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There’s a fascinating paradox in the cycling world: we are capable of accomplishing physically absurd things, like climbing a pass for two hours while talking about gear ratios, but incapable of eating a single square of chocolate without the whole bar mysteriously disappearing right after.
By Jeff Tatard – 3Bikes.fr / Photos @jefftatard
That’s because the cyclist, this sensitive cardio-pulmo-ego animal, is a being of contrasts.
For them, nuance is an option, like mudguards on a 15k triathlon bike.
They only know two positions: ON and OFF.
Total abstinence or absolute debauchery.
Prudent wisdom or the session “I almost saw God in the second repetition”.
One might think it’s passion.
It’s mostly a slight chronic deficit of moderation, that somewhat dusty virtue that resembles a perfectly adjusted old derailleur: we know it exists, but no one has seen it recently.
The Cyclist and Their Binary Vision: A Toxic Love Story
The cyclist lives in a world where everything is measured: watts, FTP, TSS, max HR, gradient percentage, grams of body mass, crank length, and number of coffees consumed before 10 am.
And yet, despite all this instrumentation, they are incapable of perceiving the grey area, the famous progressivity, that vague concept probably invented by a coach who wanted to sleep soundly.
For the cyclist, the logic is crystal clear:
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The cyclist has a beautiful relationship with excess: they understand it, respect it, cultivate it.
What they understand less is the happy medium, that mysterious zone where one progresses without destroying oneself.
Moderation: The Superpower Nobody Wants to Train
Curiously, total abstinence is easier than wisdom.
Not eating chocolate, well, that’s strict but clear. However, eating one square? Now that’s high-level stuff. It’s tightrope walking. It’s like doing a “tempo” session: neither big enough to brag about, nor gentle enough to be enjoyable.
Moderation requires a quality that the cyclist traditionally lacks: the sincere desire to think before acting.
And frankly, we’re not equipped for that.
We have disproportionate thighs, a decorative VO2max, but no integrated common sense sensor.
Progressivity? We mostly talk about it when we don’t respect it.
It’s a bit like diplomacy: we discover it when things explode.
Why This Lack of Nuance? Very Serious Hypotheses, Of Course
- The cyclist loves the heroic narrative.
You don’t tell stories like “I rode 55 minutes in Zone 2 as planned”.
You tell stories like “I went out for a short ride and by mistake, I ended up in the Wednesday peloton in Baillet at 50km/h on the Amblainville straight”. - The cyclist believes in merit through suffering.
Deeply imbued with a vaguely monastic spirituality, they think that the more it hurts, the more righteous it is.
Nuance doesn’t burn enough to be credible. - The cyclist is afraid.
Afraid of doing too little, afraid of failing, afraid of not being good enough.
So they compensate with excess, that elegant psychological mechanism scientifically known as “completely blowing their training plan”. - The cyclist loves extremes.
Extreme gear, extreme efforts, extreme climbs, extreme coffees.
In short, progressivity is not Instagrammable.
And Yet… Nuance is True Performance
Nuance is succeeding in stopping a session when it’s only just starting to get a little too hard.
It’s accepting that progression is a staircase, not a springboard.
It’s understanding that sometimes, the square of chocolate from active recovery is better than the entire bar of heroic intensity.
It’s an art, almost a Zen wisdom: do less today to do better tomorrow.
But let’s be reassured: the cyclist will eventually understand. Usually after a good silly injury (and guess why we’re writing this article, LOL).
It’s the natural pedagogy of sport: the tendon explains, calmly but firmly, what the head refused to hear.
Conclusion: Moderation, That Grail Both Simple and Inaccessible
Moderation is to the cyclist what discretion is to a Y1Rs full black stickers included: very beautiful in theory, but no one has really encountered one in the wild.
But if one day, you see a cyclist who truly respects progressivity, who stops their session when necessary,
who eats one square and puts the bar away…
… don’t worry.
It’s probably just a beginner cyclist.
The others already know that life is better when you exaggerate a little.
=>To go further, this article by Dr. Cascua perfectly summarizes how to progress without injury.
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