You Can't Improve by Coasting Uphill

The final post of "The Physics of Biking" or what I'm learning about leadership while training for a 24 hour bike ride...I am training for my 6th annual 24 Hours of Booty, a charity bike ride for the Lance Armstrong Foundation. As you might expect, riding even part of 24 hours takes training. I don’t mind training, but I hate hills – at least going up hills. Coming down, now that’s pretty cool. You can coast and catch your breath. The only problem is you can’t improve by going downhill all the time.



 
Living in North Carolina, there are hills everywhere; you can’t train without encountering them regularly. When I planned my training rides, I used to dread the uphill parts. No matter what techniques I tried, going up long, steep hills was a killer. Give me a flat surface and I can move along at a pretty good clip. Even better was a slight downhill run. I haven’t found a one-sided hill yet, so I would labor through, barely surviving, looking forward to the flying downhill on the other side.

Business blogger Seth Godin noted this in a recent post: It's very difficult to improve your performance on the downhills.


I agree completely. No matter what I tried, I couldn’t get any better by just going faster on the downhill side. Eventually, even I realized that the place to improve performance, to get better, is to work on the uphills. That's where the work is, the fun is, the improvement is. On the uphills, if I work hard and don’t give up, I have a reasonable shot at a gain over last time. The downhills are already maxed out by the laws of physics and safety.


Suddenly, the truth about biking can be translated into my work world as well. The best time to do great customer service is when a customer is upset. The moment you earn your keep as a public speaker is when the room isn't just right or the plane is late or the projector doesn't work or the audience is tired or distracted. The best time to engage with an employee is when everything falls apart, not when you're hitting every milestone. And everyone now knows that the best time to start a project is when the economy is lousy.

Godin’s 2007 book “The Dip” is a quick read that reinforces this line of thinking. A Dip is a temporary setback that you will overcome if you keep pushing. But maybe it’s really a cul-de-sac, which will never get better, no matter how hard you try. According to Godin, what really sets superstars apart from everyone else is the ability to escape dead ends quickly while staying focused and motivated when it really counts.

Winners quit fast, quit often, and quit without guilt – until they commit to beating the right Dip for the right reasons. Winners seek out the Dip. They realize that the bigger the barrier, the bigger the reward for getting past it.

What uphill are you facing right now? Will you push through it, improving your performance along the way and on the next hill? Or will you be satisfied with coasting on the other side?

The Draft is Your Friend

Part 4 of "The Physics of Biking" or what I'm learning about leadership while training for a 24 hour bike ride...

Drafting is an important technique in cycling. The cyclist, as he moves through the air, produces a turbulent wake behind himself. It makes vortices. The vortices actually make a low pressure area behind the cyclist and an area of wind that moves along with the cyclist. If you're a following a cyclist and can move into the wind behind the front cyclist, you can gain an advantage. The low pressure moves you forward and the eddies push you forward. A rider tucked just 6 inches behind another rider expends almost 30 percent less energy than the front runner. Increase that distance to  24 inches and the energy savings are slashed to just about 10 percent.

Surprisingly drafting not only helps the cyclist following the leader, but the lead cyclist gains an advantage as well. The interesting thing is by filling in the lead cyclist's eddy you improve the front person's performance as well. So two people who are drafting can put out less energy than two individuals (who are not drafting) would covering the same distance in the same time. While the lead cyclist gains some advantage in this situation he still needs to expend much more energy than the cyclist who is following. Thus, successful drafting techniques require constant lead rotations among the pack.


Although I typically train by myself, most of the rides I participate in have groups in them. My first experience at drafting happened several years ago as I was "pulling" a group of about 7 bikes. As I took the lead, we came to a small rise; due to the effect of the draft as explained above, we actually were able to accelerate to about 21 mph up the hill. I only lasted a few minutes, and then it was time to let someone else take the lead, but the experience of moving forward with less effort was amazing.

How do you take advantage of the draft? Like all the posts in this series, you will make the final choice, but let me offer you my suggestion:

Lead Leaders.

Leaders who develop leaders experience an incredible multiplication effect in their organizations that can be achieved in no other way - not by increasing resources, reducing costs, analyzing systems, or doing anything else. As a leader you will go to the highest level only if you begin developing leaders instead of followers.

Becoming a leader who develops leaders requires an entirely different focus and attitude from that of a developer of followers. John Maxwell's "The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership" points out some of the differences:

Leaders Who Develop Followers   Leaders Who Develop Leaders
Need to be needed                    Want to be succeeded                 
Focus on weaknesses                 Focus on strengths
Develop the bottom 20%            Develop the top 20%
Hoard power                             Give power away
Spend time with others              Invest time in others
Grow by addition                       Grow by multiplication
Impact only those they              Impact people far
touch personally                        beyond their own reach

As a leader, do you ride solo most of the time or are you part of a team that together, accomplishes more? Leading a team is hard work - it takes time, energy, and resources. But when you've got the right team of leaders, with everyone pulling their weight, the results are amazing.

Leaders commit themselves to people and activities that provide explosive growth through teamwork.

