The war against oneself
That voice. You know it. It's the one that shuts down the system and sends a failure notification to your personal operating system. When the body is broken, pushed to its limits, it comes along, stinging, hateful, painful, and yet impossible to completely stifle. It knows only one command: stop. Ctrl-Alt-Del. Shut down and restart.
How I hated her.
Especially because that voice is obviously mine, and it always shows up at the worst possible moment. Just when I need encouragement, it inevitably finds its way to the surface of my consciousness. I know then that if I listen to it, it's all over. And it has a knack for making itself heard.
It is a voice that screams silently inside my skull. Or it infuses me with the poison of despair, letting a nagging whisper flow into my consciousness. It is an alarm signal addressed to me in the first person, hoping that I will repeat its mantras until I believe them.
"I'm quitting." "It's too hard." "I can't do this anymore." Does this sound familiar?
Perhaps you hate it as much as I do, that voice that tries to convince us that our bodies have reached their breaking point and that we need to give up, or at least let go.
Except that I now know that's not true.
In fact, training science has shown that this voice manufactures fake news more quickly than a hacker cell funded by the Russian secret services.
But unlike those vile polluters of the interwebs, his intentions are entirely noble.
In reality, she acts as a kind of guardian, convinced that she is ensuring the integrity of my vital functions. When warning lights flash red throughout my system because my heart is about to reach its limit, oxygen is running low, and my muscles are experiencing a deluge of lactate, she sounds her siren. Always the same mantras. "I'm stopping." "It's too hard." "I can't do this anymore." She wants to force me to give up, but for my own good. Even for my survival.
But a trained body is like a Socks gauge in a gas tank: when it says there's no more, there's still some left.
And in both cases, you have to learn to know your machine better to understand how far you can push it. Learning to cope with pain, becoming a kind of fakir who manages discomfort and gets drunk on positive thoughts, helps to partially stifle the negativity of the alarm signal.
I have learned to suppress my unnecessarily alarmist inner voice, to distract it. I drown it out with my ego and refuse to give it a victory that would cause me to fail in my daily endeavors. Whether it's finishing an interval, taking the KOM on the Grand Tour des Équerres, chasing down the leaders in cyclocross, or leaving my friends behind on the final hills to Saint-Achillée, I let the goal become so big that it drowns out the voice telling me that I'm in too much pain to continue.
Does it work every time? No. But I no longer hate the voice as I once did. It's still there, like a reminder, like the fuel gauge light. But it no longer signals the urgency to stop everything. It tells me that I need to manage my pain differently, change the way I pedal, adjust my pace, take a moment to step back and compose myself, and restore my health. Or it whips me into shape, and I use it as motivation. I want to defeat it even more than I want to finish my effort. It becomes the enemy to be defeated.
And you have to know your opponent perfectly, as Sun Tzu, the master of war, would say. The fight will therefore always be uneven: the little voice knows me perfectly. So I become someone else. Stronger than I am. I become someone I wasn't when I listened to the voice and its commands.
Maybe that's what becoming an athlete is all about. Evolving. Adapting. In body and mind. Becoming who you want to be.