Perceived Effort

The Modified Borg CR10 scale for the rating of perceived exertion breaks down the sensations of effort into 10 slices. It considers heart rate, breathing, muscle soreness, and sweat, then neatly segments the combination of those facets of exercise into numerical values. 0 means no effort at all, technically at rest. 10 is where the vomit buckets come in to play. It’s a self-reported analytic; a way for athletes to check in on themselves and for trainers to get an idea what their athletes are feeling, compared to the raw data of heart rate and wattage and recovery rates that don’t always tell the whole story of a given individual’s performance. Maybe it felt like a 6, but you crushed everyone and stood on top of the podium. Maybe you felt like you were giving it the full 10, bleeding out your eyeballs, but the heart rate and the pack-fodder finish time said otherwise.

It has been a very long time since I have zip-tied a number plate to my handlebars. Most of my riding these days is comfortably bracketed in the “light” to “moderate” heart rate zones, with a sprinkling of spikes into “hard” and very occasional forays into “maximum” effort. There’s plenty of sweat during the rides, but the recovery days full of pumped quads and rattly chest coughing are not in the cards much anymore. The motivation to chase after that old pain-carrot generally stays submerged, occasionally bubbling to the surface for a single climb or a half hour of biting the stem and churning toward a pinpoint horizon before sinking back beneath the surface as I soft-pedal down into the hope-springs-eternal-fat-burning-zone. In spite of my current state of dedicated non-competitiveness, however, I know what my body is doing most days. My perceived effort generally tracks along with what the digital drill sergeant on my wrist is shouting at me. Or at least I think I know.

A new test bike arrived a few weeks ago. It was an eagerly anticipated new test bike; one that promised a lot in terms of zip and snap. So it was puzzling that the first ride on the eagerly anticipated new test bike delivered no perceivable zip, and was almost entirely devoid of snap. There was sweat, my heart rate was more in the “hard” than “moderate” zone, but it felt for all the world like I was pedaling through quicksand. The stopwatch agreed; in spite of how hard I felt like I was riding, I was slower than usual. The bike just felt dead beneath me. So much for the promise, I thought. Slow bike. It had to be the bike.

Back home, I checked the sag. 30%. Right where it was supposed to be. I went out for a little followup spin with the rear shock locked out. The bike still felt like it was dragging a cinder block. Maybe it’s the tires, I thought. They were a new compound of a known quantity tire. Maybe, instead of being grippier AND longer lasting AND just as fast rolling as the old compound – per the marketing claim – they were grippier and SLOWER than the old faithfuls. I dug around the internet looking for reviews, found a German website stating that the new compound took 6.8 more watts to push around at 20km/h, something like a 20% increase in rolling resistance over the old tire. Well, that obviously had to be it!

Just for shits and giggles, I slapped some flyweight XC tires onto a 1249g set of wheels for the next ride, and sure enough, over the course of the same loop, the test bike felt like it was levitating. Cornering was terrifying and I couldn’t get the bike to stick to anything going uphill, but boy did it ever feel peppy. Funny how chopping a couple pounds off the wheels can make almost any bike spring to life. Must have been the tires. Oddly enough, while I felt like I was crushing the ride, my time was not a whole lot different from the previous effort. My heart rate had come down a bit, thankfully, so I chalked the similar times up to a matter of me not pedaling as hard. In the interests of fairness and accuracy, I stuck the OE wheels and tires back on the test bike and braced myself for a return to sluggishly pedaling squares through oatmeal.

The following ride, number three, felt a lot like ride number one. The bike handled great, but did not feel as sharp as I had initially anticipated. The tires that I had anointed as the culprit to these sensations – while definitely not rocketship fast – were doing a surprisingly good job of adhering to the kitty litter and offering clean feedback in the corners. My heart rate was back in its usual happy place, though, and when I looked at my ride stats afterward I was surprised to see that I had come close to logging a PR on a half-hour lollipop of trail where it definitely felt like I had been just loping along complaining to the clouds about tire drag.

