feedback. A power meter and a heart rate monitor together are about as honest as it gets. You can feel like you need to train harder, but the watts and the heart rate show what is really going on.

This is a real example from one of us. On a normal endurance day he holds about 270 watts at a heart rate around 140. One morning he started a long ride and saw 140 on the heart rate, but only 195 to 210 watts. After the warmup it was still about 50 watts low at the same heart rate.

He turned around 30 minutes in and went home, and the next morning he woke up with the flu.

We are not saying a power meter diagnoses anything, because it does not. What it did was show a mismatch he could not argue with. With heart rate alone he would have seen a normal 140 and kept going, and the only other clue would have been a slower pace, which changes with every hill and headwind anyway. He would have done the planned ride and likely felt worse for it. Heart rate is useful, but power is a real-time number you cannot talk your way around. If you want both numbers, we carry heart rate straps like the Garmin HRM 200 and the Wahoo TRACKR, plus a full range of power meters.

Doing the math honestly

Numbers also tell you whether the training is working. We have had athletes run a standardized, all-out 20 minute test every week, on the same stretch of road, so the result is comparable week to week. The test is hard, but it turns "I think I'm getting fitter" into a number. If you want the background on threshold testing, our FTP explainer covers it.

This is how we would use that number with a made-up rider who weighs 72 kilos.

He wants 5.0 watts per kilo, because that is the number he thinks wins races for him. He has two levers to pull, and the arithmetic matters.

At 72 kilos, 5.0 W/kg means 360 watts, which is about 7 watts more than his best last season. At 69 kilos, 5.0 W/kg means 345 watts, which is actually a little under last season's best. Most coached plans pull a little on both levers: get the power back to where it was, and bring weight down slowly. Back at about 353 watts and down at 69 kilos, he would be just over 5.1.

The weight part is where riders get hurt, so go slow. In our experience, dropping weight fast while trying to build power usually means losing both, and that is why the sports nutrition position statement from the American College of Sports Medicine and two dietitian organizations tells athletes to work with a registered dietitian for a personal plan. We agree, so count on your coach for the bike side and a dietitian for the kitchen side.

A coach keeps you honest about effort. Someone outside your head sees what you cannot.

A plan keeps you honest about timing. It lets the calm version of you make the calls.

The numbers keep you honest about everything else. Watts and heart rate do not care how you feel.

Use a coach, a written plan and your power and heart rate numbers if you can, and use at least one of them no matter what.

If you coach yourself

Coaching yourself is great, as long as you are honest with yourself. Write your own plan, then follow it and watch your numbers. If they are moving the right way, the plan is working. If they are not, that is the moment to get help.

Be careful with free advice from training partners. It is usually well meant and often pretty good in general, but it rarely accounts for your whole schedule and your current load, and what you need is advice built around your fitness and your goals. Our favorite part of coaching is watching an athlete blow right past the goals they set in the off season. Do not let passion blindness be the thing that costs you that.

And if your power is 50 watts below normal at your usual heart rate, cut the ride short and go home.