You decided in sixth grade that you were not athletic.
You did not phrase it that way. Nobody put it down on paper. Some kid in the playground said you ran funny, or your gym teacher picked you last for a team game, or your dad joked at a dinner that the sporting talent had skipped a generation. You laughed it off. You went home. You went to school the next morning. You probably forgot the moment by the end of the week.
Twenty-five years later, here is the version of that comment still running in your head. You took up cycling at thirty-two and you were quietly amazed when you finished a 100km sportive. You assumed the win was a fluke. The next year you targeted 5.0 watts per kilo and got close. You assumed the next gain would be the unlock. Then it didn't come, and the voice in the back of the head said the thing it has been saying since you were eleven. You're not actually athletic. You were never going to break through. You have been overestimating yourself.
The voice was not yours. You inherited it. Someone handed it to you on a Wednesday afternoon in 1998 and it has been writing the rules of your training ever since.
Gabby Bernstein's conversation with Anthony on the Roadman Cycling Podcast is the kind of episode that catches a lot of cyclists off guard. The expectation is breathing exercises. The reality is a much harder, much more useful conversation about what trauma — big and small — does to athletic identity, what the work back from it actually looks like, and where the line is between meditation as therapy and biochemistry that needs proper medical support.
Listen to the full conversation with Gabby Bernstein →
The Boy In Sixth Grade Who Wrote The Next Twenty Years
The framing Bernstein uses on the podcast is the cleanest version of an idea most cyclists have not properly heard before. There is big T trauma — a catastrophic event, abuse, a defining moment of clear danger or loss — and there is small t trauma — a throwaway comment, a humiliation, a parental message that lands wrong on a developmental nervous system at the wrong moment.
Both imprint. Both shape. Both write stories the adult version of the person continues to live by long after the moment itself has been forgotten.
Her own example is striking precisely because it is so small. A boy she liked told her, in sixth grade, that she was stupid. By her own account, that comment dictated her entire life up to the point of writing her ninth book. It almost stopped her from writing her first book. Eight books in, she was still introducing herself by saying "I just write in my own voice" — never as a writer, never as a memoirist, never as someone with academic authority. The trauma recovery work she eventually undertook is what allowed her to write a book that includes neuroscience, psychology, and therapeutic practice with the authority of a person who actually believes she is qualified to do so.
The cycling translation is direct and uncomfortable. A lot of riders are still taking direction from comments they were handed at age six, eight, eleven, fifteen. You're not very coordinated. You're not built for endurance. The athletic gene skipped you. Sport isn't really your thing. The lines came from a parent, a sibling, a coach, a peer, sometimes a passing stranger. The lines stuck. They became the operating system the rider then ran for the next thirty years.
Anthony catches this in the episode and applies it directly to the Roadman audience. The cyclist who failed to reach their athletic potential and concluded "well, I'm not athletic" is in a confirmation bias loop. They are looking for evidence to support a story they were already running. The training plateau gets read as proof. The result is identity protection, not athletic development.
The Trigger Audit
The most actionable practice Bernstein walks through on the podcast is the one she opens her book with. The trigger audit. It is a three-column exercise anyone can run in twenty minutes.
Column one. What triggers a strong reaction in you. Not the surface event — the moment your nervous system tightens. Bernstein's own example: feeling out of control at work.
Column two. What does that feeling actually do to your body. Tension. Tightness. Rage. The energy wanting to burst out. Cyclists know this language already — the difference between effort and panic in the last ten minutes of a hard ride is exactly this distinction.
Column three. How do you habitually respond to that feeling. Bernstein's: control more. Force. Manipulate situations. Push the people around her until safety returned. Cycling-specific responses might look like reactive over-training, reactive cutting, reactive withdrawal from group rides, reactive avoidance of the sessions you are afraid will expose you.
Run the audit across multiple triggers. The pattern shows up. The same nervous system signature drives the reactive behaviour across different domains of life. The training relationship, the eating relationship, the relationship to other people on the bike — all of it tends to share a common upstream cause that the audit makes visible.
The point of the practice is not to fix the triggers immediately. It is to become what Bernstein calls a non-judgmental witness — to see the pattern, name it, and stop confusing the reaction with the rider. The next time the trigger fires, the witness is awake. The reaction has somewhere to be observed rather than just acted on.
For the broader cycling-mindset version of this, see our cycling mental toughness piece — the structural side of how identity, narrative, and habit interact in a serious training life.
When Meditation Is Enough — And When It Is Not
The most important honest moment in the conversation comes when Anthony asks Bernstein about her own depression and her own use of medication. Her answer is not the answer the spirituality industry usually gives. It is also exactly right.
