In todays blog I am going to talk about three things. 1) Group Ride with Giant Riding Club India, 2) The new brand symbol of Giant and 3) A lesson that I learnt from the book Atomic Habits by James Clear.
1. Giant Riding Club India:
Giant is going aggressive with its target to connect with the local community and expand its club membership. It has formed a rider’s club on the most popular cycling app ‘Strava’ and has gathered a fan base of 3888* cyclists who in turn have recorded 9194* activities measuring a total distance of 3,31,440* total club kms in less than one month (Strava club Pan India figures as on 20/02/2022).
The Giant Riding Club is simultaneously hosting rides in over 30 cities of India with one ride every alternate weekend in each city. The 2nd ride of the Mumbai chapter was held on Sunday, 20th February 2022. The start point was Giant Bicycles Store Khar to Upvan Lake in Thane city and back. Over 50 riders took part in this ride which was 70 kms round trip – a test of endurance and stamina.
2. The New Brand Symbol of Giant:
Giant Bicycles Worldwide has introduced a new brand symbol ‘Capital G in white text and blue background’. The new symbol stands for the exhilaration of reaching the summit, overcoming challenges and unleashing your full potential.
‘Its all about the rush’ say’s the official brand post on their Instagram handle.
3. Atomic Habits: Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results
This book talks about making a series of small changes which in the long term will aggregate into big gains. Here is an extract from its 1st chapter which quotes a superb example of British Cycling whose faith was turned around by their new coach.
The Surprising Power of Atomic Habits
The fate of British Cycling changed one day in 2003. The organization, which was the governing body for professional cycling in Great Britain, had recently hired Dave Brailsford as its new performance director. At the time, professional cyclists in Great Britain had endured nearly one hundred years of mediocrity. Since 1908, British riders had won just a single gold medal at the Olympic Games, and they had fared even worse in cycling’s biggest race, the Tour de France. In 110 years, no British cyclist had ever won the event.
In fact, the performance of British riders had been so underwhelming that one of the top bike manufacturers in Europe refused to sell bikes to the team because they were afraid that it would hurt sales if other professionals saw the Brits using their gear.
Brailsford had been hired to put British Cycling on a new trajectory. What made him different from previous coaches was his relentless commitment to a strategy that he referred to as “the aggregation of marginal gains,” which was the philosophy of searching for a tiny margin of improvement in everything you do. Brailsford said, “The whole principle came from the idea that if you broke down everything you could think of that goes into riding a bike, and then improve it by 1 percent, you will get a significant increase when you put them all together.”
Brailsford and his coaches began by making small adjustments you might expect from a professional cycling team. They redesigned the bike seats to make them more comfortable and rubbed alcohol on the tires for a better grip. They asked riders to wear electrically heated overshorts to maintain ideal muscle temperature while riding and used biofeedback sensors to monitor how each athlete responded to a particular workout. The team tested various fabrics in a wind tunnel and had their outdoor riders switch to indoor racing suits, which proved to be lighter and more aerodynamic.
But they didn’t stop there. Brailsford and his team continued to find 1 percent improvements in overlooked and unexpected areas. They tested different types of massage gels to see which one led to the fastest muscle recovery. They hired a surgeon to teach each rider the best way to wash their hands to reduce the chances of catching a cold. They determined the type of pillow and mattress that led to the best night’s sleep for each rider. They even painted the inside of the team truck white, which helped them spot little bits of dust that would normally slip by unnoticed but could degrade the performance of the finely tuned bikes.
As these and hundreds of other small improvements accumulated, the results came faster than anyone could have imagined. Just five years after Brailsford took over, the British Cycling team dominated the road and track cycling events at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, where they won an astounding 60 percent of the gold medals available. Four years later, when the Olympic Games came to London, the Brits raised the bar as they set nine Olympic records and seven world records.
That same year, Bradley Wiggins became the first British cyclist to win the Tour de France. The next year, his teammate Chris Froome won the race, and he would go on to win again in 2015, 2016, and 2017, giving the British team five Tour de France victories in six years.
During the ten-year span from 2007 to 2017, British cyclists won 178 world championships and sixty-six Olympic or Paralympic gold medals and captured five Tour de France victories in what is widely regarded as the most successful run in cycling history.
How does this happen? How does a team of previously ordinary athletes transform into world champions with tiny changes that, at first glance, would seem to make a modest difference at best? Why do small improvements accumulate into such remarkable results, and how can you replicate this approach in your own life?
To get the answers read the book Atomic Habits.
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Author: Vijay Malhotra, Mumbai
