This post first appeared on my old bornagainbloke.com blog on 4 October, 2013.

This Sunday I will be competing in my first ever cycle race: the Oakman Sportive, a 70km circuit around the Chiltern Hills.

In my practice rides leading up to the race I have tried to apply, where I can, the cycling philosophy of “marginal gains”.

This is the philosophy credited with bringing Team GB so many cycling gold medals in the London 2012 Olympics, and one that was explained rather simply by British Cycling director Dave Brailsford in a BBC interview as follows: “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 improved it by 1%, you will get a significant increase when you put them all together.”

So, as well as training, when I did a 34 mile practice ride last Saturday I did things like take off all unnecessary weight on my bike (a 2013 Giant Defy 0, pictured above) such as mudguards and bike lights, and made sure I was well stocked with fluids and high-energy foods like jelly babies and bananas.

I’ll be paying attention to the small details again this Sunday in order to give me the best chance of a) surviving the ride (!) and b) doing so at a decent pace for a newcomer (my target is three hours or under, including breaks).

But what if we applied this philosophy in both our day-to-day and spiritual lives?

An argument often made against charity and helping others is “what’s the point, you’re not going to change anything”?

If we allow ourselves to focus on the whole – all the suffering in the world – then the enormity of any situation can paralyse us. But when we break it down into chunks it becomes much more manageable.

Jesus taught “whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers you do to me”.

I might not be able to solve world hunger on my own, but I can feed the hungry person in front of me. If everyone did that the rule of marginal gains implies we would quickly solve world hunger.

This was the approach of St. Therese of Lisieux, which she called her “Little Way”. In her autobiography The Story of a Soul, she wrote that because of the restricted and regimented life of a convent she was limited in terms of the ways that she was able to build God’s Kingdom. She resolved to do it wherever she could, however she could in day-to-day matters: “We cannot do great things, but we can do small things with great love.”

As well as charity, I think this should be the approach to our individual spiritual lives. Those big God moments where we have powerful experiences of the Holy Spirit are great, but during the – often long – periods in between those “Glory moments” our faith rests on a foundation of small steps towards God: daily prayer, daily scripture reading. I know from my own experience that when I let myself fall out of these daily rythmns God can often seem distant. But when I take care of these “1%” elements of faith, their marginal gains lead me quickly back to Him.

PS – I’m aiming to raise to some money through my ride on Sunday for a family who put into practice the Little Way in a big way: The Catholic Worker Farm started when Scott Albrecht and his wife Maria invited a homeless man to stay in their family home. They now run an organisation dedicated to caring for destitute women (many of whom have been trafficked to the UK and forced into prostitution) and their children.