The next eight rides, alternating with a rest day in between each ride, I got to know the new bike. And while staying solidly in my tempo heart rate, trying to maintain a consistent effort ride after ride, my times on the half-hour lollipop continued to fall, finally resulting in three successive PRs. My feelings did not agree with the facts. In spite of the stopwatch evidence that I was going faster on this bike than any other bike I had ridden around the lollipop, it still felt… unhurried.

What we perceive does not always jive with what is actually happening. Much as we all want to trust our own guts, believe the evidence of our own sensations, we are not consistently accurate when it comes to interpreting those sensations. Our feelings, be they physical or emotional, are not as tightly calibrated or as lucidly dependable as we want them to be. Back when I was futzing around with motorcycles and cars, a commonly used acronym was S.O.T.P. Seat Of The Pants. “My S.O.T.P dyno tells me this new K&N intake bumped my power up by at least 10%, just like the ads said it would!” Basically, without using any measurable benchmark, S.O.T.P divination relied upon audible and tactile sensations – along with a good dose of confirmation bias – to arrive at some sort of conclusion.

Thing is, our S.O.T.P dynos were almost always wrong. That new K&N intake wasn’t any faster, it just made more noise. Thinking about this new test bike, I jumped in the S.O.T.P wayback machine and dug through some of the things I was writing about 29” wheels when they first came out. They felt slower to accelerate, harder to turn, less responsive everywhere. They were less fun to ride. I said this over and over, in notes and in reviews, until someone I respected deeply as a rider and racer mentioned that feelings can get in the way of science and told me to put a clock on the wagon wheels. I dug out a stopwatch, strapped on a heart rate monitor, and started doing what I still do to this day – repeating the same ride on alternate days at a tempo, below-threshold, effort. In spite of how slow and unwieldy they felt, the bigger hoops were faster almost everywhere.

Back to the eagerly anticipated new test bike, there were two things at play on that first ride, and they colored my thinking to such a degree that I am still untangling what is happening on each ride from what I think is happening.

One, I was expecting it to feel different. The current crop of flex-stay XC bikes are light and fast, and most of them possess an electrifying nerviness. They are twangy and loaded up with anti-squat and they practically leap forward with each pedal stroke when the traction is there. They are a blast to ride and they generally make anyone feel like a hero for an hour or so. Because this new test bike was kinda light and built around roughly the same amount of suspension travel as the twangers, I assumed it would respond about the same way. When it didn’t, I deemed it slower, because that is also what my heart rate and stopwatch were telling me on that initial ride. BUT, this is where the second thing comes into play.

Two, the prior week I had been working as a course grunt for the Breck Epic. Seven days spent humping a heavy backpack around on an e-bike, along with about five miles of walking and another six hours of standing every day. No aerobic thresholds were glimpsed, nor was it backbreaking heavy lifting, but it was a solid week of standing, walking, carrying, and it left a mark.

The perceived sluggishness of the new bike was a total misread on my part. The bike wasn’t dead. My legs were. Three days later, coinciding with ride number three, my legs had recovered and even though the bike wasn’t behaving like a flex-stay twanger, my rides were getting faster. Flex-stay mannerisms are not evident because the highly anticipated new test bike is not a flex-stay bike. It doesn’t behave like a flex-stay because it doesn’t have to behave like one.

The odd mindfuck here is that it’s a surprisingly quick bike – I have put the clock on it and confirmed this – but it doesn’t at all feel that way. Perception vs reality being what they are, how might this bike end up being received? Many of us still put so much faith in our own S.O.T.P dynos, believe our burning lungs and screaming legs are accurately telling us we’re pinging off our personal rev limiters on a Modified Borg 10 when we’re really just having an off day and are barely pushing a 7, that we often judge things to be slower or faster without really interrogating our assumptions. Sort of like what most of us did with 29ers way back when.

“Mister Ferrentino,” I can still hear the booming voice of my junior high school woodwork teacher, Frank Cambell, echoing around and around in my skull; “do you know what you do when you assume things. You make an ass out of you and me.”

Words to live by. Interrogate those assumptions, regularly and with prejudice.