Black box biking
Cycling a bike downhill fast is an experience close to flying. With the wind rushing again you, whilst you push your machine and your abilities close to their limits all senses are heightened. You learn to go fast by pushing beyond your comfort zone. You also learn by making mistakes. Sometimes you might overcook it on a corner. When you do, you think about what line you took, where and when you began to brake and how hard you braked. Next time you get those things right and your descending improves. This is just one example of what I like to call Black Box Biking
The airline industry is the most successful in the World at learning how to improve flight safety by learning from their mistakes. Nowadays there is just 1 crash for every 8 million flights. The reason for this is because of how much focus is placed upon learning all that can be learned from what happened and making sure that it does not happen again (some might say that they should do the same thing for lost luggage, especially bikes)
On the bike it is really important to learn from mistakes in order to improve. If you get dropped on climbs, ask yourself what can you do to improve your climbing. It might be better gear selection, better positioning in the bunch or the most likely one, loose weight. When you figure out what is needed then you have to do it. You can have all the knowledge in the world but if you don’t put it into practice you might as well just go play candy crush for the rest of the year as it will lead to the same amount of improvement. If you keep on doing everything the same, everything will stay the same.
In a nutshell :
If you have a problem.
Identify the cause.
Identify the solution.
Take action and put the solution into practice.
Enjoy the results !
Barry
Leave a comment