At an age when most women are thinking about slowing down, Ann Marie Miller can be found on her bicycle, riding several hundred miles every weekend. Ann Marie is a long-distance bicyclist, who races all around the world, has won the UCII World Master’s Championship twice and is an eleven-time US National Masters Champion.
I feel her story is an important one to highlight on this episode of Dream Power Radio. To compete on such a high level is any sport is an accomplishment and to do it at an age when most athletes are long retired is nothing short of remarkable.
But an Ann Marie tells it, she’s not alone, with other competitors in her field racing well into their sixties, seventies and even eighties. What they do to stay fit and motivated are lessons that can benefit all of us in our quests to perform at our highest levels in whatever we do. Ann Marie explains:
• Why she felt the need to take up competitive racing
• The mindset that enables her to beat competitors half her age
• Ways to increase stamina
• How to handle defeat gracefully
• Training tips for staying fit
• The attitude that keeps her a winner
• The role of nutrition
• What it means to be “in the zone” and how to get there
You don’t have to be an athlete to have a championship mindset. Learn how to get there in this remarkable episode of The Dream Power Experience.
Ann Marie Miller has been teaching and training athletes and individuals for over 30 years, helping them achieve their fitness and performance goals. Ann Marie was graduated from Ball State University, IN with a BA in Music Education and Vocal Performance, spending several years as a Broadway singer-actress.
While in Corporate Fitness in the financial sector, she gained a MA in Applied Physiology from Columbia University, NY. Ann Marie holds an AFAA Group Fitness Instructor Certification and has been certified as an ACSM(HFI) personal trainer. She has created and presented workshops for fitness professionals around the world as a Reebok University Master Trainer.
From racing 5K’s to completing the London Marathon, her passion for endurance sport lead to cycling and the CRCA bicycle racing club of New York, NY, whose coaching program she credits with her success at a local and national level. Moving into Performance Sport, Ann Marie joined Cadence Cycling and Multisport, New York as a coach and the Director of Corporate Wellness Programs. As Head Coach for the Performance Center at Chelsea Piers Sports Center NY, a licensed USA Triathlon Training Center, Ann Marie conducted physiological testing, including VO2Max and Lactate Threshold testing and supervised the indoor cycle training program.
As an ongoing coach for the Century Road Club Association, she has helped many racers evolve and excel through to a national level. She is a licensed USA Cycling Level 2 Coach and is certified for bike fitting as a Body Geometry Fit Technician from Specialized Bicycle Components University and the Boulder Center for Sports Medicine. Ann Marie holds an AFAA Group Fitness Instructor Certification and has been certified as an ACSM(HFI) personal trainer. She won 5 UCI World’s Master’s Championships and is a 15- time United States National Masters’ Road Cycling Champion with 7 Road Race, 5 Criterium, and 3 Time Trial National Championships, and countless podiums and wins locally. She continues to race Masters and Open races, and Owner/Coach of EPIC Training and Fitness.
