Out for a mountain bike ride today, and I could tell I was gun shy after my most recent crash. Rode a little slower, and I felt myself reaching for the brakes even while in the middle of a turn.
Those of you who have any involvement with an activity that includes guiding a wheeled vehicle (car, motorcycle, bike, segway, etc.) through a turn know that braking during this process is both a lizard brain driven fright response to slow down during such an unnaturally large application of centripetal force on the human body, and also a stupid dangerous response. It’s a dangerous response because though your scared brain is saying “SLOW DOWN!!”, applying the brakes in a turn can cause loss of traction and increase the likelihood of a crash. This is bad in a four wheeled vehicle. Worse on two wheels.
Fighting this natural instinct takes unconscious effort to use one’s logical brain to tamp down deep rooted fears. What works for me it to keep on doing the thing that scares me, slowly ratcheting up the speed, training my lizard brain that everything is going to be A-OK; even though it feels weird. Lizard brain gets tamped down, and then I can rail bermed turns faster. Which is fun!
And then a week ago I go and take a turn too fast, crash and mildly hurt myself, and now my lizard brain is back to square one. Luckily(errrr, sorta), I’ve been through this process multiple time now, I know all I have to do is start slow, and keep bringing up the speed until lizard brain chills out a bit. BUT, it helps that I did something key right after I crashed, something that’s helped me in many other aspects of life, of which I will blather on about below.
TL;DR-it’s called getting back on the horse.Just do whatever almost killed/hurt/scared you again, as soon as possible.
Now lets all settle in for story time….
Yeah, there I was. It was a summer more than a decade(almost two, holy shit!) ago, back when I was both in college and in the National Guard. As you may recall, my Guard unit expected more than the typical one weekend a month/2 weeks a year commitment. One of those extra duties was supporting various ROTC groups as they did their summer camp “fun” stuff like rappelling and helicopter rides. Most of us in our unit had been sent to various schools that qualified us to run rappelling operations- you know, where you’re on top of something tall, use a rope, harness, and teamwork to descend down the side of said tall thing in a fast but controlled manner so you don’t die.
Kinda like this (Aussie style!)
These ROTC kids would show up and do army stuff for awhile, then on the weekend we’d setup and run a rappel tower for them. The tower was this purpose built steel thing about 70 feet tall, flat on top, with a staircase up and corrugated metal all around. Had anchor points built in the top, a flat wall on one side you could bound or walk down. Then there was an open side, where the top edge protruded 10 feet away from the wall to simulate rappelling from a helicopter. We ran these ROTC things every year, multiple times. Pretty standard show. They’d come there, most never having touched a rope, let alone rappelled before. We’d do a quick demo where’d we rappel in various styles down the flat wall and the open wall, then we’d run them through some instruction on the ground, and finally throw them off the side with rope attached with multiple safety contingencies in place.
This time my demo spot was the open wall, using the normal back facing the ground rappel style. The top guy, my friend who’d I’d served with for years at this point, would hook me up, I’d yell to my belay guy below and he’d answer me back. Then I’d plant my feet on the edge and let out a little bit of rope until I was standing perpendicular with the vertical wall, my chest facing the sky and back to the ground. I’d then squat down, push off and let out some rope. Having done this a whole bunch of times, I got to the point where I could take one big bound and zip down and slow myself down just before I hit the ground. This was somewhat dangerous on the open wall, as the belay guy couldn’t really do anything if I lost control with no vertical wall to brace me towards. If I lost grip or I wasn’t hooked up right, I was screwed. But I was young, complacent, and there were some women in the ROTC classes so I was even more stupid than normal.
This particular day, it was exceedingly hot, we had just done some ridiculous non-ROTC training the night before that involved walking through the woods carrying heavy shit for miles, and it was getting towards the last group so we were totally fried.
My friend, whom to this day I respect as one of the best people to have at my side when shit goes down, hooked me up, I barely glanced to double check, and then I started to head down the tower. Then shit went bad; the rope unwrapped itself around my carabiner; now the only resistance I had was my gloved hands on 10mm rope that I held against my right side. My buddy had accidentally routed the rope in the wrong direction through the carabiner, giving me the dreaded “West Point hook up”(named because the only thing more dangerous than a dumb brand new 18 year old private in basic training is a dumb brand new 18 year old West Point Cadet, who doesn’t think they’re dumb because they made it into West Point).
I death gripped the rope, felt it burn through my shirt and then skin on my right side, yelled “FALLING” and hit the ground like a sack of shit. Luckily, the ground was packed with finely chopped tire rubber, and when I hit the ground my Airborne training kicked in and I executed a passable Parachute Landing Fall . So I didn’t break anything, which was nice.
Though I wasn’t seriously injured, I was shaking quite a bit as I quickly unhooked myself. Then I remembered someone, somewhere saying something about getting back on the horse. Probably my dad. I wasn’t too scared of heights; when jumping out of planes the ground was so far away it didn’t look real and I never hesitated. Rappelling was always a different story. Looking down from the top of that tower always scared this shit out of me, but I had done it so much that bounding down became automatic and the fear barely registered. Now having plummeted like a rock, I was scared that I’d freeze the next time I tried to rappel. Without much thought, I ran up back up the stairs, pointed at my friend who had hooked me up and said something like “hook me the fuck up again but this time do it fucking right you fucking fuck.”(except I think I said fuck a few more times than that). He nodded, and without speaking hooked me up and triple checked his work. This time I actually checked it like I should have before, and my fellow soldier who was running the PA for the demo phase picked up what I was doing, ad-libbed the demo script and said something like “So that’s the procedure if you encounter a situation in which you would fall, and now we’ll demo the proper technique for descending from the open wall.”
Despite shaking uncontrollably, I bounded down the wall without incident, and we moved to teaching the Cadets how they would tie their harnesses. Everyone in my unit kept it together, and the kids just thought it was part of the show.
After we were done for the day and the ROTC kids left, I grabbed my friend and had him hook me up as I rappelled off that open wall half a dozen more times. I was scared I’d get scared, and wanted to burn through it. And I wanted to make sure my friend and I still trusted each other. We’d been through a lot, mistakes happen, and I didn’t want that hiccup to mess us up. Made sure he bought the first round that night though, for fucking sure.
It’s not like I’ve always had the healthiest habits, no doubt many ranged from stupid to toxic. But this one, immediately repeating something the right way as soon as possible after it goes wrong, has served me well. I continue to put it in the keep box of my mind.
So what did I do right after I wrecked last week? Well first I straightened out my handlebars, they were jacked. But then I climbed to the top of that downhill jump run, and hit it again, over and over.
I’m still a little gun shy. But I know it’d be worse if I hadn’t done that.
It’s not like I’m not scared. As I eluded to above, I’m more scared of developing a fear of something I want to keep doing.
And that fear seems to work, to keep driving me to be better. It’s not perfect. Abstractly, I know that if I were a perfectly well adjusted human I wouldn’t have the desire to mountain bike, jump from planes, or really do anything besides contemplating the transcendence of whatever. But them I’m not perfect, and this seems to work as long as I keep choosing to do things I love that also scare me.
What do you think? Do you have a similar practice that helps you deal with stuff like this? Have you worked through something that made you gun shy?