Gearing Up

Part 3 of "The Physics of Biking" or what I'm learning about leadership while training for a 24 hour bike ride...

The development of the chain drive helped make the bicycle that we know today possible. The chain drive eliminated the need to have the cyclist directly above the wheel. Instead the cyclist could be positioned between the two wheels for better balance. With the advent of gears, the cyclist could also pedal more efficiently. Riders enjoyed increased speed and easier riding up steep grades.

A chain drive alone (without gears) is effective on flat surfaces and going downhill. However, when it comes to headwinds, hill climbing, and even starting on a bicycle without gears--the cyclist has to stand on his pedals and strain while pedaling at a very low rate. Gears allow the cyclist to pedal at a comfortable and efficient rate while traveling either uphill or downhill or with a headwind or a tailwind.The gears of a bicycle make pedaling more efficient, allowing the cyclist to travel faster and more easily handle steep grades and other obstacles.

Gears make it possible for riders to maintain the cadence (or rate of pedaling) that makes them the most efficient. While there are many opinions as to what exactly is the optimal cadence for bicycling, everyone seems to agree that cadence is important.

What are your leadership "gears"? What makes your organization go? How do you determine the speed of your movement? When do you have to push a little harder, and when can you coast? Just like yesterday's post on "wheels", only you have the right answer. But here's mine:

Priorities.

Leaders never grow to a point where they no longer need to prioritize. It's something that good leaders do whether they lead a small group, a church, or an organization of 50 or 5,000.

Successful leaders recognize that not all activity is accomplishment. The best leaders seem to be able to prioritize their focus while reducing their number of actions.

John Maxwell, writing in "The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership," talks about three guidelines he uses when making priorities. To be effective, he thinks leaders must order their lives according to three questions:

1. What is required? Anything required that is not necessary for you to do personally should be delegated or eliminated.
2. What gives the greatest return? Leaders spend most of their time working in the areas of their greatest strengths.
3. What gives the greatest reward? Nothing energizes a person the way passion does.

What are you doing with your leadership potential? Are you successfully prioritizing your actions to produce maximum results? Or are you spinning away in the wrong gear?

It Begins With a Wheel

If you're going to talk about bicycles, you had better start with the wheel. The wheel is the most crucial element of the bicycle: it allows the rider to roll over the ground with great speed and efficiency. A bicycle wheel needs to be able to handle a variety of forces. Besides holding up the weight of the cyclist, a wheel must withstand the forces of pedaling and braking and the jarring effects of the road surface. The resistance to the motion of a wheel can vary tremendously depending on the surface on which it is traveling. The treads of bike tires can affect performance.

Even the earliest bicycles used spokes of one sort or another. A spoked wheel can be made as strong as a solid one and have only a fraction of the weight. It's easy to think of the spokes as columns supporting the wheel and helping it retain its shape. But, the "support" that the wheel receives is created by pulling the spokes towards the center of the wheel (tension) rather than pushing out from the center (compression).

Many aspects of the wheel make it crucial for the success of a bicycle. But this isn't about bicycles so much as it is the leadership you provide to the organization you lead.

What's your leadership "wheel?" There's a lot of right answers to this question, so you will have to figure it out for yourself. Here's my suggestion:

Trust.

Trust is the foundation of leadership. To build trust, a leader must exemplify these qualities: character, competence, and chemistry (Bill Hybels). In order to develop these qualities, Posner and Kouzes have suggested six disciplines of credibility or trust:

1. Discovering your self
2. Appreciating constituents
3. Affirming shared values
4. Developing capacity
5. Serving a purpose
6. Sustaining hope

Leadership exists only in the eyes of those who follow you - are your "wheels" on right?

The Physics of Cycling...

...or, what cycling is teaching me about leadership.

I'm heading into the final two weeks of preparation for my 6th annual 24 Hours of Booty charity ride. I'll being joined by over 1,200 cyclists as we ride the 3 mile "Booty Loop" in the Queens College area of Charlotte. It's a lot of fun, it's for a good cause, and it's become a tradition unto itself - the ride usually sells out in a couple of weeks each January. If you're interested, here is my personal web page at the 24 HofB site. You can find out anything you want to know about the ride, and if you're  so inclined, you can even make a donation to my efforts! But I digress...

Normally, I prepare for rides like this and other distance events by long, repetitive hours of time in the saddle. I'm not in this for speed, and I just try to condition my legs, butt, back, and aerobic system for hours of riding. This year, however, I am behind in training time. There's no shortcuts, but I am going to take any advantage I can find - which leads me to the physics of cycling.

At it's simplest, I am trying to move my body mass over a fixed course at maximum efficiency so that I can ride for several hours at a time. I only have the muscles of my body (and the energy stored within them), my bicycle (the system that will convert energy to motion), and my computers (my brain and my bike computer) to accomplish the task. In order to ride at maximum efficiency, I'm going to have to really let the physics of cycling dictate my training and ride times.

As I was on a training ride this past weekend, it occurred to me that the physics of cycling have leadership lessons as well...

...want to join me on a ride?