Louis takes you on a cycling journey through Europe, mostly France: Six countries, 20/day, 38 stages, and averaging 100 km/day. His bike with luggage weighs 40 kg. His pannier bags contain everything necessary to travel, sleep, wear, navigate, photograph, cook and eat. He travels on unfamiliar roads through countryside, villages, towns and cities. Each day presents new adventures with challenging thoughts. He exposes his senses to wide-ranging input. Sometimes, he experiences something about everything, or everything about something. Louis wonders about reality and myth. How science and culture shapes the future. He wonders about large and small, the universe, photons and space-time. Should you think while cycling? Does energy produce continuity? Louis realizes that his bike is his best friend. Is gravity also a friend? Do you plan a cycle tour? The checklists may help you plan whatever physical or mental journey you desire. There is information about nutrition, bicycle functionality and self-reliance. Join the ''cycle of life.'' Smell the flowers, hear the birds and see the stars. Let speed-distance-time, echo in your mind! Let's ride together everywhere!
Louis takes you on a cycling journey through Europe, mostly France: Six countries, 20/day, 38 stages, and averaging 100 km/day. His bike with luggage weighs 40 kg. His pannier bags contain everything necessary to travel, sleep, wear, navigate, photograph, cook and eat. He travels on unfamiliar roads through countryside, villages, towns and cities. Each day presents new adventures with challenging thoughts. He exposes his senses to wide-ranging input. Sometimes, he experiences something about everything, or everything about something. Louis wonders about reality and myth. How science and culture shapes the future. He wonders about large and small, the universe, photons and space-time. Should you think while cycling? Does energy produce continuity? Louis realizes that his bike is his best friend. Is gravity also a friend? Do you plan a cycle tour? The checklists may help you plan whatever physical or mental journey you desire. There is information about nutrition, bicycle functionality and self-reliance. Join the cycle of life. Smell the flowers, hear the birds and see the stars. Let speed-distance-time, echo in your mind! Lets ride together everywhere!
'A must-read book to make you faster on the bike' – Cycling Weekly The Cycling Mind gives you the essential tools to ride – and live life – at your personal best. Foreword by Joanna Rowsell Shand, double Olympic gold medallist and world champion cyclist. The top of the podium is reserved for those athletes who train their bodies and minds to perform at their very best. One of the most important yet overlooked areas to master is an athlete's psychological skills. The Cycling Mind is an expert guide to developing the elite mindset needed for peak performance – both on and off the bike. Written by leading sports psychologist Ruth Anderson, who has worked with globally renowned Olympic and World champion cyclists, this book will teach you everything about the psychology strategies used in elite competition. You'll discover the techniques top athletes use to excel: from race preparation to harnessing performance anxiety, and from how to recover from a win (as well as a loss!), to how to build an effective support team. The Cycling Mind gives you the essential tools to ride – and live life – at your personal best. Foreword by Joanna Rowsell Shand MBE, double Olympic gold medallist, winner of multiple world cycling championships and BBC commentator on major cycling competitions.
'I am blown away by the level of detail Phil Cavell brings to his work.' Elinor Barker MBE, multiple world champion and Olympic gold medallist 'Phil is eminently qualified to write the Midlife Cyclist. Well, he is certainly old enough.' Fabian Cancellara, Tour de France rider and two-time Olympic champion 'An amazing accomplishment... a simple-to-understand précis of your midlife as a cyclist – you won't want to put it down.' Phil Liggett, TV cycling commentator 'I'm determined to grow old gracefully in lycra, and Phil Cavell has been helping me to do it successfully for years.' Gary Kemp Renowned cycling biomechanics pioneer, Phil Cavell, explores the growing trend of middle-aged and older cyclists seeking to achieve high-level performance. Using contributions from leading coaches, ex-professionals and pro-team doctors, he produces the ultimate manifesto for mature riders who want to stay healthy, avoid injury – and maximise their achievement levels. Time's arrow traditionally plots an incremental path into declining strength and speed for all of us. But we are different to every other generation of cyclists in human history. An ever-growing number of us are determined to scale the highest peaks of elite physical fitness into middle-age and beyond. Can the emerging medical and scientific research help us achieve the holy triumvirate of speed and health with age? The Midlife Cyclist offers a gold standard road-map for the mature cyclist who aims to train, perform and even race at the highest possible level.
