Out of interest, do any of you have any New Year’s resolutions made? Please feel free to post them up in the Comments section at the bottom of this page. I promise not to mercilessly slate them unless they truly are worthy of further ridicule.

For my own NYR’s I’m keeping it simple – “ride more,” followed by “ride more disciplines.” Last year I spent a decent chunk of time on the turbo trainer feeling my brain dribble out of my ear in order to get a decent road and TT season in, with a smattering of track endurance racing. During one of many stationary daydreams I realised it’s really about time I tried a mountain bike and maybe attempted an aspect of cyclesport with tyres wider than 23mm. So, finances willing, a hardtail 29er is on my hitlist for early 2014 so I can at last unleash the dirty filthy habit I have, as yet, repressed. This will almost certainly make it into a future column. Probably written from a hospital bed.

Poor weather and New Year resolutions brings me neatly around to the subject of this circuitous rambling:  Motivation. Specifically, motivation to ride. I am convinced, with all the furious conviction of a religious zealot, that this subject is worthy of discussion as in highlighting your own motivations you may be able to encourage them, remove any dry periods, and keep riding with a big smile on your face. Which is always the aim, right?

We all have different reasons for wanting to throw a leg over a toptube, and over the course of a season, career (for the lucky few), or lifetime this probably changes and mutates like a particularly virulent strain of ebola. I’m going to go back and delve into my pre-University Psychology textbook here and posit that the first major motivational distinction is between intrinsic and extrinsic motivations.

Intrinsic, interior, motivations are those that come from within. For personal reasons. For emotional reasons. Such as wanting to do the best, or exceed your own boundaries. Of wanting to put in a solid day’s training each day and being fascinated by the process. Exterior motivations, though are generally more physical and take the form of money, food, and corporeal reward. I think in all honesty we all share a mixture of the two, but if the balance is unnecessarily skewed then you may have problems, e.g., the person who doesn’t actually enjoy riding a bike but is happy to spend thousands on the latest frame, or the dreamy romantic who spends so much time lost in a world of personal development he forgets to secure a real job to pay for rent (I hold my hand up here).

There has been a great deal of interest in recent years on the sports psychology element of cycling – fuelled, perhaps, by the success of Sir Chris Hoy, the GB squad, and the real Scotty in the engine room, Dr. Steve Peters. His book, The Chimp Paradox, neatly explains some of the motivational and mental issues we all face and from what I can gather is a kind of updated, modified version of the Freudian school of psychology for the 21^st-Century cyclist, or indeed person.

A large part of Sir Chris’ success, if he will permit me to pass my unqualified outsider opinion on it, is down to the fact he is a perfectly-performing mental athlete. His motivational focus – on the process, rather than the outcome – and his attention to detail and control of negative urges/feelings has enabled him to train consistently over many years and make the gains required to have achieved the astonishing successes he has. I think this is an approach we can all learn from. It seems curious that we spend so many hours working the body yet so little on combatting negative mental patterns or developing positive visualisations. But that’s another topic for another time

But enough on the motivations of the professionals, who perhaps don’t have to worry as much about the juggling of training with family and a ‘real’ job. What motivates you? And does this change?

I find the first tentative jitters for my road season appear in January, as I begin to start dreaming of racing again. Once the racing has started my motivation switches to ongoing development and wanting to do a little better each race, or pick up a few more category points. By August or September, though, the novelty is beginning to wear off and I’m normally quite keen to start thinking about the ‘fresh start’ to addressing my weaknesses that the offseason offers.

This is around about the time that my every waking moment is taken up with idle fantasies involving a KFC Bargain Bucket, takeaway Indian curries, and lots of red wine (although not all at the same time). After months of restraint and self-control it is inevitable and I don’t regard the season as fully over until I have finished my last race and then gone on to eat fried chicken until I pass out in a greasy, exhausted, glorious mess. Living the dream.

However the costs will continue to rise like a KOM VAM should you make the woeful mistake of becoming SERIOUS about cycling. This will result in a particularly deliberating fetish for carbon fibre and you are also likely to start obsessing about training (and food – see my previous ramblings here), which is what this week’s column is really about.

Short of spending a king’s ransom on equipment or PEDs (or both, for the financially provident and morally bankrupt), the easiest way of proving how SERIOUS you take your cycling is to start to investigate training methods and theories focussing on how to improve your latent cycling prowess. Your hidden talent. ‘Undiscovered’, lying in wait, surreptitiously biding its time until it’s beyond the remit of the statute of limitations. I digress.

