Follow up and Fear

Follow up

Since my last post a friend of mine updated his mountaineering blog and two lines in it stuck out for me as being relevant to my previous post. “I suppose as you become more involved and talented in your hobbies, your goals inevitably become more ambitious.” (James Roddie. Glencoe Mountaineer) This first quote is that thing of the better you do the harder you push yourself and the more you do to make it come about and the higher you aim, I’d guess even the top athletes in our sport still have days where they look outside and think I don’t want to do this but the knowledge that there’s someone else out there already doing it pushes them to train longer and harder.

Gee Atherton about to win at Fort William

“The possibility of achieving a dream is always more important than that extra hour in bed.” (James Roddie. Glencoe Mountaineer). This quote amuses me coming from James, as he has always been pretty driven about what he does, finishing a shift at 1am getting changed and going straight up a mountain to take pictures of the sunrise. However for me it’s something I struggle with, the thoughts of ‘I don’t actually have to get up’ and as I often don’t get to sleep before 3 am the call of the extra hour is often too appealing. Maybe I should write this on my bedside table as a reminder. Which leads me on to the comment Claire left.

Unfortunately due to the nature of my work I can’t pick set days apart from one day I try to ensure is my day of every week however the last week or so following what Claire said I’ve picked days to go out when I got my rota for the week and kept to them (apart from one day). Buying proper lights does seem like  definite way forward however they cost money I don’t have/need to spend on other things, though my current lights are good enough to use on the road so may start doing that, it’s either that or start running. Racing gives me something to aim for, I’m not a competitive person but making the decision to take part in a race gives me something to aim for. Cheers for the comment Claire it’s definitely given me ideas and it’s good to hear other peoples thoughts.

Fear

What I have noticed in the last couple of weeks is I’m not hitting things as hard as I did before my crash the other week, while I’m out on my bike I’m telling myself it’s down to it being wet and slippy but I recognise the thoughts in the back of my head that are the beginnings of fear.

In some ways this tint of fear is helping as I’m concentrating on riding things smoothly rather than just smashing them as hard as I can however through my experiences in kayaking I need to make sure the fear is just a slight background whisper rather than something that holds me back. In kayaking I got to a stage where I was very confident in my boating and paddling a lot of difficult rivers and rapids unfortunately I had a series of incidents which knocked my confidence culminating in two very big swims out in the French Alps, now my confidence is pretty low and I struggle to make myself do anything that might make me tip over.

I’ve tried several ways to rebuild my confidence but find as soon as I push myself I let the fear take over and that makes me make mistakes which again knocks my confidence back down again, so at the moment I’m consciously not paddling anything hard and trying to do more teaching and river leading to build up my basic level of faith in my own abilities.

From this

to this.

There are many people to take inspiration from in this in mountain biking though, first and foremost (for me anyway) is Dan Atherton, having broken his neck on a jump he’s back on his bike racing World Cup rounds as soon as he can, also Rachel Atherton who has had a bunch of injuries and is still riding hard enough to be one of the best riders in the world. The list goes on from Sam Hill to Matti Leikhonen who is back on his bike after his massive crash in the Nordic Downhill Championship. That’s just the pro’s I’m sure we all have friends who have taken a big crash and jumped back on their bikes or even outside of biking, those who have bounced back from something big to get straight back on with life.

Speaking of big crashes I’m now sporting a wrist band from http://scottshepherd-riderdown.weebly.com/  check it out and show your support through the Facebook page and @RiderDown_Scott on Twitter.