The Mental Cyclist will change the way you think about your cycling, and yourself, so you can do more on your bike. Your mind is smart. It knows you inside out. But sometimes it tells you stories. Negative stories that shatter your self-confidence. Then, when you think about doing something challenging, something you'd love to do, your mind goes: nope. The stories aren't real. But they feel real. So they limit your ambitions. Affect your performance. Spoil your fun. The Mental Cyclist will help you see these stories for what they really are - and demolish the psychological barriers that hold you back. Rationally. Mindfully. Permanently. Change your mind. Change your ride. As you break free from the barriers, you'll learn how to make your mind work for you, not against you. You'll design the cyclist you really want to be, and commit to your personal Mental Cyclist Challenge - an ultimate personal cycling challenge that takes you well beyond your current comfort zone. 300 pages of fully accessible learning 12-stage Mental Cyclist Manifesto - practical mind training for cyclists 30 powerful journal exercises for developing deep self-expertise 12-week planner for tracking emotional progress towards your Mental Cyclist Challenge Becoming a Mental Cyclist is not about pushing your body through the pain barrier and achieving superhuman feats in the saddle. Nor is about changing your personality, or balancing your chakras, or asking the universe to magically make your life better. It's much more powerful than that. More than a marginal gain. It's about getting to know yourself better so you can do anything you want to do. The Mental Cyclist Manifesto At the heart of The Mental Cyclist is this 12-stage practical exploration of what's really going on inside your head when you ride. The text provides the learning, and the user exercises help you build expertise in yourself. You complete the exercises journal-style within the book as you go along. When you understand what holds you back and what drives you forward, you'll learn how to change your mind to change your ride. STAGE 1 - SUPERCHARGE YOUR SELF-ESTEEM STAGE 2 - SUSTAIN YOUR SUPERPOWER STAGE 3 - MAXIMISE YOUR MOTIVATION STAGE 4 - FEEL THE FUN STAGE 5 - SQUASH SELF-CRITICISM STAGE 6 - BIN THOSE LIMITING BELIEFS STAGE 7 - SHAKE OFF THE STRESS STAGE 8 - THWART THE THREATS STAGE 9 - DESIGN YOUR DEFENCES STAGE 10 - FIND YOUR FLOW STAGE 11 - ESCALATE YOUR EXPERTISE STAGE 12 - COMMIT TO YOUR CHALLENGE Your Mental Cyclist Challenge Why a challenge? Because a challenge is a goal, and goals keep life interesting. They motivate us to get off our butts and go do cool stuff. Your comfort zone is the mental equivalent of an easy ride. It's pleasant enough but it's well within your capability. If your comfort zone was a colour, it would be beige. The colour least likely to excite or delight, to stir your loins or set your heart on fire. Your Mental Cyclist Challenge will be something that does set your heart on fire. Something that motivates you to push beyond your comfort zone. Something that makes you think you might fail (but you won't). Something you know you'd really, really love to do (and you will). The Mental Cyclist will help you design the ultimate personal challenge for you, and then plan your milestones and goals, and finally monitor your progress in a 12-week tracker. The Mental Cyclist is designed for recreational cyclists of every age, ability and ambition.
Taming the Bicycle is a short essay by Mark Twain. Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 - April 21, 1910), better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist. He wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), the latter often called "The Great American Novel." Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, which provided the setting for Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. After an apprenticeship with a printer, he worked as a typesetter and contributed articles to the newspaper of his older brother, Orion Clemens. He later became a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River before heading west to join Orion in Nevada. He referred humorously to his singular lack of success at mining, turning to journalism for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. In 1865, his humorous story, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," was published, based on a story he heard at Angels Hotel in Angels Camp, California, where he had spent some time as a miner. The short story brought international attention, and was even translated into classic Greek. His wit and satire, in prose and in speech, earned praise from critics and peers, and he was a friend to presidents, artists, industrialists, and European royalty. Though Twain earned a great deal of money from his writings and lectures, he invested in ventures that lost a great deal of money, notably the Paige Compositor, a mechanical typesetter, which failed because of its complexity and imprecision. In the wake of these financial setbacks, he filed for protection from his creditors via bankruptcy, and with the help of Henry Huttleston Rogers eventually overcame his financial troubles. Twain chose to pay all his pre-bankruptcy creditors in full, though he had no legal responsibility to do so. Twain was born shortly after a visit by Halley's Comet, and he predicted that he would "go out with it," too. He died the day after the comet returned. He was lauded as the "greatest American humorist of his age," and William Faulkner called Twain "the father of American literature." Twain began his career writing light, humorous verse, but evolved into a chronicler of the vanities, hypocrisies and murderous acts of mankind. At mid-career, with Huckleberry Finn, he combined rich humor, sturdy narrative and social criticism. Twain was a master at rendering colloquial speech and helped to create and popularize a distinctive American literature built on American themes and language. Many of Twain's works have been suppressed at times for various reasons. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been repeatedly restricted in American high schools, not least for its frequent use of the word "nigger," which was in common usage in the pre-Civil War period in which the novel was set.
A meditative love letter to the sport of cycling, THE ART OF CYCLING traces the journey of a former professional racer regaining his love for the sport and shows how cycling can shed new light on age-old questions of selfhood, meaning, and purpose. Interweaving cycling, philosophy, and personal narrative, THE ART OF CYCLING provides readers with a deep understanding into the highs and lows of being an elite athlete, the limits of approaching any sporting pursuit from a strictly rational perspective, and how the philosophical and often counterintuitive lessons derived from sport can be applied to other areas of life. Accessible to everyone from the hardened racer to the casual fan, THE ART OF CYCLING engages the history of thought through the lens of cycling to undermine much of what is typically thought of as "intellectual", breathing new vitality into life, and countering society's obsession with progress and drive towards the abstract, detached, and virtual.
Your Brain on a Bike takes the reader where no other book on cycling has gone -- inside the mind of the competitive cyclist. Other books concentrate on the physical aspects of cycling; this book builds the mental strength of the cyclist. The book's premise -- Your body powers the bike; your brain powers your body -- illustrates how to achieve peak performance by controlling thoughts and emotions. In this book I called upon the lessons learned from my cycling experiences, extensive research on attaining peak performance by managing thoughts and emotions, the hundreds of seminars I have conducted teaching success methods and concepts, and coaching from my mentors to express my philosophy that your body powers your bike but your brain powers your body. I compare Your Brain on a Bike to the groundbreaking 1974 book by E. Timothy Gallwey, The Inner Game of Tennis. Mr. Gallwey's book was the first to instruct solely on the mental aspects of a sport. Your Brain on a Bike will open new realms of possibilities for anyone who wants to achieve greater performance not only in cycling but also in endurance sports such as triathlons, running, climbing and cross-country skiing. Your Brain on a Bike delivers a need that no one else has addressed. Timothy Gallwey filled the same need for tennis players in 1974 with his book, The Inner game of Tennis. My book will do the same for cyclists and other endurance athletes. Cycling coaches, racers and competitive riders will recognize the uniqueness of the book's premise and will add it to their library. Astute coaches of other endurance athletes, such as tri-athletes, runners, and climbers will use the information in the book to enhance the training of their clients.
