Chipps is in the flow zone… just don’t tell him.
Been ‘in the zone’ lately? Have you achieved ‘flow state’? Perhaps you have; perhaps it’s something you’ve only glimpsed once or twice, or it might be something you’ve never heard about.
‘Flow’ is something that is hard to explain, harder yet to achieve on demand – even if you know what it is. It’s the state where time has no meaning, where your daily worries are left behind and your only focus is in the here and now. It can be found doing many different things, like playing music or painting, but I think it has particular relevance to bike riding, thanks to the speed and skill needed. Especially as it turns out that extremes of either don’t even appear to be essential for the full experience…
I’ve been looking into the whole ‘flow’ thing recently, after a couple of particularly satisfying local rides. The trail seemed smoother, the bike felt like an extension of my senses; fatigue, heat and hunger no longer had a place. Self-doubt and even self-preservation didn’t seem to come into my thoughts. There was nothing but the trail ahead and a bike that moved where I wanted it to go, tyres simply going where they needed to be, without me thinking about it.
Flow state is a proper scientifically studied phenomenon. And it seems that the phrase was coincidentally coined at about the same time that modern mountain biking appeared in Marin and Colorado in 1975. Some coincidence, eh? A Hungarian/American psychologist with the great name of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (‘mi high, cheeksent mi high’) found that artists and performers would get so immersed in their work that they wouldn’t feel the need to eat or sleep and felt like the music or painting was being created almost without their conscious thought. Hours would pass like minutes.
The downside of this flow state is that it can’t really be summoned on demand and thinking ‘Wow, I’m in a flow state!’ is often enough to snap you back out of it again. There’s another irony, though, that brings hope to run-of-the-mill trail riders like me the world over. The flow state appears where the demands of the task (in our case, the riding of a great trail, really smoothly and speedily) exactly matches the skills and confidence of the flow state pursuant. It runs a fine line between the anxiety of achieving the task and the boredom or complacency of finding it too easy.
This means that the faster, stronger and more skilled you are as a rider, the harder it’s going to be to find that true flow. The trail needs to be hard enough to challenge the rider, ridden with enough commitment to surf that line between eye-popping anxiety and dull competence. Pity those riders at the top of their game as they keep needing to find harder and harder trails to get that hit of flow.
The rest of us, meanwhile, can find that Zen-like calm on a whole range of trails: the Glentress Blue, the Cyflym Coch at Coed y Brenin or Willy Waver at BikePark Wales can all be the scenes of our own private trail zones. Hans Rey even pioneered the idea of ‘flow trails’ a decade or more ago. But they don’t need to be built specifically for it, we can all find nirvana in a local bridleway – where that sense of familiarity and end-of-summer fitness combines with those just-so turns and that little rooty bit ridden perfectly (for a change) – in that moment, you won’t notice it as the sections of trail flow smoothly into one another, and even though the light dapples the surface of the fallen leaves, you confidently speed through, not fearing the hidden rocks lurking beneath.
All too soon the section of trail is over and your heightened senses return to normal. That hyperfocus eases and you can let the noises and sounds of the world back in. That was flow, my friend, and it’s as achievable for us as it is for those Red Bull helmeted racers we see. Perhaps more so.
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