Spring Break and How Textbooks Lie

Over Spring Break (my last one!) I had the opportunity to train like a full time elite athlete on my team’s annual Spring Break training trip to Scottsdale, Arizona. I love it--it’s so enjoyable to focus solely on training all week and spend time with the team. After a winter spent in New York riding inside a sweaty trainer studio, riding with the beautiful Arizona vistas was bliss. I also really enjoyed making my own food to fuel workouts, along with a few “recovery” trips to Chick Fil A. Also, the house we rented had a hot tub so life basically couldn’t get better.

Spring Break also gave me a really good opportunity to push my limits by training with people faster than me. I spent a lot of time hanging on to the back of the bike pack because I was deliberately pushing myself to ride with the fast pack, even though most of them are far stronger cyclists than me. As a result, I spent a substantial percentage of my spring break out of breath and hanging on for dear life--heart pounding, legs burning, staring at the wheel in front of me vaguely wondering how long I could keep this pace up. In between wondering when I was going to get dropped and trying to get Kanye playing on my phone, I began to realize this discomfort level felt suspiciously like races often do. Even people who don’t race can relate to a general feeling of physical and mental discomfort. I was out of my normal pack, pushing the boundary of what I thought I could do. Sometimes it worked really well, and other times I ended up alone, dragging my poor body up the side of a mountain at snail pace as the boys biked off into the sunset.

But being uncomfortable being the slow girl in the fast pack is not a bad thing--it’s where growth happens. We find personal growth in abundance when we slingshot ourselves right through our comfort zones--not just hanging out on the edge but hurling ourselves at the thin line between where we feel confident and where we are unsure, staying there as long as we can before the pack finally leaves us in the dust. But it’s okay to “fail” because you still went faster than you previously knew you could. On those rides I moved the line of where I thought my limit was.

Discomfort is probably the most efficient way to discover your own limits. No one but me is allowed to tell me where the limit to my speed and success is. I must find my limits myself. Victor Frankl[1] emphatically reminds us that “Textbooks tell lies! Somewhere it is stated that man cannot exist without sleep for more than a stated number of hours. Quite wrong! I had been convinced there were certain things I just could not do.” For example, one of my instructors recently told the class about a drivers training he received learning how to drift vehicles (this anecdote is also a plug for how awesome the Army is). As part of the training he had to turn the wheel into the corner until the car drifted. He watched as many others did the course over and over, every time with a little more speed but never fully drifting, never actually going outside their limits. It took some people dozens of laps to finally push the limit incrementally enough to “fail” and drift around the turn. In contrast, my instructor got in the car, sped into the corner, turned the wheel and refused to let go, despite mental reservations about crashing the vehicle. Unlike the others, he drifted the vehicle on the first try, and he found his limit immediately. My instructor deliberately put himself into a position where he had to be comfortable being uncomfortable in order to find where the limit of the vehicle was.

I am not advocating that we all go drift our cars around corners or push our bodies in unsafe ways without proper coaching and recovery, but as I continue to train I want to use the tough workouts to find the line and push it a little farther every day. As runner Amy Cragg writes, “the only way you will get there one day is if every single race, you try to get a little bit farther.”[2] I want to train outside my comfort zone until it becomes my comfort zone and then push it even more. Anything less would be settling without ever figuring out how much I can accomplish.

Hanging on to someone's wheel featuring Pit Vipers

[1] Author of “Man’s Search for Meaning,” which is a really good book when you need a little perspective.

[2] Amy Cragg quoted in “What does it take to Win?” by Steve Denning for Forbes Magazine, Feb 24, 2016

Special Thanks To Care Kehn for her help in editing this blog post.