Website: www.epictrainingandfitness.com
@thedreampowerexperience
Have you ever watched worldclass athletes and wonder how they do it what makes it possible for a marathon runner to make it up that hill 22 miles into a race or a cyclist to move ahead of the pack and Sprint after a grueling 200 mile race or a long-distance swimmer
Battling both fatigue and Powerful ocean currents do they have something in them that’s superhuman something most of us can never realize or is it something else at play something that any of us could add access we’re going to go into the mind of what suchar performer today worldclass cyclist anarie Miller anarie
Has won the UCI World Masters Championship twice and is 11 time US national Masters champion she’s going to tell us what she does to give herself an edge over her competitors and why is this important to you well the techniques that make her a world champion and successful training and
Performance coach can make you a superstar in your field as well and give you a up on achieving the success you want welcome to the dream power show amme hi Deb how are you today oh wonderful well Amory when I was a little girl I would race around the block with
My friends on my bike trying to see who could race the fast this my racing days didn’t last very long because most of the kids were older and had better bikes and I didn’t usually win so I lost interest did you have racing in mind the
First time you got on a bicycle as a kid not really I think as a kid I more or less used it as kind of a little uh sort of escape to just ride around our farm on the driveways and lanes and uh just kind of keep moving I was always someone
Who was always in motion in one way or another and the bike was a lot of fun to be able to get and roll and and you could go fast uh so it gave you a feeling of freedom and you know a sense of of being able to kind of chart your
Own course so what made you decide to go into competitive racing well I I took a very roundabout way to get into competitive racing to be honest with you I had been more or less a runner uh for most of my life although I had been on my sorority bike team in
College at a relay race that was held at Ball State University called Sigma switch but I I always had a bike and I would use it mostly for commuting and riding around and you know getting from one place to another and um I was doing
A lot of running RAC at that time and I was working in a corporate fitness center and one of my colleagues said oh well you run and you ride a bik bike you ought to do duathlons and I really didn’t know what a duathlon was it’s a
Bike it’s a a race event that consists of a run leg a bike leg and then another run leg so I thought well hey I do those things great let me try it and um I entered my first duon in New York City and actually ended up second place out
Of all the women so I thought hey this is this could be fun and I did a lot of athlons because I enjoyed both running and cycling and then I started getting more and more interested in cycling and I just felt like well I’m doing this but
I don’t really know that much about it I just want to be a better cyclist uh so first I joined New York cycle club uh because they had a great uh training program it was a 12-week program where they helped writers build endurance to go from riding 40 miles to completing a
Century ride which is 100 miles and they also taught good group riding skills and B handling skills and um I got very involved in that and then was a ride leader for that group for three years and I never really thought much about racing bikes because it always looked a
Little intimidating um to have 60 people packed into a roadway and going at high speeds um but I kind of overheard some friends mine mentioned that their bike handling skills really improved when they started racing so I thought thought well you know I’ve taken the recreational cycling about as far as I
Can I can go I’m having a great time but you know I would like to try and improve my skills so I had no Illusions about racing I just started racing in order to be a better Rider because I enjoyed cycling and I just wanted to get the
Most out of it so I rather naively entered a bike race and actually ended up winning it and did not even realize I had won my division in that race uh the first race I the first really open USA cycling race I ever ENT um and from then on I was really hooked
And really sought to you know improve my uh racing skills and become more fit and just learn more about it so I got very involved and uh eventually progressed to the point where now I’m a USA cycling level two licensed coach and I also have my uh bike fitter certification from specialized bicycle
Components and uh you know I and besides being involved in the fitness industry um I’m doing a lot of cycle coaching and multisport coaching but why longdistance cycling I mean it’s very grueling and and you have face all kinds of obstacles when you’re doing it well that’s true
And even as we went through you know the first time I trained to do a century ride and each ride got progressively longer and at first it seems kind of intimidating and you you think well how could I ever ride more than 40 miles but you realize it’s just one pedal stroke
At a time and the main thing is prepare yourself if you build up gradually and take the time to build the endurance uh and also take the time to understand how you’re going to have to fuel your body for these longer events and eat Smart uh
Both Before the Race and also during the race and after then you know it you can have fun it can be a really successful experience if you’re unprepared or if you don’t plan ahead or you kind of become forgetful one of the worst things you can do is actually Bonk during a