There are many ways to skin a cat, as the saying goes, and an equal number of ways in which riders have persisted in physically ruining themselves, in the ardent belief that superior VO2 must be hiding just around the next interval. Some training companies, such as the Sufferfest, have even fashioned an industry around smashing yourself into teeny tiny pieces, accompanied by a feel-good soundtrack and motivational slavedriver onscreen. If you have only 1he spare for riding they make a great use of that time. Just don’t forget your bucket.

HIIT, SIT, tabata, and the like have all been pronounced as the holy grail of training methodologies in their time. Periodisation, reverse periodisation, cross training, and visualisation all have their place in the serious cyclist’s toolbox of physiological education, but – as with food and pretty much any other aspect of performance – a consensus has not been forthcoming as to what is the ‘right’ way to train.

There are still those old fellas on the club run, the grizzled veterans of a bygone conflict who, in a hoarse and war-torn rasp, insist on “gettin’ t’miles in,” convinced that ‘the legs’ will materialise in time like disgruntled field mice coming out of a long hibernation. Humans are creatures of habit and it is all too easy to settle into a comfortable rhythm year-on-year and then wonder why there are no real changes in your performance each season. I’ve discussed denial in the past as being the true mark of the committed cyclist– and here’s a pretty much perfect example. I believe it may have been Einstein (check me out, with my Fisher Price book of quotations) who said the most ridiculous thing in the world is doing the same thing again and again and expected a different result.

The other end of the spectrum (and I apologise for using this line, AGAIN, but it means I get to pretend I’m presenting the other side of the argument and that I’m a balanced and educated mediator) represents a rider who will refuse, ‘pon pain of death, to accomplish a single pedal stroke without a power meter, HRM, oxygen mask and pressure mapping tech in place – to ensure no wasted effort (and, regrettably, maximum irritation for anybody within the vicinity).

Beyond the meat and veg of the training program and bulk of the workload, however, there are the wizards and wildcards who insist they have done what countless generations of blue sky thinking coaches and physiologists have not done before and found a ‘secret method’, guaranteed to assure sporting supremacy.

I’m not talking about drugs here – even if they do offer a one-size-fits-all illicit performance boost– but the kind of revolutionary breakthrough touted as the ‘next big thing’. Beetroot juice. Powercranks with independent cranks. Q-Rings and O’symetric ovalised chainrings. Powerbreathe respiratory trainers.

Far be it from me to dispute their efficacy or the relevance of their supporting scientific data, but there has yet to be a performance aid which actually pedals for you – and that is what is really required. Devastatingly effective though these aids may claim to be, it all essentially comes back down to your leg(s) and your pedal(s). I include pluralised (s) there as I know a good many leg amputees who will utterly trash the majority of people on a bike.

Training, therefore, is very much about trying to maximise training load whilst minimising actual effort. Crackpot schemes and secrecy will always trump simple, hard, mind-numbingly dull graft. For example, I recall one maverick soul, convinced he was Obree’s equal, insisting that what I really needed to do to ride faster was take up smoking and fire up a cheroot or eight after every ride. Something to do with vasodilation of the blood vessels to accentuate the oxygen deprivation and stimulate greater cardiovascular adaptation. Or something. I forget. It all sounded a bit Michael Hutchence to me and I may have zoned out and found something utterly fascinating to look at on the sole of my shoe.

Training. It really is quite simple. Ride. Rest. Recover. Repeat. And try your best to have fun doing it.

All cyclists, all sportspeople if we’re honest, are borderline delusional. Deniability is thy name, whether you deny your legs are hurting, deny yourself another slice of cake, or deny any knowledge of how the banned chemicals made it into your blood sample. As the name of this column suggests I am also in denial of my cycling ability. I too have flaunted in the face of realism, tweaked the nose of common sense and squinted under the cold harsh glare of fact.

This column aims to be a realistic exploration of those delusions. There may be biased commentary and half-baked reviews. There may be shallow cursory analysis and vitriolic diatribes. There may be puns. There may be weak attempts at humour. There may even be the occasional real joke which catches you unawares. Anything is possible.

