Floyd Landis – Train The Hardest & The Most To Win

After reading the article on Dean Karnazes that inspired me to experiment with 4 hour sleep training and the limits of human performance and training, I also found an incredible article on Floyd Landis. This is before the doping scandal, but paints an amazing picture of what it takes to race on that level. Sounds like he knows how to direct his energy, attention, and power in a distorted yet almost unbelievable direction. One can, almost feel his ability to overcome limits and pain.

From Outside Magazine
“Everybody wants to say, ‘I couldn’t win because of this or that,’ ” he says. “To my way of thinking, it doesn’t matter if your goddamn head fell off or your legs exploded. If you didn’t make it, you didn’t make it. One excuse is as good as another.”

Landis takes a sip and leans forward in his chair. “There’s only one rule: The guy who trains the hardest, the most, wins. Period. Because you won’t die. Even though you feel like you’ll die, you don’t actually die. Like when you’re training, you can always do one more. Always. As tired as you might think you are, you can always, always do one more.”

Z-Man rouses, concerned. “I hope some 16-year-old doesn’t read this and then go kill himself on the bike,” he says.

“That was what I did,” Landis says, not missing a beat. “I read something like that, and I trained like that, and, yeah, I was pretty damn depressed for a while. Then it got better.”

So there’s no such thing as overtraining?

“If you overtrained, it means that you didn’t train hard enough to handle that level of training,” Landis says, his fingertip rapping the table for emphasis. “So you weren’t overtrained; you were actually undertrained to begin with. So there’s the rule again: The guy who trains the hardest, the most, wins.”

“I saw firsthand what Lance did, and it was superhuman,” he continues. “I saw how his system worked. It’s not necessary for me to be like Lance in every way. But there are some things that I want to take from that and use.”

For instance?

“His boldness at taking charge of things. His willingness to say, This is what I want, and I’m going to take it. It’s very hard to compete against that.”