Faster, further, harder?

Ernesto Pastor is a restless, passionate person with a unique perspective who has been able to focus on the beauty of an area considered a "demographic desert." After pedaling many years in ultra-distance road tests, he decided to seek further challenges. He is one of the leaders of bikepacking in this country and is the creator and ideologist of the mythical "Empty Mountains", a project with a true soul that transcends cycling. Ernesto leaves us a deep and interesting reflection on the desire for improvement, the competitive impulse and the need to demonstrate... We invite you to read it and enjoy its splendid photos.

Ernesto Pastor

During a stage in my life, these were the metrics that everything focused on: More speed, higher averages, better position, shorter time, greater gradient, greater distance, less rest, more hours of pedaling, less time sleeping, more difficulty. Numbers, numbers and more numbers.

At that time, everything revolved around improving those numbers. They were a form of expression, a message of tremendous power. The desire to improve was the driving force that moved my daily life, and that allowed me to gain the confidence necessary to overcome a good number of health problems that affected my childhood and youth.

The bike became therapy, the tool that allowed me to overcome my health problems by overcoming my limits. It was a desire to improve in the purest version I had ever felt.

However, there came a time when that desire to improve left me, and I began to look outside without being conscious: Be faster than, arrive before, do more kilometers than... It was no longer about surpassing myself. , I needed to compare myself with others to satisfy my perception of evolution. I also felt that I was starting to do things not for myself or for myself, but to prove to others, to meet other people's expectations. People who probably didn't give a damn what I did. But I didn't know that. Belonging to a group, to a level, to a “sports status” was a burden that increasingly weighed more and more. 

And I continued, season after season, without finding out anything.

In my case, every time I reached one of my limits, it was a motivation to continue learning and improving in different aspects: training methods, nutrition, rest, and at a certain point, also psychology. I started documenting, reading, researching. At first from a more sporting point of view, but I soon expanded it to a more general point of view, even discovering meditation, yoga or mindfulness. And once again, the bike was the tool with which I could practice all those new concepts. My challenges became final practices where I tested my improvements. 

However, throughout all that learning I came to a conclusion that I did not expect. That whole process led me to discover that the key question was not “what to do to continue improving", but "why I need to continually improve”. I didn't learn to break my psychological limits, but rather I learned to question them. 

Why did I need increasingly longer, more difficult, more risky challenges? What lack did that impulse show? What did this continuous need to demonstrate, to please, mean?

Realizing this made me completely change my point of view. You discover that you don't need to prove anything, that you don't need to please, but simply do it for yourself, for your own enjoyment, for living, for your physical and mental health. Always with the bike as therapy and tool.

But without a doubt, that had an enormous difficulty: leaving the current in which you find yourself to search for your own, heading towards your own horizon.

Throughout this journey I have met many people who have followed a similar process, in one way or another. Some who had not yet found an explanation for what they felt. Others who had not yet managed to find the strength necessary to get out of the current that was dragging them. But unfortunately, also those who gave up and ended up hating this precious tool of life that is the bicycle.

I hope these words are a point of reflection, doubt, or why not, support. In an ultra-competitive world, both inside and outside of sport, simply talking about these issues can be an important, even necessary, step that can contribute something very positive to the lives of those around us. Talk later?

@montanasvacias

www.montanasvaacias.com