02 / picturing Success
All top athletes engage in mental imagery,” says Ian Robertson, professor of psychology at Trinity College, Dublin. “They go through race routines beforehand, sometimes in real time.”
Robertson’s talking about visualisation – many of us have heard of it, and you might think it’s poppycock. Think again. “If you undertake brain imaging of people when they’re undertaking mental imagery of that kind, almost all the same parts of the brain that are active when you’re actually doing it are active when you’re imagining it,” explains Robertson. “It’s only the final pathways that send signals to the muscle down the spinal cord that aren’t active.”
Pros like Mark Cavendish will imagine the crowds, see the banners and inhale the scents of the local environs that shadow his final (usually victorious) sprint.
As for you applying visualisation to your race performance, you should picture yourself, say, descending the way you’d like to descend and, ideally, how you’ve ridden in training. Or you could reflect the likes of Cav and his contemporaries in a process called ‘modelling’. This is mimicking someone whose form you perceive as exemplary, and physically and mentally copying them during a certain skill, be it handling, climbing or slip-streaming.
And that’s the key with visualisation – focus on one skill or one section of a race. Picturing the whole 100 miles of a sportive’s not only unrealistic but will send you to sleep. So find a nice quiet environment, like a lonely bachelor’s bedroom, close your eyes and hone in on a segment of the event that could dictate your outcome. Doing this for just 5-10 minutes each day will pay dividends, and you don’t need to start until about two months before your race.
For visualisation to work, it must be as realistic as possible. This is where a good course reconnaissance comes in, but if physically running through the course isn’t going to happen – a race abroad, for instance – head to Google Maps and virtually recce your route.
“Picturing the whole 100 miles of a sportive’s not only unrealistic but will send you to sleep.”