Zen and the Art of Athlete Maintenance
When I was in my early twenties and training hard for Nordic ski racing, my coach and mentor introduced me to the world of gas-powered speed. He had spent much of his own life driving, riding, and maintaining high-performance engines from ‘60s-era Jaguars to cafe racers from the early British scene of sport bikes. It didn’t take long for that bug to bite down hard, and I soon had in my possession a rather decrepit 1973 Honda CB750 motorcycle, complete with touring boxes and a sizable (dorky) wind fairing. But after spending a year-plus wrenching, learning, fumbling and bruising, with his help I turned that bike into a sleek speed machine.
The process of (re)building a vintage motorcycle starts by recognizing that you’re dealing almost exclusively with mechanical and usually intuitive systems. Lever A connects to cable B which actuates function C, and so on. If you have a problem, most of the time you can physically track the path of malfunction backward to the source. And because the motorcycle sits on a small footprint and you can literally walk all the way around it in a few steps, you have quick access to all the nooks and crannies (and trouble areas). During that phase of my burgeoning mechanic’s skillset it slowly dawned on me how analogous wrenching on a vintage bike was to managing an athlete’s body and physiology; in both cases, by applying the principle of Occam’s Razor.
Simply (maybe oversimply?) put, William of Ockham (d. 1347) stated, “Plurality must never be posited without necessity”, which gradually transitioned to “the simplest explanation is usually the right one.” In the motorcycle realm, when the taillight ceased to illuminate during braking, my first instinct would be to get all stirred up and look for cuts in the wire sheath somewhere along the length of the wire run from switch to bulb. But in reality, most of the time the problem is at the connection, where the system is most vulnerable.
In the athlete realm, we’ve all had the experience of setting off on a run or bike ride and feeling flat, laggy, uninspired and slow despite previous sessions showing good progress. What the heck? Why the sudden decline? Consider the most likely culprits: poor sleep, an incoming cold or virus, dehydration, lack of quality nutrition. Discard (for the moment, at least) the perhaps more compelling but less-likely culprits: overtraining, chronic disease, lack of cumulative training response. We gravitate toward the more profound and dire predictions but most of the time it’s pretty simple, and a quick fix will get you back on track.
We all like to have lots of tools at our disposal but as a coach, I’ve found myself turning again and again to my tried-and-true guidance: take the day off, eat and rest, and let’s see how you feel tomorrow.
In the end, we’re a pretty straightforward machine, and Mr. Ockham’s (“Occam”) insight rings true most of the time: engine having trouble starting or power keeps dropping? You might just be low on gas.