Mince Pies, Metrics and Monkeys … The Great Festive Negotiation
A Drop Bar Diaries Christmas-to-New-Year special in which I attempt to train like an adult, supervised by a small primate called Moogy Boogie.
Christmas is a fascinating time of year for a cyclist. Not because of the weather (usually damp, dark and engineered to erode your will to live), but because December turns training into an annual negotiation.
On one side: the version of you that wants momentum… steady work, consistency, a quiet sense of progress.
On the other: the version that sincerely believes a mince pie counts as carb loading and that Quality Street is recovery nutrition if you eat it soon enough after standing up.
Both versions live in me. And this year, they’ve got witnesses.
Moogy Boogie and the Red LED
Picture the scene. Zwift is glowing on the screen, the fan is doing its best, and I’m producing that uniquely indoor-cycling sweat, the kind that starts in your scalp and ends up in your socks.
On the bars, like a tiny director on a tiny set, sits Moogy Boogie. One of the PG Tips Monkey soft toys Jake and I started collecting when he was little. We ended up with a whole gang of them, named, each with their own cheeky character, ridiculous in the best way, and they’ve somehow become part of our family story.
Jake’s 29 in March and still keeps Bing Bong and Zugga Zugga with him in Bristol. Bing Bong even has his own Facebook page, which has been posting holiday snaps and nonsense updates for sixteen years. In our defence, this world needs more harmless daftness, not less.
This Christmas, Charlotte (Jake’s girlfriend, and now an enthusiastic recruit) gifted us two new monkeys released for Comic Relief in November: Cedric Chimpinson, apparently Bing Bong’s long-lost cousin, and Nigel Stevenson. Naturally.
So the gang grows. Which is fitting, because Christmas also brings back another character… the chimp in your head.
The Chimp in My Head
Professor Steve Peters’ Chimp Paradox has done the rounds in elite sport for years, and once you’ve met your own chimp you can’t unmeet it. The gist is simple: you’ve got a rational brain that can plan and pace, and you’ve also got a chimp that deals in feelings, urgency and self-preservation.
The important bit (the bit I didn’t fully appreciate until recently) is that the chimp doesn’t have just one voice. It’s not always the same character shouting the same instruction. It’s more like a shape-shifter with a little box of costumes.
Sometimes it’s mischievous. The Zwift chimp. The one that sees a segment, a rise, a passing rider and goes: “Go on then. Smash it. Prove yourself!”
That chimp is basically twelve years old and fuelled by ego.
But sometimes, and this is the one that’s much more convincing, it’s persuasive. It sounds sensible. Reasonable, even. It turns up mid-effort, looks at the time remaining, and starts making a calm case for why you should stop.
I’ve met that chimp many times, but more recently on one of the longer sweet spot sessions, when the second block suddenly felt like a different sport. The first interval was fine. The second started fine. And then, somewhere around the point where your brain realises there’s still a long way to go, the chimp slid into the passenger seat and began its presentation:
“You’re not feeling 100%. You’ve slept badly. You’re going to blow up. There’s no point. Just pack it in and try again tomorrow.”
That voice used to win. I’d either bail completely, or I’d do the other classic chimp move: surge at the end purely to prove I could, then crawl off the bike like I’d been evicted from my own legs.
This time I did something that felt almost suspiciously adult.
I didn’t quit. I didn’t fight. I didn’t turn it into a moral drama. I just dialled the watts down in ERG mode and finished the time. Not because I’d “given up”, but because I’d decided the actual goal was to bank the work and keep the habit intact, not to impress an imaginary jury of cyclists in my head.
It’s a small shift, but it’s the one that changes everything: listening to the chimp without obeying it.
And that’s why this festive period feels different. Because the main negotiation here is about resisting both chimp impulses: the one that wants to smash every ride, and the one that wants to bail the moment discomfort starts bargaining.
Which brings us neatly back to mince pies.
The Mince Pie Protocol
No, mince pies aren’t the enemy. The enemy is the thinking that arrives with them.
There’s the “it’s Christmas so training doesn’t count” approach, which tends to drift into “it’s Christmas so I’ll do absolutely nothing for two weeks.” Then there’s the “I must offset this” approach, which leads to people doing maximal intervals on four hours’ sleep purely out of guilt, then eating half a tin of chocolates while insisting they’ve earned it. I have been both these people.
This year has been more considered. Some days I train properly. Some days I spin easily. Some days I rest because, well, it’s Christmas Day and I’m cooking for eight and my mum’s kitchen resembles a military operation.
I keep the habit alive without turning it into a performance. Which turns out to be… surprisingly effective.
