Toughness

I finished reading Leadership Secrets of the Rogue Warrior this weekend. It was recommended as a good motivational book by Ross Enamait. It was maybe a little over-the-top, but it was basically good. The gist of the book was that you should be busting your butt when you're doing whatever it is that you do.

It did get me thinking about the importance of being mentally (and physically) tough. For example, the last lap of my 'cross race at Stony was basically all about being tough. I got passed for 4th place right at the beginning of the lap, and the guy in 6th was right behind me. In that situation, you have a choice. Am I going to let this guy get away, or am I going to do whatever it takes to stay with him? Of course, the correct answer is the latter, and then it just gets down to having the toughness to actually do it. In this particular race, I cracked before the end, and they both got away. I don't really feel bad about it, I hung on for a long time and I just could not stay with them anymore at the end. The deal is, the next time, I expect to do better.

So, how to improve this kind of toughness? I think doing long threshold intervals is good, but I also like doing the following two exercises off the bike as part of strength and core workouts.

First, the stationary wall squat. This one will smoke your quads. Keeping your legs tense makes it harder. I've progressed to where I can hold this for two minutes, doing 3 sets. After a minute and a half or so (especially the second and third time around), my legs are twitching and my body is begging to quit. You "simply" have to make the decision not to. (This picture is clearly "posed", usually I'm not smiling. ;) I also usually try to get a little lower, so my upper leg is about parallel to the floor.)

The second one is a pretty common core exercise, the plank. I usually hold this for two minutes also; I could probably go longer, but done in a circuit with other core exercises, two minutes is still pretty tough. (In fact, reading what I just wrote, I should start trying to go longer!)

One of the other things I'd like to incorporate next year are some of Ross's anaerobic conditioning drills. These are great for working on pushing through fatigue. I'm not sure how I can incorporate these into the rest of my training plan without burning out quickly though.

On an unrelated topic, I watched another mountain bike movie, No Recess - Welcome to the East, Friday night. It ended up being mostly urban riding, which is cool and all, but really not my cup of tea. The last movie I watched was considerably better; I probably wouldn't watch this one again.

I'm heading back over to Germany for the week. I'm leaving in a few hours, so no new blog entries for a while.