Listening to the nudge

A last minute call to race the World Cup

Thursday evening: 6PM

David and I are preparing dinner when a thought I’ve been trying to ignore all day comes back—again. I want to race the Hoogerheide World Cup.

It makes no sense. The race is in less than three days, on another continent. We already have flights and hotels booked for the following week for World Championships. Nothing is planned.

And yet, the feeling won’t go away.

I try to push it aside and focus on dinner. On the day before, I had a good workout, maybe the first one in a few weeks where I actually felt solid. The kind of ride where pushing hard feels good and where you feel present.

All day Thursday, that same feeling kept resurfacing. I tell myself it’s impractical, unnecessary, poorly timed. I tell myself to stick to the plan. But the more I try to reason my way out of it, the clearer it becomes that this isn’t noise.

Then it occurred to me: One of the things I’ve been working on through my work with Enso Mental Performance has been listening to my instincts.

So I took a moment and I listened. What was my guts trying to tell me? And why did I feel like I wanted to race Hoogerheide? Was it insecurity? Or was it something I truly wanted to do?

I realized my motivation was pure. I simply wanted to race. I also felt that, while my main goal was to perform at Worlds — and not at this particular World Cup — participating in this World Cup would help me be better a week later.

The original idea of racing only Worlds was to allow myself as much time as possible for training and try to gain back a good enough level of fitness for that one-day race. But if there is one thing I have learned in my career is that plans change. Suddenly, I felt like the best way to prepare for Worlds was to get a World Cup level race under my belt — allow myself to get back into the rhythm of racing and reconnect with the feeling of riding my bike on dirt, at speed, on people’s wheels after a month of indoor training.

So at dinner, I told David about my idea. Within 15 minutes, David had found a dog-sitter for Mia, he had rebooked our whole trip, and our flight was leaving in 24h. I felt very grateful for his support. There is no one quite like him.

So we packed our bags, drove to the airport, and flew to Belgium. We landed at 9AM, picked up our bikes where we had left them, drove to Hoogerheide, and jumped on course at 2PM for pre-ride. Funny to think that 24h prior to the pre-ride, I wasn’t even thinking of coming, and 24h later, I would be on the start line. David and I have done some quick trips in our career, but this gets the palm for our quickest turnaround ever.

A whirlwind of a preparation. Photo by @billy_lebelge

As expected, when the race started, I was a bit rusty at the beginning. My skills were not on point, I couldn’t really follow the speed of the others in the corners, and I was getting passed non-stop. But then, I improved on the second lap, and again on the third, and the fourth. I started finding my rhythm, passed people, let go of the brakes, and managed to push myself. By the end of the 7th lap, I felt a whole lot more comfortable on the bike, my engine felt like it was up and running, and truthfully, I had a blast. My result is nothing to celebrate (37th), but I’m proud of how I pushed and how engaged I was.

At the end of it all, I mostly felt grateful. Grateful for having followed my instincts. Grateful for David’s support in my crazy ideas. Grateful for our luck in everything coming together within such a tight timeline. And grateful for simply being there, racing cyclocross.

After the race, David asked: “Would you have been disappointed if this would have been your Worlds race?” I answered that, while I was happy with how I raced, yes I would have been disappointed. Not because of my performance, but because I knew I can be exponentially better next week, after getting a race under my belt. I would have been disappointed if I hadn’t given myself that chance.

So I am grateful. And I’ll carry this appreciation into this last week of the season as I prepare for World Championships.

Happy to be back between the tape!

We finished the day celebrating Helene’s birthday with a little dinner and board games with David and Raylyn Nuss. Lucky to have these people in our lives.