Tips for maintaining motivation in winter

With the days of cold, rain, fog, and the few hours of light, it can sometimes be very difficult to maintain the motivation to go out and train during the winter months or get on the roller at the end of the afternoon when you get home from work after an intense day. We leave you some tricks to avoid falling into discouragement.

How to survive the winter without your form being affected

If we add bad weather and few hours of light to pedal to the pace of life that most of us usually lead, no matter how fanatical we are about the bike, the motivation to continue fulfilling the workouts and maintaining our cycling routine ends up suffering. In fact, there are not a few who practically park the bike until spring, which means to later achieve an adequate form, especially if we have some challenge in mind.

To prevent our spirits from falling in these months, we have prepared a series of ideas and tips that, surely, will be useful when you start to feel that feeling of laziness before a bike ride.

Take advantage of the route to visit a friend

At this time of the season, many of the workouts are simple aerobic rides in which to accumulate hours on the bike to improve our resistance. As we should not worry about times, intervals or where we train, we can take advantage of our departure to visit that friend who lives in a town far from our place of residence and who, for whatever reason, you have not seen for a long time or go to have the mid-route coffee in the bar run by another friend. With the excuse, it will cost us much less to dress as a cyclist and get going those days that we are invaded by reluctance.

Give a twist to your rides

Riding our usual routes for many hours with an eye on the heart rate monitor or power meter is something that many cyclists find unbearable. However, we can do those same rides by changing the chip and adding a small dose of adventure.

Take the opportunity to look for new routes, discover new trails if yours is the mountain. You can even emulate what some professionals do during these months and face that bikepacking route that you have been thinking about for a long time and for which you never find the right time. At route pace, simply accumulating hours that, after all, will become excellent endurance workouts.

Renew your winter wardrobe

Sometimes there is no better way to motivate yourself than to give yourself a cyclist treat. If we spend money on that cool winter jacket that we have had our eye on for a long time. New gloves that allow us to continue feeling our fingers on those icy days, etc. in the first place, we will want to go out and try them as soon as possible. But, if they also greatly improve what you already had in your closet and make the difference between suffering hardships or discovering that with good clothes winter days are much less suffered, we will probably be ending one of the main reasons that make us give up and stay at home on those days when we would normally be on the bike.

Do a preseason stage like the professionals

Many of us have the habit of reserving some vacation days to use them during Christmas, which, after all, are dates when social events take up much of our free time. Instead of that, we are going to propose that you save those days for a few weeks later, let's say, mid-January.

Look for an apartment in Benidorm, Calpe or Denia and emulate the professionals by spending a few days of cycling holidays concentrated in those lands. An option that, in addition, is very economical as it is low season in those places. In return, we have practically guaranteed days of going out to ride a bike with a very pleasant temperature and, incidentally, discover some scandalous roads to ride a bike. That's right, it's about hard terrain so we will also add an extra motivation to do the job well and take care of ourselves during the holidays to be able to enjoy the collection of ports and mid-mountain roads in the area, even, of the possibility of catching wheel to some of the many professionals who pedal there during these months and who, in most cases, are usually very accessible at these times when their workouts are not so specific.

Prepare a trip to a spring classic

For sure, dozens of times you have seen the cobblestone classics on TV and you have imagined what it must be like to be there, with the Belgian public cheering fervently. All this you can enjoy in the cyclo-tourist version of both the Tour of Flanders and the Paris-Robaix which, in addition, are organized the same weekend as the professional race, so it is a perfect plan.

Going to the cobblestones is one of those pilgrimages that every cyclist should do at least once in their life, just like knowing certain mythical ports that are climbed in the races. Why don't you consider it? Facing a long-distance test, especially the Tour of Flanders that in its version of greater mileage faces the same route as the professionals, will serve as a spur to keep our workouts during the winter to the letter.

Compete in virtual races

For those of you who make a groove on the roads of Zwift but who end up getting bored just going out to ride in Watopia or find it excessively hard, both mentally and physically, to do interval work to fully take advantage of the roller time, we propose an alternative.

The events of these virtual applications usually make the session fly by. It would be a bit like competing in cyclocross as some professionals do, by the way something that we also recommend you try as a source of motivation for these months. The events of these applications, whether they are races or simply “social ride” as they are usually called, often end up accelerating more than necessary and in the end we are going to be there trying to stay in the group, win a sprint or simply survive closing gaps. In the end, that competitive spark is a great complement to the endurance workouts that predominate at this time and, from experience, we tell you that they are tremendously addictive. That's right, without abusing it, we are supposed to be in top shape in spring or summer, whenever we have to face the challenges we have set, not in the middle of January.