SG ambassador Ryan Cross’ Guide to Maintaining Sanity the Off-Season
I know what you’re thinking – another article on optimizing your Zwift setup, how to dress in cold weather, and where to go fat-biking in the Front Range.
**Queue the collective groan**
Sure, those things are great too, but I tend to embrace a slightly more holistic approach to the off-season. I think it’s prime time to swing the pendulum towards a calmer and more introspective approach to cycling and how it intertwines with the intricacies of daily life.
I’ve been doing this off-season thing for a while now and I’ve learned a thing or two about how to enjoy it both on and off the bike. Here are a few ways to keep those proverbial wheels turning during the cold months.
1) Spend Time in the Kitchen, and ENJOY it
There’s nothing that compliments an active lifestyle better than quality food. In the summer, eating on the run is all too common (if you don’t have the Chipotle app, you’re missing out), but this time of year serves up a ripe opportunity to take more of an intentional approach to your diet and cook more of your meals at home. I have a few tips to make this enjoyable and build quality cooking habits:
- Find 4 or 5 recipes that you enjoy and perfect them so they become simple and repeatable,.
- Make grocery shopping convenient. Swing by on the way home from work or running errands, and make sure you’re regularly restocking supplies to avoid running low on key ingredients. Grocery shopping shouldn’t feel daunting, so make it easy.
- Find a cooking channel on YouTube that you enjoy. Use it for inspiration, entertainment and recipe discovery.
- Cook for your friends & family. Food is meant to be shared, and there’s nothing that beats that feeling of cooking a beautiful meal for your loved ones. Compliments to the chef, I’ll take ‘em.
2) Read 3 New Books in the Next 3 Months:
Mix up the genres, try fiction as well as non-fiction, educational vs. creative writing. Here are 5 books that I enjoyed during this last off-season.
- The Lean Startup – for the modern business mind
- Born to Run – an entertaining story of ultra-running subculture (spoiler alert, they’re weirder than cyclists)
- A Promised Land – Barack Obama’s recent memoir
- Good to Great – Jim Collins’ business classic
- Dune – one of the world’s best-selling science fiction novels, read it before you watch the movie.
3) Meditate
Mental health shouldn’t exactly be a new topic, but taking care of ourselves often falls by the wayside during our busy times of year. Silencing your brain and taking the time to find some quiet space is an invaluable task, and one I highly recommend implementing.
If you’re new to meditating, try the Calm app. Last year I tried a 30 day meditation challenge that I can’t recommend enough. Taking the time to hone in on this practice and build healthy habits around it meditation now will pay off when life get a little more hectic.
4) Discover New Music.
Expand your horizons! Ask some friends what their favorite album is right now, go deep on the Spotify radio and playlists, and bust out that vinyl record player if you’ve got one. Now’s the perfect time to stretch those musical wings, you soulful jam master, you.
5) Hit the gym
Okay, okay, we had to include at least one thing that’ll keep you fit on the bike. Resistance training has undeniable benefits for all cyclists and there’s no better time to get on a cross-training program than winter.
Last year Pivot launched their complete enduro training program to guide you through an off-season in the gym. You can check out Pivot’s program here.
I hope this list inspired you to think about your off-season a little bit differently this year. The inevitable time spent indoors isn’t always a bad thing, and I encourage you to turn it into an opportunity to focus on other aspects of your life. Although we all want to ride as much as we can, I believe that slowing down the pace can be healthy. And hey, you might just learn a thing or two.
Is there anything that keeps you going in the off season that we missed on this list? Shoot us a note, we’d love to hear about it.