There is one enshrining principle or concept which influences a lot of what I do – or attempt to do – on the bike. This subject is style. Fashion. Looking good. Being ‘en vogue’ or ‘au moment’. Because, let’s face it, road cycling as a discipline is about as pretentious and sniffy as it is possible to be without actually donning a leotard and dedicated footwear and practicing the same repetitive movements over and over again. Oh, wait…

Cycling, and in particular road cycling, it would seem, is experiencing a bit of a zeitgeist renaissance at the minute. In cities across the world people are saddling up their fixties, vintage roadies, or hyperlight carbon rocketships and tapping awkwardly into towns in order to drink specialty coffee, purchase premium merino garments, and agonise about the serious topics of the day – such as whether Cav is lookin’ podgy, if Oleg plans to introduce a female-only masseuse policy (brunettes need not apply), and exactly what is the best depilation mousse around.

But it’s ok. Because this is road cycling. It’s all bums on seats. The more the merrier. But it’s a tough, elitist and poseur clique of cyclesport, and it’s hard to remember the intricate rules and etiquette. The flipside, however, is that if you learn the unspoken rules you will fake it until you make it. Be accepted. Even if your designer lap-dog has a greater VO2 than you do. The key phrase to bear in mind is:

“Bella in sella.”

That is all you need in road cycling. Truly. It doesn’t matter if you are the choppiest of chopper 4^th cats (5^th cats for our American readers) and actually considering a genuine 4/5^th cat tat, provided you are ‘beautiful in the saddle’. What this may actually mean is ambiguous and varies depending on the locale, timezone, race and your own level of self-respect.

Because it doesn’t matter how fast, or slow, you are… provided you look damn fine doing it. Consider, for a moment, Chris Froome’s crushing 2013 Tour de France victory. The majority of my effeminate road cycling friends remain conspicuously unfussed about it. The reason? He may climb at the speed of God’s gift to endurance sport, but uphill he looks like a rheumy-eyed octogenarian pushing a supermarket trolley with a dodgy wheel. Across cobbles. To be blunt.

In stark contrast the previous year’s winner, Bradley Wiggins, is as cool a cucumber as you are likely to chance upon in even a Siberian grocery. The sight of him spinning languidly down les Champs, full-bore, with all the considered nonchalance of a chap running errands in town, whilst leading out Cav, was the very personification of ‘bella in sella’. I half expected him to turn and half-heartedly let off a casual snot rocket into the faces of the assembled lead-out trains. Put the green in GreenEdge, so to speak.

These two recent examples neatly illustrate either end of the cool spectrum. That they are also both British riders (as am I) is merely a coincidence. And in no way is a covert attempt by me to underline the rabid supremacy of British cycling across all other nations. Nope. Nosirree.

That it was the Italians who came up with the phrase ‘bella in sella’ is the very antithesis of a surprise. In a country where leather trousers (pants, for the Yanks) is considered acceptable legwear and a poorly-executed cappuccino merits a violent homicide, looking good, being good, retaining ‘la bella figura’ is of paramount importance. When you actually stop to consider Italy’s contributions to the World – pasta, pizza, lambretta, decent coffee, Cipollini, il Giro, you realise that the Roman empire never really left. It just hid under a cloak of enthusiastic gesticulation and outrageous skinsuits.

So, the rules. There are enough. You’ve probably seen them around. Velominati has some tasty ones. Bike Snob is also good for the occasional sartorial guiding hand. I won’t discredit your intelligence or Googling skillz by directing you to them (Editor’s note: while Tom is also very lazy, his editor is not…), nor will I add my own biased ‘rules’ to an already conflicted, contradictory and conceited milieu. As mentioned before, the rules are flexible in context. Order a cappuccino for lunch in the UK and nobody bats an eyelid. Order a cappuccino in Italy after 11am and you’ll be lucky not to be flogged to death with your own carbon mini-pump.

Be as slow as you like, but make it look good. It doesn’t matter what you ride, where you ride, when you ride, or indeed how fast you ride. Just ride and make it look good. Be the very pinnacle of beauty in the saddle, the epitome of road sense, and conscientious awareness. Be the rider people stop and stare at, jaws-dropped, entranced by how ‘yes’ you are.

This rambling monologue is, of course, just a reminder to myself that looking good is a goal in itself, and one that I like to think I carry off with aplomb in the absence of any other discernable talent or skills. I raced a track event at the weekend and absolutely bombed, adding new significance to the term ‘underperformance’. But it doesn’t matter. Because even if my lap times were more akin to the swift walking pace of an asthmatic, I looked good. Let’s not kid ourselves. That’s what really matters.