Stop kidding yourself

Hands up if this sounds familiar: You work nine to five plus commuting, but you want to do physical training when you get home for a race, for an event, or just to feel good. You get home. You're tired.

You can't be tired though, because you need to push hard to get the most out of your training. So you go to the cupboard and grab a snack; maybe you put the kettle on. While you eat and drink, you settle down on the settee and watch some TV, or play a game, or just catch up on what's going on in the wide world of the Internet.

Two hours later, there's not much time left in the night to train, and you're still not feeling fresh. You drag yourself to your bike, or push yourself into your shoes, scrape your way out the door and go for an hour. It's only in the last half hour that you even start to wake up.

You get home, desperately try to find some food that you can shovel into yourself in the twenty minute post-exercise window, and know that you won't be able to get to sleep for hours yet, pushing back your sleep pattern and driving the whole thing round again.

This lecture isn't a parable about preparation - although it's fair to say that it's easier to get on the bike or get fed if everything you need has been organised beforehand. It's actually about that dead time after you get home.

The worst part of this whole self-perpetuating cycle is that dead time - the time that you feel that you cannot do anything, but also that you feel is wasted. Physically and psychologically, it takes "it" out of you; convinces you that you could be working harder, if only you had the energy.

You're kidding yourself.

I don't mean that you couldn't work harder. I mean that you're kidding yourself if you think that what you are actually doing is resting, that browsing websites for an hour is going to replenish your batteries for a seven o'clock assault on the roads. If you need rest, take rest. Don't be half-hearted about it.

Critical to me in this after-work window is working out what I need. If I haven't been able to snack in the afternoon, I'll probably want some carbohydrates to bring my energy levels back up, so I'll munch on some oat cakes. If I'm not alert, I'll make a cup of coffee and drink it.

Then, crucially, I'll sleep.

Not deeply and, if my flatmate has anything to do with it, often not for long, but it works better than not even trying. Caffeine takes time to affect the body. If you nap for twenty minutes immediately after taking a dose, you'll wake up as the effects begin to kick in, leaving you thoroughly refreshed and ready to go.

Accept that you do need rest if you are to train well, and target it. Don't think that sitting still and turning your brain off is enough. It takes no more time, and is far more effective, if you set aside a period and just go to bed. Just as with getting on your bike for a training ride - clothes, helmet, tyre pressures - make it a psychological event. Get undressed. Turn off the lights and set your alarm. Do the things you do to go to sleep, and wake up twenty or thirty minutes later knowing that your time was well spent and you're good to hit to road.

Enjoy your rest. You've earned it.

Good trails!