Race which it’s uh similar to a marathon runner hitting the wall when you simply run out of your uh glucose and glycogen stores and there there’s nothing in the tank and you cannot go very far when you have no fuel think of your car H so
Absolutely yeah so how tell me how do you prepare to race a a long race like that well a long race like that hopefully I’ve done the training ahead of time you know it takes more than a week more than a couple weeks you know you want to give yourself enough window
Of time to really build the endurance so you can comfortably handle long distance rides and and long distance could be anything from something what the like what we call a metric Century 62.1 miles which is a popular distance or all the way up to a century 100 miles or there
Are even now longer races sort of um gravel races that often are 200 miles long or more um and for those you know again give yourself enough window of time to adequately prepare so you you build week by week in the volume of training you’re doing and um then as you approach the
Event you don’t want to be riding 100 miles the day before you do a century ride so you have to give yourself enough time to actually taper Before the Race it’s similar to a marathon tapering where you once you built up to a point where you can run 20 miles then you
Actually start tapering and cutting your mileage for the last two or three weeks so that you still have the endurance base but you’re fresh and your your muscles uh will you’ll have more of a chance to actually Store Muscle glycogen in your muscles if you’re not overusing
Your muscles on a daily basis and depleting them daily so you want to build up those glycogen stores you want to give yourself time to taper uh and not just for nutritional reasons or for muscular skeletal reasons but also kind of as a mental uh trick because if you
Start tapering you know you’re training less and you’ve been used to training at a higher volume so mentally uh it really makes you want to get out there and do the long event instead of dreading it you know you feel like oh you in fact a
Lot of people suffer kind of guilt when they taper and it’s very hard when I work with athletes it’s very hard to get them to taper properly because they feel guilty not doing the same volume of training that they were doing they feel like I’m going to lose all my fitness
And you know I tell people it takes you you’re not going to lose your Fitness overnight you’re not going to lose your Fitness in a few days but you are going to refresh your body and give yourself um a head start you’re going to give yourself more of an advantage by
Tapering and resting properly yeah I know it sort of sounds counterintuitive you would think that you know to increase endurance you need to go more more and more and more and more so it is it does sound a little uh unexpected but I guess that’s what makes
It work right yeah there’s a whole science of peeking your training and then tapering your training in order to really perform at your best for a key event or some special long ride or race right and uh so the preparation also includes prep proper nutrition so you go
Into a little bit about uh the kinds of food you eat the kinds of food you Avo avoid and that sort of thing oh great yeah I mean I think basically on a a week in week out basis I just try to eat a well balanced healthy diet I don’t go
In for a lot of special supplements or you know taking taking pills to get my nutrients I really think that the the body is designed to absorb nutrients most efficiently from a food source so I try to eat a nice well-rounded diet but as you do increase your training you
Will have to increase your car both your total caloric intake and also your carbohydrate consum consumption because basically the body can really uh only use two two fuel substrates for energy production one is fats and thankfully we all have a pretty much Unlimited Supply of fats in our body the average person
Is definitely has stores of over a 100,000 200,000 calories worth of fat so you you would think oh you’re never going to run out of energy you’re never gonna be hungry but the problem is fat can only be burned in the flame of glucose which means you still have to
Have some carbohydrates in your system in order to be able to access fat for energy production uh so it is important to have enough carbohydrates and especially the higher intensity that you’re going to be performing uh the more that you your body relies on carbohydrate sources for energy
Production your body is very comfortable using fat when you’re at rest or at lower and lower intensity levels but once you re reach a certain critical point where you you go above that metabolic set point where your body shifts from burning primarily fats for fuel to burning primarily carbohydrates
Then you’re going to start burning through carbohydrates much faster than you burn through fats and unfortunately while I mentioned you have over 100,000 calories of fat stored in your body the body can only store about 1,500 calories at the most of carbohydrates and then probably add another 250 or so calories
For blood glucose that’s always circulating as long as you provide more um carbohydrates in your bloodstream so we really have a rather limited amount of carbohydrate storage and that’s why it is so important to keep um eating and drinking during long events uh in order to maintain a steady supply of
Carbohydrates so that you can continue to uh enjoy your sport yeah I want to get back to the actual racing itself because often in races you find yourself facing an unexpected situation uh how do you handle that and could you give me an example of or two of how you overcame
What could have been setback so could have destroyed your whole entire race oh yeah sure um well of course one thing that you always want to be careful of is obviously you don’t want to crash and you know injure yourself or uh wreck your bike so that it is no longer
