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Did you know that May is “Bike to Wherever” Month? It used to be that we had a Bike to Work Week but then everyone stopped going to work for some reason in 2020 and now we get the whole month to just bike wherever we want. Which is nice.
This year, I decided to celebrate Bike Month by doing my first imperial century: 100 miles on the bike in one day. I did it as part of Climate Ride, where we raise money for worthy organizations that are helping to fight climate change. I previously rode with them for a week through Joshua Tree National Park, and if you haven’t seen that video, please pause this one and check it out! The algorithm really screwed with me on that one, because I made a mistake in it and uploaded a new version and YouTube decided no one should see it. So go check it out!
Anyway I had so much fun on that ride, and rode so much further than I ever had before, I figured 100 miles in one day with the same group would be, well, not “easy,” but doable. I had a few friends joining me, the ride went through Sonoma wine country, the forecast looked beautiful, and I felt confident.
And then everything went wrong: my friends had to drop out of the ride so I was totally alone, the weather was colder and foggier and rainier than predicted, and the route included a lot of roads like highway 1 where there’s no shoulder and a lot of drivers who either aren’t paying attention because they’re looking at the view or they’re townies who actively hate cyclists and want them to die. I was cold and wet and exhausted, and about halfway through I decided, “screw it, I’m quitting at lunch because this is absolutely miserable.”
I had a lot of time on that long slog to think about “will power,” something I’ve always thought I possessed in great quantities. I quit my office job to do something that requires me to self-motivate, I’ve never had an addiction despite enjoying things like drugs and alcohol and food and gambling, and I enjoy picking up challenging hobbies and continuing to do them even though I am objectively bad at them, like surfing. Seriously, I went out surfing once and my Apple watch buzzed to let me know that I hadn’t stood up that hour. I didn’t mind.
So I was really bummed to hit a point where I really felt, mentally, that I could not do something I previously wanted to do. And I decided that when I eventually got home, I’d read up on the topic of willpower: what is it, does it “run out,” and can we improve it?
Psychologists consider willpower to be a kind of self-control–the ability to resist a temptation you really desire in order to achieve longer-term goals. For instance, being able to overcome my short-term physical and mental discomfort on the bike in order to achieve the longer-term goals of improved fitness and, let’s be honest, being able to say I’d biked 100 miles.
Researchers HAVE found that willpower appears to be something that can run out, and not just because the thing you’re trying to overcome took too long or became too difficult. In the 1990s, studies began to suggest that willpower is like a muscle that is used over and over again throughout your day: just as you might work your glutes to run up the stairs to your office, and then again walking up a hill to lunch, and then doing squats at the gym, the muscle gets more and more tired. In the same vein, your willpower might be tested by not eating a donut in the break room in the morning, then by not shouting at your idiot coworker in the afternoon, and then just deciding to go to the gym in the evening. By the time you get home that night, you have way less willpower and it’s way more likely you’re going to go ahead and just watch trash TV instead of reading a book or meditating.
Researchers tested this by giving some subjects a test of willpower (like eating a radish instead of a piece of chocolate) and a control group an unrelated task, and then having everyone do a completely different test of willpower, like trying to solve an unsolvable problem. In study after study, the people who had to exercise self-control twice did worse on the 2nd task compared to the control group.
So in my case, I needed willpower to go out to the ride even without my friends, and then get on the bike even though it was cold and rainy, and then keep going even though cars were annoying me. I wasn’t mentally prepared for each of those setbacks, and each one sapped my willpower just a bit more.
Learning all this really drove home to me how exercising willpower is largely a function of privilege: the fewer stresses I have to deal with in everyday life, the more willpower reserves I have to overcome short-term temptations.
So could I have increased my willpower? Many people think willpower is something unchanging thanks to the famous “marshmallow test,” in which psychologist Walter Mischel gave 4- and 5-year olds a marshmallow and told them they could eat it if they wanted, but if they waited until he returned to the room, they’d get TWO marshmallows. He followed those kids in later studies and found that the kids who couldn’t resist eating the marshmallow had all kinds of other problems with willpower later in life.
But his own follow up study 40 years later actually found that as adults, those “kids who quickly gave in to the marshmallow temptation are generally no more or less financially secure, educated or physically healthy than their more patient peers. The amount of time the child waited to eat the treat failed to forecast roughly a dozen adult outcomes the researchers tested, including net worth, social standing, high interest-rate debt, diet and exercise habits, smoking, procrastination tendencies and preventative dental care.”
