--- title: "When a hard interval becomes a terrible day" date: 2026-11-15 categories: ["Mindset","Training"] url: https://www.semiprocycling.com/digest/when-a-hard-interval-becomes-a-terrible-day author: Damian Ruse (SEMIPRO Cycling) --- # When a hard interval becomes a terrible day ![](https://buzz.semiprocycling.com/newsletter-images/ee6af7cf-16ef-4347-9cff-d8ff7a86bf82/a5f01bc4eebfbc2aae42619d5454ac91f83f2f1162dbe7e2a14ebdfea6693d8d.jpg) You’re partway through an interval and it feels harder than you expected. Your legs are heavy. You glance at the power. There’s still more time left than you’d like. Then the conversation changes. “This feels hard” becomes “I’m having a terrible day.” A few seconds later, you’re questioning your fitness, your training, and whether there’s any point finishing the session. The effort is real. The verdict about your whole day deserves a closer look. That distinction is what makes a small cycling study by Martin Barwood and colleagues useful. Fourteen recreationally active young men completed four laboratory 10 km time trials. After familiarisation and a baseline trial, two matched groups received different self-talk sessions. One group identified negative thoughts from their earlier rides, developed their own motivational responses, and rehearsed them. The comparison group received neutral phrases unrelated to performance. The motivational group improved their average time from 18:40 to 17:58. The neutral group didn’t improve significantly. The faster riding came with higher power late in the trial, while ratings of perceived exertion were unchanged. There were only seven men in each group, and they weren’t specialist cyclists. The groups also differed in whether they chose their phrases, so this doesn’t isolate the effect of positive wording. It certainly doesn’t prove that every difficult session can be rescued by changing your thoughts. What it gives us is a useful possibility: a prepared response can help you keep working when the effort starts generating unhelpful commentary. Here’s how I’d apply that to training. This is a coaching framework, rather than a reset-or-stop rule tested in the study. Start by making the thought more specific. “I’m having a terrible day” is difficult to act on. “This rep feels harder than the first one” gives you something to assess. So does “I started too hard” or “My breathing hasn’t settled in the recovery.” If the sensations are familiar for this kind of effort, your pedalling is controlled, and you’re still meeting the purpose of the session, try a short reset. Relax your grip. Bring your attention back to the rhythm. Choose a response you can believe: “This is a hard part of the rep. Stay steady until the recovery.” You don’t have to decide the fate of the entire workout halfway through one difficult interval. Give yourself a sensible point to reassess, such as the end of the rep or the next recovery. There’s no magic number of seconds that separates a mental wobble from fatigue. Then look at what happens. Does the effort become manageable again? Can you ride the next repetition with the control the session requires? Or are you repeatedly missing the target, struggling to recover, or changing how you pedal just to keep going? Persistent difficulty deserves a change of plan. Poor sleep, accumulated fatigue, insufficient food, heat or an overambitious target may be part of the picture. A calmer internal voice helps you assess those possibilities; it doesn’t remove them. Adjust with the purpose of the workout in mind. A small reduction in power might keep a controlled aerobic session useful. If a session depends on high-quality efforts and you can no longer produce them, ending the hard work may make more sense than turning the remaining reps into a grind. Easy riding or finishing early can be the right choice. There’s also a clear boundary: chest pain, dizziness or unusual breathlessness are reasons to stop and seek medical advice, with urgent help for severe symptoms. Those belong outside the self-talk experiment. What you do with this depends on which rider you are. **If you’re time-capped,** resist the temptation to make a scarce training window justify any amount of struggle. Use the reset to see whether useful work is still available. If it isn’t, protect the next session instead of trying to repay today’s missed watts. **If you’re over 50,** keep the assessment specific to today. “My legs haven’t come round” is information. “I’m getting too old for this” is a much bigger conclusion. Check the session and your recent recovery before turning one difficult ride into a judgement about your future. **If you’re chasing a result or preparing for a new event,** practise a credible response before the decisive moment. Choose words that bring you back to an action: hold the rhythm, settle the pace, reach the next recovery. Afterwards, notice whether they helped you make a better decision. **Let a hard moment be a hard moment. Then decide what the next one needs.** _Source. Barwood, M.J., Corbett, J., Wagstaff, C.R.D., McVeigh, D. & Thelwell, R.C. (2015). Improvement of 10-km Time-Trial Cycling With Motivational Self-Talk Compared With Neutral Self-Talk. International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance, 10(2), 166–171. [doi:10.1123/ijspp.2014-0059](https://doi.org/10.1123/ijspp.2014-0059). Session-adjustment guidance is coaching interpretation. [Exercise warning signs: sports cardiology guidance](https://www.bangkokhospital.com/en/bangkok-heart/center-clinic/bht-sports-cardiology/bht-sports-cardiology/warning-signs)._ OFFICIAL KIT PARTNER Check out the Lameda kit I’ve been riding in here: [https://www.lameda.cc/SEMIPRO](https://www.lameda.cc/SEMIPRO) Use code SEMIPRO for 15% off eligible cycling kit (I earn a commission on eligible purchases). ## On my mind: What do you value in coaching? A bit of a question for you this week: what’s important to you in coaching? I’m trying to understand what the future of coaching looks like, and where I can add the most value as things change. Yes, there’s a little bit of navel-gazing in that. But the reason is straightforward. I want to use my skills and knowledge to help you get better at riding a bike. Understanding what you actually value is part of doing that well. It’s easy to spend time building what you think people need. I’d rather hear what makes a difference to you, and what you think will still matter a few years from now. Is it having a plan you trust? Understanding why you’re doing something? Having someone notice when things aren’t going well, help you make a decision, or keep you accountable? Or something I haven’t mentioned? If you’ve worked with a coach, what would you most miss if that support disappeared? If you haven’t, what would make coaching worth it to you? Hit reply and tell me. A few honest lines would help. — Damian **PS.** What’s the one thing you most want from a coach? Hit reply and tell me. It will help me understand where my work can make the biggest difference to your riding. Semi-Pro Limited, Suite 1104, 70 Queen's Road, Central, Hong Kong.