Functioning uh but everybody from time to time will have you know some sort of little fender bender on the bike or some sort of little uh crash or some s sort of little incident but the one thing is to kind of learn to handle yourself while you’re riding with others so that
If you do make contact with another Rider it doesn’t have to result in a crash or an accident um in fact that’s one of the things that we work on with new erasers is we make them go through certain bike handling skills training so that they know what to do if they if
Their front wheel touches the wheel of another biker or if they accidentally bump into another writer uh in One race in particular um it was early in the race it was the Grants tomb Criterion which is a race uh a criterium race is a race where you cover a very short course
Like you go around and around and around the town square or a course that’s usually less than two between one kilometer and two miles long and you do many repeated Loops of that course so as the name implies Grant tomb Criterium is sort of like the joke who’s buried in
Grant tomb it’s held at Grant’s Tomb and we ride round and around and around and around the square that Grant’s Tomb is located on and um I had done fairly well in that race from time to time uh but in this particular race um as I was
Rounding a corner I bumped into one of the other writers who was really really good Criterion writer but she was experienced I was experienced we both kind of laughed it off and you know there no harm no foul and continued the race where if I had let that up UPS set
Me and throw me I would have not I would not have been ready for what um came up about the next lap which was some a woman attacked and I didn’t recognize her it turned out she was a top Collegiate racer who was on a pro team
And was participating in the gron cretum that year but she attacked out of the field and I just instinctively jumped on her wheel and chased after her and um just about busted along working my way up to her and by the time I caught up to
Her I was I was totally out of breath and completely gassed and spent about a half a lap just trying to stay with her and then we started working together and we were working together so well that we started increasing the distance between us and the rest of the field and um with
About five laps to go I realized I don’t think the field is going to be able to make up the distance now we were about in fact we were about ready to lap the field at that point and I thought there’s no way the field is going to
Catch us and at this point they had all lost interest in wasting energy chasing the first two Riders because that meant someone was really going to have to do a lot of work and the rest of the writers their mindset is well I’m just going to
Sit back and wait for the Sprint so I stayed with this woman and um on the last lap and I thought oh this is great I could get second place in this race and as we were coming around the final turn and heading toward the Finish Line
I thought she’s not going that fast so I just stood up and Sprint and roared past her and much to you know won the race um much to my surprise and like I say if I had let that first little incident throw me or you know put me in some kind of a
Negative mind State I know I wouldn’t have been you know had the calmness and and the ability to you know I would I don’t think I would I think I would have been afraid to try to respond to her attack but you know I just kept going
You know oh there’s one little incident not a big deal keep going well and uh for those listening on the podcast who can’t see you uh I have to say that you’re not a little kid and yet you race against collegians and win how do you do that well I think uh main
Thing is just to be in the moment to be as well prepared as you can be uh you know I I try to to build my fitness up to the the most I can and um you really have to especially in a sport like bike
Racing a lot of times the result is more dependent on when you play your card and um knowing your strengths so that you play your card at the right time and um I think that I I’m good at you have to stay in the moment uh I think many
People get way ahead of themselves and write a big script about what they’re going to do in a race situation but you really have to be so totally in the moment that you really sense what the rest of the group is doing as as a big organism or something and you feel
What’s going on in the group there have been many times when I’ve won races in rather uncanny situations where I just sense that moment where everybody else was sitting up and looking at each other and saying to themselves I don’t want to go to the front and work let her go to
The front no not me I’m I’m not going to the front let that person go to the front and when I see that kind of hesitation and I know people are trying to size each other up a little voice often comes on in me and
Just says gotta go and I listen and when I listen to that voice if I’m in good shape and I can follow through on it it gives you just enough of an advantage that other people then are kind of left startled and it will take them another
Couple of seconds to react and by the time they’ve reacted you’ve been able to establish you know an advantage over the rest of the group so I think much of you know being successful and same way tennis players or anybody else you have to know when to hit the drop shot to
Catch your opponent off guard or you have to know when to hit the lob that’ll take them kind of out of position so that you can set yourself up for you know a real Smash Hit um and I think that part of it is just trusting