A lot of research now suggests that you CAN increase your willpower in general by being physically active and also maybe by practicing meditation. It can also be built up just like a muscle: the more you practice willpower, the more willpower you get over time.
But that wasn’t helpful while I was actually on the bike. Luckily, psychologists have also come up with a list of ways that they’ve been able to get subjects to push past their self-control exhaustion: making them laugh to put them in a more positive mood, or raising the stakes by offering them money, for instance. And prepping them right before the final test of willpower can also help, by mapping out “if – then” statements. For instance, let’s say you want to go out with friends but you don’t want to drink alcohol. Before leaving, you tell yourself, “If someone offers me a drink, then I will ask for a diet cola.” It takes some burden off of your brain by giving it a plan to kind of mindlessly follow. So to speak. I may have had a better time if I had done something like that: “If I’m feeling frustrated, then I’ll stop and stretch for five minutes.”
While looking at various studies on how to dredge up more willpower when you feel like you’re all out, I also learned something that really blew me away: some research suggests that the idea that willpower is a limited energy source is NOT just a metaphor. In 2007, researchers showed that when subjects completed tasks requiring self-control, they experienced a significant drop in blood glucose compared to subjects that completed a different task. They then went on to show that when they gave subjects a high-glucose drink, they showed more willpower than those given a low-glucose drink after they were already depleted.
Glucose is super important to brain function, so researchers think that willpower literally does drain the energy from your brain. This is why if you’re ever trying to lose weight but you’re having trouble cutting back on sugar, and someone tells you that you just need to exercise more willpower, legally you’re allowed to slap them in the face.
So, having learned all that, what could I have done on the bike to complete that 100-mile ride? Well, there are a few things here that I couldn’t do. For instance, “try not to have to deal with other bullshit” just isn’t possible. I can’t control my friends or the weather or other drivers. And like I said, I didn’t know to come up with some good “if-then” ideas beforehand, so that’s out.
That leaves three scientifically proven ways to dig deeper when willpower is depleted: eat and drink some sugar, raise the stakes, and cheer the fuck up.
And friends, I am happy to reveal that that is exactly what I did.
It didn’t happen through my own efforts. As I said, I was absolutely positive I was going to quit halfway through. I thought, “I’ll just get to the lunch stop at mile 60 and inform the team that I would like a ride back to camp, and I will shower and change into warm dry clothes and be a million times happier and not regret my decision for a single second.”
At the lunch stop, I happened to see a few Climate Ride people I knew from the Joshua Tree trip, Caeli, Patrick, and Steve. They told me later that as soon as they saw me roll in, they knew I was in trouble because I looked like someone had sucked my entire soul out of my body. They introduced me to another lady, Emma-Louise, they gave me a bunch of food and sugary drinks and then they all sat down and talked with me and cracked jokes, and after about 20 minutes I could feel my willpower regenerating.
“There’s only one more stop before the end,” they told me, “and there’s going to be free pie there. It’s just 20 miles. Just make it to pie.”
The stakes! They had been raised. There was pie.
I sighed deeply and agreed that I would go get that pie, but then I was definitely quitting. I got back on my bike and took off. A few minutes down the road, Emma-Louise caught up to me on her own bike and told me that she prefers to have company on the road and if it’s okay with me, she’d like to join me. For the next 20 miles she made me talk and laugh and actually, you know, enjoy myself. Before I knew it we were at the pie stop. Strawberry rhubarb, by the way, my summertime favorite.
And after pie, Emma-Louise told me that I just wasn’t allowed to quit, sorry. She needed company. So I got back on the bike and we did the final 19 miles back to camp. And when I got into camp, the crew gave me a cup of wine and told me that because the route was actually only 99 miles, I was going to have to get back on my bike and finish my century. I said absolutely not. I was done. Willpower, gone. Sorry not sorry.
Then I drank the wine while laughing and talking with everyone, and my husband and friends and dog showed up to congratulate me, and then I got another cup of wine, and then I got back on my bike and did that final mile. I got a big round of applause when I cycled back in, and I assume most of the people applauding assumed I was just the slowest god damn cyclist on the planet. I didn’t even care if they assumed I took 14 hours to finish the route. I was just overjoyed that I finished at all.
So yeah, willpower! It’s not innate; you can improve it with exercise and meditation; and you can push past your own perceived limitations with forethought, laughter, and friendship. And pie. And maybe a little wine.
