A rigid high performer is a scared high performer.

For most of my career I thought I was in control.

Last weekend I watched the Vuelta from the side of the road for the first time.

I've raced Grand Tours. I'd never stood on a climb with two friends and watched one go past. This time I was outside Estepona with Ulisses and Ronja, halfway up the climb, and it was one of the best days I've had around a bike.

The Vuelta was my first Grand Tour. I wore the leader's jersey there. I also learned what it feels like to reach the third week and die in installments, one day at a time.

So I found myself watching shoulders, hands, faces. The way some riders held themselves on the bike.

I couldn't know what each of them was going through. But some of what I saw looked familiar. I'd spent years riding like that.

Two bodies I knew from the inside

Some riders came past with the shoulders sunk, the chest dropped, the hands soft on the bars. Still pedaling, still in the group. It looked like the body was carrying a decision that had already been made.

Others looked like the opposite. Shoulders up by the ears. Chest lifted and stuck there. Jaw set. Mouth open, breath high in the chest. A grip on the bars that never softened. Holding a place, getting to Sunday with the number intact.

I've been both. The first one in the third week of that Vuelta. The second one for most of the years after it.

The face was the same on all of them. A poker face. That was the part I recognized most.

You know this one

Someone asks if you're okay.

"Yeah. Just tired."

You answer before you've really checked.

You're still doing the work. Still showing up. If the result is there, you take that as proof that you're fine.

Then someone tells you to relax your shoulders, and you notice how high you've been holding them. You let them drop. A minute later, they're back up.

That's the part I'm talking about. You can notice it for a moment and still have no idea how much of your day you spend that way.

The face can be trained. The shoulders can't.

The body doesn't lie. But one part of it can act.

The face is the part you learn to run. I learned it early. I grew up reading the room, watching what the people around me needed to see, and giving them that. Long before I raced a bike I could show one thing on the outside while the inside was doing something else. The best poker faces belong to the people who needed them most, and mine was very good.

The shoulders and the breath don't take instructions like that. When your body decides something is at stake and there might not be enough to cover it, a few things happen on their own. The eyes fix on one point. The chest lifts and holds the breath in. The shoulders come up. The hands grip. You can override that for a few breaths. Not for a climb. Not for a third week.

And holding the face still while all of that is running costs extra. It comes out of the same energy as the climb.

So on that climb I could see the tension. I wondered whether they could feel it. For years, I couldn't feel my own.

Why I was rigid, and what it cost me

A bike only works if you let it move under you. The wheel in front shifts, the road changes, the group surges. You need to be able to adjust without tightening up every time something changes.

I couldn't. For the second half of my career I was tight on the bike. I reacted late. My eyes were on the wheel in front and nowhere else, so the side of the road, where the crash comes from, wasn't there for me. I crashed a lot. I called it bad luck.

Here's what I understand now. I was holding myself because I was trying to control the result. And I was trying to control the result because losing wasn't a bad day for me. It was a threat to who I was.

If you don't believe in what you're capable of, you don't believe in your body. A body you don't trust sends signals you don't trust. The thought tightens the body. The tight body confirms the thought. Every lap around that circle looks like proof. So you hold on harder, because holding feels like control. And a held body loses exactly the thing that keeps you upright in a group.

What changed

I'm not going to tell you I fixed myself. I'll tell you what was different, because I noticed it in a race.

It came late. In my last season I went into somatics, into studying my own body and what it had been holding. I became much more aware of where I was and what was around me. The body was more relaxed. I noticed more. I wasn't tight anymore, and my intuition worked better.

That year there was a stage race in Italy. Chaos every day. Bad roads, dangerous finales, at least five crashes a stage. I avoided every single one. I was almost always in the right place at the right moment, and I couldn't have told you how.

I can tell you now. When the body isn't braced, it can feel the group. It reads the road before the thought arrives. That's not luck. That's a body that is no longer in the dark.

What actually changes it

Not believing harder. You can't decide to trust a body you can't feel.

And not dropping the poker face. It kept me in the room for years, and it still has its uses.

What changes it is learning to notice what you're doing with your body while you're busy getting through the day. Finding what it's holding, and feeling it from the inside, before someone on the side of the road can see it. Once the body knows what it's gripping, it can let go. Not as a decision. As a permission it gives when it's no longer in the dark.

That's the whole of my work.

For years I could tell you how the race had gone. I was much less able to tell you what I'd been doing with my body through it. Standing on that climb last weekend, I kept thinking about how long it took me to notice.

Maybe you know some version of this. You get through the race, the week, whatever it is you get through. Only afterward do you realize how tightly you were holding yourself.

Getting through it matters. So does knowing what it takes out of you, before it has taken it.

JB