She experienced postpartum depression after the birth of her son. The episode included suicidal ideation, months of agoraphobia, anxiety attacks, severe insomnia. She is direct about what was actually happening. The condition was biochemical. She had been raised homeopathic. She had stigma around psychopharmacological medication. None of that mattered at the bottom of the well. She accepted medication. She is open that it saved her life. She is also clear that the medication then created the baseline of safety that allowed the deeper trauma work to become possible.
That sentence is the one to take seriously.
The line she draws is clear and adult. When the condition is anxiety, mild depression, low mood, persistent overwhelm — meditation, therapy, lifestyle, and the trigger work can do enormous amounts of work. When the condition is biochemical, properly diagnosed, severe, and dangerous — meditation is not the answer. The answer is medical, and the meditation comes back online afterwards as part of an integrated recovery.
The cycling translation is again direct. Plenty of amateur cyclists are sitting with low-grade anxiety, mild seasonal depression, motivation deficits, training-related identity strain. Most of those situations respond beautifully to better sleep, structured meditation, the trigger audit, and the kind of community a serious sport provides. Some of those situations do not respond to any of that because the underlying issue is hormonal, biochemical, or thyroid-related, and the rider needs proper medical investigation. Both groups deserve clarity rather than the standard stigmatising script that tries to push everything through one pipeline.
For the masters cyclist, this overlaps with the conversation Anthony had with Dr Mark Gordon on testosterone — see our free testosterone piece for the version where the upstream issue is hormonal. For the broader recovery picture, the overtraining signs guide covers the cycling-specific markers that distinguish ordinary fatigue from something requiring more attention.
"Stick Around For The Miracles"
When Anthony asks Bernstein how amateur cyclists can build a consistent meditation practice — knowing many start and few continue — her answer is the gym answer. The more you meditate, the more you meditate. The benefits compound. The compound benefits pull you back in. Like cycling itself, the practice that works is the one you do daily for long enough to feel it begin paying you back.
Her tactical recommendation is to use binaural-beat or bilateral-stimulation music during meditation. The mechanism — different tones in each ear, encouraging cross-hemisphere brain processing — is functionally similar to the EMDR therapy that has become a standard intervention for trauma. The version of this an athlete can use at home is just headphones, a quiet room, ten minutes, and the willingness to let the brain reprocess emotional residue without forcing the outcome.
Her line — "stick around for the miracles" — is the meditation equivalent of cycling's "consistency over years beats intensity over months." Most riders abandon meditation in the first three weeks because nothing has obviously changed. The work is happening below the surface. The athlete who keeps practicing past the point of obvious return is the one who eventually catches the deeper benefit. The athlete who tests it for two weeks and gives up is using the wrong measurement window.
What This Means For The Cyclist Listening
Three things to take from the episode if you are an amateur cyclist trying to actually use this conversation.
One. Do the trigger audit. Schedule twenty minutes. Three columns. Five triggers, ten triggers, however many you find. The pattern that emerges will tell you something useful about your training, your eating, your relationship to the bike, and the parts of yourself that show up most reactively in those domains. The exercise is free, takes one session, and produces clarity that ten more interval sessions will not.
Two. Audit the imprinted stories. Specifically the athletic ones. Where did "I'm not a climber" come from. Where did "I'm not a runner, so I'm probably not a real endurance athlete" come from. Where did "I peaked physically at 32" come from. Some of these stories are true; some are imported. The ones you cannot trace to actual current evidence are usually imported. The cyclist who can name the import is the cyclist who can rewrite it.
Three. Take biochemistry seriously when meditation is not moving the needle. The plateau that will not move, the motivation that has gone missing, the body that feels heavier than the training plan would predict — these are sometimes mind problems with mind solutions, and they are sometimes hormonal, thyroid, iron-status, or psychiatric problems with medical solutions. The serious version of self-care is being willing to investigate both pathways without ideology.
For the parallel cycling-relevant conversations, see our pieces on Owen Vermeulen's path back from addiction and the Ger Redmond mental method. Different individual stories. Same structural insight — the bike rewards the work, but the work is sometimes upstream of the bike.
Listen To The Full Conversation
The full conversation with Gabby Bernstein — including her detail on writing as a creative process, the broader value-system audit Anthony walks her through, and her own framing of medication as a baseline that enabled the deeper work — is on the Roadman Cycling Podcast.
For more on the mental side of serious cycling, see our motivation conversation with Dr Erin Ayala, and the Dr Mark Gordon conversation on testosterone and crash trauma for the biochemical side of the same picture.
If you want help building a year of training that respects the parts of you that are upstream of the watts — sleep, story, nervous system, recovery, biochemistry — the Roadman coaching system is built around exactly this kind of integrated picture. For a faster answer on a specific question grounded in the same library, ask the AI coach.
The boy in sixth grade does not get the last word. The story he handed you is editable. You are not done yet — and the rewrite is closer than the next interval block.
