Mantras for Tempo and Endurance Rides

Note: This article was originally posted in March 2014. I’ve added 20 new mantras to help your riders through the challenges presented during the pandemic.

One of our more popular series on ICA is a set of articles with various strategies for inspiring your students up long climbs. The series was called Strategies for Strength, and is one of the favorites we’ve done on ICA. One of the strategies was to inspire students to come up with a mantra that they repeat over and over to themselves as they climb. Read that article here, and make sure to read the comments as well, because there are some fantastic mantras that members contributed. (You can find links to all 12 Strategies for Strength at the bottom of that article.)

Of course, mantras aren’t just for climbing. Many of the mantras in that article can also be used for longer endurance rides, but recently I was inspired to come up with an inspirational phrase to help me commit to a tempo pace on a flat road.

Before I give you some more mantras for tempo rides, let’s take a look back at a recent profile we posted for you.

In her incredible Olympic-themed profile Faster, Higher, Stronger (which, by the way, is not limited to use during the Olympics!), Christine Nielsen inspires students to come up with their own motivational phrase. The phrase “faster, higher, stronger” is what is known as a hendiatris. That’s a fancy term for a three-word phrase that expresses one idea. Such phrases are often used as descriptors or mottos—like “sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll,” “reduce, reuse, recycle,” “truth, justice, and the American way.”

During the profile she asks students to develop their own three-word phrase that they can use to describe and/or inspire their effort.