Yourself in the moment to know and also uh to know to look at the course if you know anything about the course that you’re racing on to kind of pick spots where you feel like you would have the best chance to uh establish a breakaway or where you would
Have the best chance to launch your Sprint yeah uh you so many times we talk about being in the zone you know having that singular focus and mindset which is actually where we’re operating on a different brainway level than we normally do so would you say that you’re
In the zone when you’re racing when I’ve when I’ve you know had those kind of when I have listened to the little voice and I don’t censor it yes I’m definitely in the zone I just go it’s like a visceral reaction when I try to intellectualize about stuff and that’s
When it always invariably it’ll get me in trouble you know if I look over at someone and um they you know I don’t know them or something and I kind of think ah well don’t worry we don’t need to chase that person we’ll catch her on
The hill those are the times when I realized that was a real mistake you should have just gone with your instinct which was follow that person when they attack and so many times that so I find that trying not to be intellectual about it and or to overthink but just really be
In the moment exactly be in the flow try you know if nothing else if as long as you try you may be surprised at the result you may be happily surprised at the result and and if you don’t try then then you you sort of uh you never
Give yourself a chance to see what you could do so in other words trust your gut exactly exactly yes um so you’re talking about this whole mindset that you have for racing do you find that this helps you deal with obstacles in other areas of your
Life yes I think so I think um you know learning to be calm and to uh you know approach situations with a sense of you know taking taking everything you looking at the big picture and figuring out what to do um it it’s very helpful and I think
Also being able to sort of read read the read the race read the room and see what’s going on so that you know how to act or when to um make your play I I think in that respect it certainly does and I think also just that aspect of
Once in a while you get in a situation haven’t spoken much about this yet where yes you’re in a a long race or you’re especially climbing a Long Hill and it just it doesn’t get any easier let’s put it that way and you just kind of have to
Keep saying to yourself one pedal stroke at a time one pedal stroke at a time because you can just keep going that one more pedal stroke you know you might be able to hang on and um persevere and succeed where others might give up to
Some extent and slow down uh you know or not keep up that kind of effort so sometimes it’s just a matter of okay you know let me try this one more pedal stroke if I can do one one more pill stroke maybe I can do another one maybe I can do another
One uh how many races do you race each year Well it it depends in the past couple of years unfortunately there haven’t been many races due to the pandemic but before that I was racing probably anywhere from 40 to 50 60 races you know in a in a really busy year
Usually you have quite a lot yeah in many cases you have opportunities to race at least once a weekend or sometimes on Saturday and Sunday and I’ve also entered a lot of stage races which are multi-day events that consist of different events each day I love Stage racing because uh you know then
You get to do different courses and different types of racing ing all in the same event so I think stage racing is probably my favorite U type of event to participate in and do you race only against women or do you race against men also well in USA cycling and master
Cycling you only compete against other women uh so if in that respect for most racing we only compete against women but there are other events like Grand fondos where even though men and women may be placed separately you everybody starts together and so you may find yourself in
A group a mixed group of men and women um so yeah but and they don’t really um place you against the men other than just perhaps in the overall results of the entire event each age group and each sex has you know they’re given separate categories in those kind of races do you
Ever find yourself outracing the men yes yes and there was One race where uh the promoter combined a men’s Master’s field uh I think Master’s 55 plus with the the Advanced Women’s field of women category one two and the men were very upset about this they were like well the women
Are just going to slow us down and somehow as it turned out at that race the women finished ahead of the men I was in I happen to win that one but I was in the lead group of women and somewhere along the way we dropped the
Men um so you know they were complaining that they they thought they were going to be stuck racing with women and surprise surprise we happen to perform better than they did that day that doesn’t happen often but you know it was It was kind of gratifying especially because they had obviously seemed a
Little annoyed at the fact they were going to have to race with women yeah well I don’t find it too surprising though are there times when let’s say you get injured or you fall off the bike during a race that that you feel like
Giving up and if so how do you get out of that mindset to continue um well yeah I mean fortunately most of the times uh if I’ve had injury or you know had some kind of little minor crash it’s been minor like you know just pick myself up make sure the
Bike’s okay get back on the bike and continue but I have had some serious injuries um and in that case and some of them really were pretty serious injuries and I had had to spend months recovering and even wondering hey will I be able to
