Category Archives: psychology

Speed and distance: the Andy Wilkinson paradox

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I did my first turbo session of 2012 today. To be more accurate, it might be my first session of indoor sensory deprivation torture since January 2011: I can’t say I took up cycling to ride indoors. I can’t go out on Tuesdays during the day as my youngest son is at home with me, but the opportunity is there for indoor training whilst he is having a nap. Given that I don’t race, the wisdom of turbo training is a paradoxical one. The received wisdom of long distance preparation is slowly building a base; gradually increasing the duration if rides to match the distances encountered in competition. As with marathon training, there is an upper limit: it is probably not a good idea to prepare for PBP by gradually increasing training distances to 1200 km: a diet of long day training rides and events of up to 600 km is the sort of regimen suggested by Doughty (or Burke and Pavelka). Continue reading →

It’s been a good year… for blogging

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Prior to joining twitter and starting to post here I became a regular visitor and sometime contributor to the clinic, over on cyclingnews.com and hence my outlook was dangerously skewed towards the effect doping was continuing to have on both professional and amateur road racing. However, over the past year I have written about music, about depression, and most recently about my own cycling efforts and ambitions.

I started this blog for two reasons:

  1. to learn how to use Twitter and WordPress to reach an audience; and
  2. to contribute to online discussion of cycling.

I wonder how I did? Continue reading →

Shooting the messenger: how to lose at anti-doping

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In Italy, Mafia informers are shot or blown up. In cycling, dopers who inform on others aren’t blown up or shot, but they do risk being vilified for their actions by the very community they are acting to defend: some lose their jobs, some are insulted on twitter and in internet forums. Of course, their efforts to defend cycling from doping are paradoxically self-interested: most give up information in order to benefit themselves in some way, just as some keep quiet for the same reason. It is very rare for those directly involved in cycling to break Omerta otherwise (maybe Frankie Andreu is a nice example, although he had just a little help from the formidable Betsy). Continue reading →

Cycling and depression: finding a balance

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Ex-professional cyclist Tyler Hamilton (in the news again recently, which you will know unless you were asleep for 60 minutes) claimed in 2009 that his second positive test for doping (DHEA) was the result of his taking a herbal remedy to counter longstanding depression (Bonnie Ford of ESPN as usual does an excellent job of summarising here). Hamilton is not the only professional cyclist to have suffered from depression during or after their career, and I have often wondered about the relationship between training workload as a cyclist and mental health. I recently read two blog posts about depression by active cyclists (Scientist, you’re a failure & Drugs and Mental Healthcare) and this got me thinking about how exercise and mental health interact. In this post I write about my own experiences, share some academic research on the topic, and speculate a bit about depression and cycling in general. I am not a mental health professional (although I am an academic working in the area of empirical psychology) so please take my words with this in mind.

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Cycle racing and the perfect crime

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I just read a wonderful blog entry from Cycling Inquisition on the appropriation of nationality and the hyper-real manner in which fans of cycling willingly give up their grip on reality in favour of the fantastic (or not-real). I was foolishly inspired to write something on how we have lost the ability to distinguish the real from not-real in judgments of sporting performance.

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Music lessons: ergogenic effects need not be pharmaceutical

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In the epilogue to a recent book on blood doping, Robin Parisotto (member of the UCI bio-passport panel, interviewed here by nyvelocity) discusses the future of doping, and suggests that music’s effects may be sought out by athletes and trainers who previously might have resorted to transfusions or rEPO. The use of music to enhance sporting performance is arguably a kind of doping or artificial ‘assistance’, and indeed is now being treated as such by some sports (e.g., the IAAF, rule 144(d)), although efforts to ban music in some sports (especially mass participation events) may run into stiff opposition from athletes and coaches.

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Doping and the placebo effect

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Remember Dario Frigo, caught at the 2002 Giro d’Italia with bags full of saline which had been sold to him as the blood doping agent HemAssist (see Lindsay, 2011; Tucker and Dugas, 2011 for an interesting take on this drug in cycling)? Frigo claimed never to have used the drug, but if he had used the saline he believed to be HemAssist it is quite possible it would have had a significant effect on his performance…

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