In the Mood to Kick Ass?

Turn that frown upside down! How you manage, manipulate, and reframe your emotions can positively impact performance.


Selene Yeager |

Turn that frown upside down! How you manage, manipulate, and reframe your emotions can positively impact performance. – By Selene Yeager

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A funny thing happened Saturday morning as I stood on the line under heavy leaden-gray skies with nearly 500 other shivering racers awaiting the start of a much-anticipated race. I felt happy.True story. Though I had the usual kaleidoscope of butterflies flapping around inside, I didn’t have a single ounce of pre-race misery. No feelings of impending doom. I hadn’t spent the morning muttering to myself about why I put myself through this anyway. I was, dare I say it, stoked.

And because I have worked for years (decades?) to attain the mental state of pre-competition stoke, I was really freaking stoked to be stoked. Even better, not only was I stoked, I was confident and comfortable in my heart that no matter what the outcome (barring of course, true catastrophe, not the self-fabricated variety), I’d have a good day.Moods and mental states are often an overlooked and underappreciated element of recreational competition. We’re not making a living at this stuff, so we shouldn’t get all worked up about it, right? Yeah. Right.We are human. And with humanity comes emotions. We can’t pretend we’re just a floating head on a bike that is powered solely by lungs and legs. We train and race with both our actual and emotional heart. We invest time and money and hopes and dreams into training and preparing for challenging events and races. On a physiological level, all that training and racing stirs up hormones that can profoundly impact—in fact sometimes overwhelm—our moods and emotional state.RELATED: Train Your Brain to Survive the RideI know I’ve nearly packed it in numerous times because I was sick of the misery-inducing nerves. I know racers who have. But as I tell my pre-teen daughter, you can’t control how you feel, but you can control what you do about it. And actually, that’s only half correct. In the realm of bike riding and racing, sometimes you can even control both. Not surprisingly, you’ll also likely perform better if you do.

Case in point, two recent studies. The first examined the moods of a group of cyclists before and after a multi-day road race. In a nutshell, those who performed best maintained a better mood start to finish than those who performed the worst, who saw their moods go south from the beginning to the end and finished with significantly lower moods than they began with.

Yeah, I know. No kidding right. When you don’t do well, you’re not so happy. But there’s a chicken/egg question here. The second study on cyclists competing in a 161km race found that hydration has a pointed impact on your mood and that even mild dehydration sours mood, makes exercise feel harder, and amplifies fatigue and pain. That’ll make anyone get grouchy over the course of one day, let alone several in a row. It’s also well established that poor recovery leads to poor moods and, you guessed it, poor performance.

In short, we have a lot of control over how we feel from start to finish. It just takes a little know-how and practice. So I called up AASP-certified sport psychology consultant and associate professor at West Virginia University, Kristen Dieffenbach, PhD, for some expert advice.

“People like to separate their moods from their physical self. You can’t. But you also don’t want to give them too much power and control over you,” says Dieffenbach. “Instead, you should tune into them and use them to improve your performance and overall experience.” Here’s what she recommends along with some personal observations of my own.

RELATED: Train Your Brain to Achieve Your Cycling Goals

Walk the Line:
When you’re training really hard, you disrupt your hormones and can get a bit testy. I call it dancing around the volcano. “The key is getting the volcano to rumble without making it blow,” says Dieffenbach. “That’s the point of overreaching where you make gains when you step back and recover.” The key is that recovery. It’s expected to be cranky for a few days, not weeks. Sustained bad mood is a symptom of overtraining, which means you’re stretching yourself too thin and need recovery pronto.

Be Honest About Expectations: You’ve told all your friends you just want to go out on race day and have fun. Is that really true or just the public face you’re putting on to hide your real agenda that’s terrifying you? Your hidden goals have untold power to make you miserable, says Dieffenbach. “This happens all the time. People don’t own up to their real hopes and expectations and it has a huge potential to create underlying anxiety and amplify negative emotions. It can really creep up on you.” Instead be honest. “I’d love to get top 10.” Or “I’d love to set a PR.” But be careful to not make the overall outcome your sole expectation (see next step…).

Redirect Your Focus:
So you’re all nervous because you want to do well. And you’re angsty because you’re nervous. Here’s where you need to stop worrying about your current mood and focus on what you can control, which is the process, not the outcome. So, I can’t control who else shows up to a race or ultimately how I’ll do. But I can be sure I hit all the high notes in my preparation, including getting my bike set up, doing my intervals, and developing a race plan that includes small goals like where to line up at the start and how to fuel myself along the way. “When you’re done, you can honestly say, ‘These are the things I want to accomplish in this race and winning or beating a certain time is the icing on the cake,’” says Dieffenbach.

Reframe the Feelings:
You’re going to feel nervous. If you don’t, you don’t care and what’s the point of that? But there are different ways to interpret the fluttering stomach and jangling nerves. You can think, “I’m so nervous. This is terrible. I’m doomed.” Or you can think, “I’m really excited today. It’s a good day to race.” You might have to fake it at first. I know I did. But then at some point I realised I actually was really excited to race. And that was a good thing.

Feed the Beast:
A Snickers may or may not be the solution, but the “hangry” problem is real, says Dieffenbach. “We tend to forget that our brain fuels and feeds like our muscles. When you are low on fuel, your brain function is off just like the rest of you. It’s going to make you cranky and possibly defeat you,” she says. “From a bio-physical standpoint it’s essential to pay a lot of attention to nutrition. Once you set off the biochemical spiral of bonking, no amount of self talk will bring you back.” Be sure to practice eating on training rides just as you would races so your body and brain are finely tuned to respond to being fed and performing. Personally, I know when the negative voices start creeping in, I need calories to quiet them. The same is true for hydration.

Respect Your Recovery:
Restock those muscle (and brain) stores. Get good sleep. Treat yourself to a massage. All those things that bring your body back also keep your moods from sailing south (though a little dip is natural) after a big event.

So, using this advice myself, I can say it makes a big difference. The race went swimmingly well despite some mishaps like shelling a bottle 10km in (I reframed that one as ‘Well now I’m a 500g lighter for the climbs’ and grabbed a handup at the next aid station) and having to run 4km on a still snow-covered, no-winter-service road (I just laughed at that one and reminded myself I used to run much further by choice; I’d survive…and I did).

I ended up with a win on the day, which of course is a happy thing. But what made me happier is that every step along the way I was in tune with and in control of how I dealt with how I was feeling at any given moment. It made me calm and content to know that no matter how the day ended up, I had succeeded in all the ways that in the end and in life at large are what really matter.

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