Ride again but I you know I just look at it very philosophically from a you know take it day by day your job if you are injured or if you get sick or something happens that you have to you know pull out of your sport or any activity for a
While to recover from something and it could even be some other physical ailment that has nothing to do with your sport but if you have to take some time off to recover just look at look at it as recovery and and you know getting back your strength and your health is
Your first job you know that’s your first priority so just look at it that way don’t get ahead of yourself just take care of yourself right then and there if that means more rest initially if that means you know a certain recovery period or some kind of
Treatment you know be it you know treatment from a doctor surgery whatever you know give yourself that time and then if you are injured badly enough that you know that you you do have have to recover get yourself a really good team choose your doctors even carefully
If you have a choice make sure that they’re going to be on the same page as you and you they understand especially if you want to get back to your activities um that this is important to you and it’s not just enough that a bone heals or it’s not just enough that oh
You recover from a a sprain or something but that they understand you want to get back and you want to make sure you’re at the top of your game as a result of it and even things like physical therapists um when I have had injuries are really serious uh the physical therapy team
That I had was incredible and even noticed that I was in one incident I was making progress ahead of what the doctor had expected and the physical therapist asked me do you mind if I approach your doctor because he goes you’re already exceeding his predictions for what your
You can do uh what your capabilities are what your range motion is uh do you mind if I approach him to see if I can give you some more advanced exercises and I was like like hey certainly that’s great and uh the doctor was actually glad to
Hear this from the physical therapist so they they really you know weren’t afraid to try to cooperate as a team and and make sure that I was you know returned you know and was able to um get back on my feet and and get be better than ever
But it was a very you know several months of recovery several months of physical therapy and then getting back to riding and um so you know it was a long process but once and then of course once you do get back to riding you think oh am I am
I going to be able to ride the way I did before am I going to have any um you know doubts but you get back to it and you just like I say focus on the moment focus on what you’re doing right then do everything you can to perform your best
And be safe and uh you know avoid being Reckless or anything and um it all it really um works out pretty well yeah it’s just like getting back on a bicycle right it is just like how long do you see yourself continuing to race competitively that’s a good question um
I think you know I will continue to race and ride as long as I’m enjoying it and as long as I can one of the most ins one of the things that really inspired me so much uh was when I went to Master’s worlds in Albi France in 2017 and won
The road race that year and got the bronze medal in the time trial and um for they were having the presentation of the medals for the road race on the final day of the of the event and they also wanted to introduce a special guest at this program which was a man named
Robert Maron who was 106 years old and he had just set the world age group record for the 105y old age group for the one hour record which one hour record in cycling is um go riding on a track of el Drome as far as you can in
One hour now God bless him this Robert Marshon was a French man and um so they he won he actually had been the 100y old record holder for the hour and then he turned 105 and he said can I compete for the 105y old title and the international
Cycling Union simply said we’ve never had anybody before and you know God bless him he rode around the vrum his hour record time for the 105y old category was 13 I think point8 Miles by contrast the you know Elite professional cyclists World hour record is about 35 miles in one
Hour but you know the elite professional is not 106 years old but I had the honor of meeting this man and um he came backstage where we were all waiting to receive our metals and he was going around shaking people’s hand and you know saying hello and then I saw him
After the event he was sitting outside with um someone who was kind of care taking care of him and I asked him for a picture and to me that was so inspiring to see someone who was 106 and still writing now hey if I get that far I would be thrilled but you
Know I can I’m going to continue riding and and racing and training and sharing Fitness with other people you know as long as I can wonderful Amar how can people find out more about you and your work well I have my own coaching business called epic training and fitness and my website is
Www.pic trining and fitness.com um and um I am a USA cycling level two licensed coach so if you go on the USA cycling website you can look up uh the directory of coaches and I am listed there um and if you happen to be in New York City you
Know and you want to say hello you know contact reach out through my website and uh I’d be happy to say hello or meet meet anybody go for a ride we’ve been speaking about success with award-winning racer and cycling coach amarie Miller hope you’ve enjoyed today’s program if so please hit that
Subscribe button so you don’t miss out on any future episodes until next time this is Debbie Spectre Weissman saying sweet dreams everybody