Heart Rate: The New Anxiety Generator
Christmas also brought me a heart rate monitor. A sensible person would clip it on, ride normally, and glance at the data afterwards like a calm adult.
I did not do that.
I spent parts of my first ride watching the number like a stock market ticker, trying to bring it down using breathing techniques and what I can only describe as mild spiritual negotiation.
The problem with heart rate is that it tells a story, but it also tells several unnecessary subplots. You slept badly. You’re warm. You’re dehydrated. You had a drink. You’re thinking about heart rate too much. It adds another, unwelcome psychological layer to an already demanding situation.
So my AI coach (who we now know speaks fluent restraint) and I have agreed that heart rate is currently observational. We collect it, we learn from it, and we don’t chase it like a dog after a tennis ball.
The Last Ride of 2025
New Year’s Eve arrived and, partly needing to decompress after a challenging twelve months, I decided to end the year quietly. No big party. A controlled session earlier in the day. No heroic “earn your indulgence” nonsense.
The ride itself was tidy: two twenty-minute blocks at 195W, steady as a metronome. The first block settled nicely; the second block ran hotter, as it should, and towards the end I lifted cadence slightly and saw my heart rate monitor’s LED go red.
I’d covered the heart rate number on the Zwift HUD so it wouldn’t distract me, but the LED sits there in my peripheral vision like a tiny traffic light for my nervous system, and red has a way of waking the chimp.
The old me might have panicked, surged, proved something. The new me stayed smooth and kept the power steady. I finished feeling like I could have done a third interval if I’d had fuel to hand, not because I was trying to impress anyone, but because I genuinely felt strong.
I ended 2025 buoyant, not battered. Which is not usually how I exit December.
New Year’s Day: Choosing the Sofa (… “the sofa, let me lie here on the sofa”)
January 1st arrived with a slightly fuzzy head (a few glasses of red, nothing heroic) and, confusingly, legs that felt ready. That “prepped” sensation that normally triggers the chimp’s favourite thought: we should ride to prove we’re still on track. I didn’t.
I visited mum, lazed in front of football, and let the training settle. Adaptation doesn’t happen while you’re heroically sweating. It turns out it happens afterwards, quietly, while you live your life.
As Lisa, an ex professional cyclist, concurred after reading my first blog: “rest, rest, rest!”
Rest looks like nothing, which is why the chimp mistrusts it. But rest is often the most productive thing you can do.
Pork Pie Endurance
A couple of days later I did the steady endurance anchor: sixty minutes at 160W, controlled and oddly easy, the kind of ride you could hold for ages, which is the entire point.
The only complication was that I’d had a pub lunch a couple of hours earlier: cheese and onion roll, pork pie, scotch egg, pint. Oops. Obviously not traditional cycling fuelling. More “British endurance folklore.”
Heart rate sat higher than it probably would on a clean day, which is fair enough when your digestive system is staging a small conference. But the interesting part was how stable everything stayed within the main block. Smooth power, minimal drift… the kind of steadiness that suggests the engine is getting more durable even when real life is interfering.
If nothing else, it’s comforting to know the plan can survive a scotch egg. And it was a delicious scotch egg, to be fair.
The New Context: Lincoln
And then my buddy Alan, in a move that I can only describe as “optimistic friendship”, entered us into the Lincoln sportive at the end of May.
Not the polite distance. Not the sensible option. The full 161 miles, out and back… with the comforting clause that we can turn at the 100-mile point and still claim a respectable century without needing therapy or replacement limbs.
So, that’s the new context. That’s why the festive negotiation matters. Not because I need perfection now, but because I need continuity. Winter isn’t about hero days. It’s about stacking ordinary days until spring arrives and you realise you’ve quietly built something.
Back to the Monkeys
The monkey gang has always been a reminder that the best things in life aren’t always the sensible ones. They’re a thread from Jake’s childhood that’s endured into his adulthood, a little pocket of shared ridiculousness that still makes us laugh.
Bing Bong and Zugga Zugga in Bristol. Moogy Boogie on film shoots and sat with me in the edit suite. Cedric and Nigel joining the story like long-lost relatives turning up at Christmas.
And in a strange way, they’re also a reminder of what this training approach is trying to do: keep the story going.
Not reinvent everything. Not punish yourself for enjoying life. Just keep turning up. Keep building. Keep it sustainable.
If Moogy Boogie can sit through a twelve-hour concert shoot day without losing morale, then I can survive January without declaring war on bread.
Happy New Year from The Drop Bar Diaries.
And remember: if you’re going to use Quality Street as recovery nutrition, at least do it within the anabolic window.
If you’re on Zwift, you’ll find me riding as Tim Sidwell — usually somewhere in Zone 2, riding off the mince pies.
