Cultivating Flow

I first read about flow more than 25 years ago in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book. The book was interesting but didn’t capture my experience with flow, as it related to exercise.

Around the same time, I was working with a physicist on what would eventually become machine learning and large language models. All of the tech went far over my head and we didn’t invest. However, my physicist friend was into meditation and we had several interesting conversations about his practice. Something he said stuck with me, “One could meet their guru through meditation.”

25 years pass, along with thousands of hours of endurance training, and I’m starting to get a handle on flow, exercise and mental states.

Let’s roll back to the time when I reading about flow and talking to physicists with an interest in spirituality. Back then, my positive experience of long duration exercise had two main expressions:

1. Serenity => Fatigue, from long easy sessions, would quiet my mind. The quiet was pleasurable.

2. Noise => During my long sessions, occasionally, strong emotions would arise. It felt like these emotions would be processed by riding through them, literally, as I was usually on my bike during these experiences.

There was a duality. Long-duration exercise was mostly quiet with mild pleasure but, occasionally, my inner experience would be loud and emotional.

There wasn’t any sign of a guru during exercise. I travelled the world learning from expert coaches and world champions who were willing to teach me. I was a seeker in a traditional sense of the word.

During our Epic Camps, when we would take athletes beyond The Limit, we’d notice about half the camp would get giddy from fatigue. The other half of the camp would act like you’d expect: down-regulated, quiet, exhausted. I coined the term Fatigue Intoxication for the giddy folks, who often acted like they were mildly drunk. The athletes who skewed giddy were the best trained, and coping well with extreme exercise.

In speaking with the doctors I coached we assumed the mood shifts were driven by neurochemical changes. However, that’s a guess because it’s impossible to gather a large cohort and study the effects of exercising 5-8 hours a day. There are not many humans willing to undertake extreme exercise, and the one’s who do are often lone wolves.

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Combining the first two sections of this article:

• Exercise => serenity, in many.

• Extreme exercise => fatigue intoxication, in some.

It struck me that what I was seeing was different magnitudes of the same effect.

Every session we do is an opportunity to process “noise” and increase “serenity.” This is an under appreciated benefit of the building fitness from the bottom up.

Initially, serenity is trained:

• In low-stakes environments.

• At low intensities.

• With repetitive movement patterns.

• That require low mental engagement.

For most of us, our best chance of training the above is during easy cycling, away from traffic, without music. If you can become proficient at relaxing while swimming then the feel of the water against your skin will also bring feelings of serenity. Focusing inward, with relaxed breathing, will also settle the mind.

Using any of these techniques, as thoughts arrive, we let them go.

Once we have the basics sorted by learning how to settle the mind, we can deepen our practice by improving performance at all intensities. The technique here is to gradually increase the intensity and duration of our practice.

• For example, on a day with a Tempo set. Settle the mind during the warm-up and see if you can maintain mental relaxation as heart rate and effort rise.

• Here’s another one. During a long endurance session, settle the mind in the first half. Then, in the second half, lift effort by a half an intensity zone (using only feel). Don’t worry about pace, or power. Focus solely on internal feelings. The sensation will be moving from the top of Zone 1 (Easy) to the bottom of Zone 2 (Steady).

This relaxation of the mind, and focus on breathing, will translate to improved movement economy. As a bonus, it feels really good.

Most everyone I’ve coached started out unaware how much energy they were wasting (via thought) and the cost of chronically holding tension in their bodies.

Those of you who read my Epic Camp Diaries may remember a section I wrote about flow and “where does your mind go.”

Under extreme stress, initially, my mind went quiet, then I focused on my breathing, then I visited with old friends. Hours later, still riding but on my own, I experienced feelings of euphoria while thinking about my son as well as my favorite cat. Euphoria is a useful emotion when training long, or approaching The Limit.

These experiences got me thinking, might I be able to summon the feelings when I want to improve my performance and fatigue resistance?

Across the camp, I tried a few experiments:

• Uphill riding.

• Relax the mind.

• Focus on breathing.

• Think about my “guru” - in this case my son.

These mental exercises culminated on the Passo della Stelvio when I put up my best numbers of the season. I didn’t use the technique during my attack (20-minutes true max effort) but I did use them for an hour when wanted to ride hard tempo, and solidify my gap. The mental state I summoned had the effect of lowering my RPE by an intensity zone.

I pass these techniques along for those of you who race from a place of serenity, or want to figure out how to relax — first in sport, then in your larger life.

To balance a flow-state approach to racing, here’s a link to our article about Racing Angry. Be careful with anger, it is an emergency solution, unpredictable and can lead us astray.

Our Chapter on Training The Mind

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