The Privilege of a Broken Heart: Mara Abbott (Transcript)

Full text of cyclist Mara Abbott’s talk: The Privilege of a Broken Heart at TEDxBoulder 2016 conference

Notable quote from this talk:

“No one else gets to decide what is or is not enough for you.”

Listen to the MP3 Audio here:

TRANSCRIPT:

Mara Abbott – Cyclist

About a month and a half ago, I stood clad in American flag spandex on the beach in Copacabana. Unfortunately, I was completely nauseous.

This was possibly because I also happened to be standing on the start line of the road race at the Olympic Games this summer, so I was a little bit nervous.

Now before you guys get any wrong ideas, I never started cycling because I loved the feeling of the wind in my hair or the freedom of the open road. I became a cyclist because I loved competition, elite competition, and this was my avenue to being the best in the world.

I had also decided that this road race in Rio would be the poetic finale to my career, so therefore also my last chance to embody that greatness.

Well, they said that the course that day had a little something for everyone. Now what that actually means is that it had some aspect that was going to be genuinely terrifying to each and every one of us. It began with cobblestones.

Now, routing a race across cobblestones is one of the hallowed traditions of cycling. It is not one of my favorites. As a rather small rider, hitting a cobble at speed is pretty similar to being the little kid on the wrong end of the Seesaw.

And then you’re going to add into that extra crashes and flat tires and everything bouncing off at angles you don’t expect.

Furthermore, that particular day, the current world champion had spent the last week telling the media about how she planned to use the cobbles as a place to get rid of me, personally, as a threat before the race had even started.

Now, to be fair on her part, that wasn’t entirely stupid strategy because the second major challenge of the course was a big climb that came perilously close to the finish.

Now I got selected for the Olympic team based on my ability as a climber. And my rivals have learned that the best way to deal with me on a climb is to get rid of me before the climb.

So we came to the cobbles and I kept my focus and made sure I was to the front of the group. And I kept my hands light on the bars and tried to keep my pedal stroke steady.

And after two laps of that section, nothing bad had happened. That is apart from the bee that flew into my helmet and stung me on the head.

Well now I faced even greater challenge – patience. Because for the next hour my job was to stay out of trouble and not use any extra energy.

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So I ate and I drank like I was supposed to and I talked to my teammates, and I tried to stay out of the wind. And as we got closer and closer to that finishing climb, I started to feel a little shaky.

And at first I attributed that to, you know, maybe too much sugar from all of the energy gels. But then I realized it was much more likely that it was just the nerves of potential.

Because see, this was the moment that everyone had been telling me about for months – if I could make it to the base of the climb with all of my major rivals, something extraordinary might just happen.

So I went hard from the bottom of the climb just like I was supposed to and now I had to call on another lesson. And that’s faith. Faith that if I kept going at this pace, just like I had so many times before, one by one my rivals would fade away.

Now that’s not a very easy thing to believe when a glance under your shoulder reveals the faces of people that you are sure are not suffering at all, in spite of your very best efforts. But I had learned this lesson before, commit, believe and keep going.

And so when we got to the top of the climb, it was just myself and one Dutch rider, Annemiek Van Vleuten who remained. There were about 15 kilometers that remained to the finish line and about half of them downhill. So for perspective, that’s going to be 20 or 25 minutes out of a race that took just under four hours.

There was a big gap to the next group of riders behind us. I was exactly where I needed to be to win an Olympic medal.

So we started the descent and Annemiek immediately proved herself, not for the first time to be a more daring descender than I was. And so she shot away around the corner as the light rain started to fall, making the roads a little bit slick.

But still, that left me in second place until I came around one of the final bends and I saw an orange shape crumbled to the side of the road.

Annemiek had crashed in one of the final corners, which meant now somehow as things go in cycling, I was back in the lead, in the lead of the Olympics road race with now less than 10 kilometers to go to the finish line.

Now another thing you learned about in bike racing is physics. So when you’re in the draft of another rider, that is, behind them so that they block the wind for you, you’re using about 30% of the energy that you would be using if you were riding by yourself.

So when you see all the riders in the Tour De France moving around in that blob, well it’s called a Peloton, and they’re not doing it because they’re gossiping. And they’re not doing it because they want to play Russian roulette with the bike handling skills of the guy next to him. Although both of those things do happen, but they’re doing it to save energy.