Chipps reminds us not to try to skip to the end...
When I was about 16 I borrowed an electric guitar from a friend, with the usual teenage ambitions of becoming a rock star in the ensuing weeks. Obviously, this still hasn’t happened…
I already knew a couple of chords, so once I’d worked out how to tune it the next thing I did with it was to try to learn the widdly-widdly bit at the end of Sultans of Swing. Literally the next thing. I didn’t know what chords to play in the rest of the song, I didn’t know what key it was in, I just went straight into trying to learn the most difficult part of the tune.
I’d like to say that I quickly mastered it and was soon touring the world in a band. The reality is that I still can’t play that bit very well, even 40 years later. If, perhaps, I’d mastered the non-widdly 95% of the song and started on the widdly bit as a final exercise in perfection, I might have achieved it, but the lure of being able to play the impressive sounding bit, regardless of the rest of it, was too strong.
My cycling has often had echoes of that impatience for excellence, and perhaps yours has too. We see the heroes of YouTube clips launching and manualing or slinking over the slipperiest roots and we want some of that, with little regard of how much work it has taken those riders to get to that point. To misquote Boromir, ‘One does not simply do a backflip’ – but we want that that airtime confidence. And we want it now. And if we don’t have the time to put the 10,000 hours involved into getting it, surely we can buy our way in?
Nope, not even close. While buying a new bike, private foam pit and moving to a lower gravity planet could all help, nothing in mountain biking can sidestep some patient hard work and deliberate skills progression. Skills coaching will help massively in helping you become better and more confident on a bike, but they’re still building blocks that need to be built upon.
Sudden jumps in progression can be risky too. Trials rider Ryan Leech has said that the only time he’s been injured when riding was when he skipped a step in riding progression. As he got better (and presumably higher off the ground) he simultaneously learned how to bail and land from that height, while keeping pointy bike bits and squishy skin separate on the way down to landing safely. It was only when he skipped a stage and went higher than he knew how to fall from that he got hurt.
There’s an argument for learning to ride on a hardtail before getting on a full-suspension machine, but then there’s an equally valid case for learning to get the most out of whatever bike you’re going to be spending the most time on; hardtail lines aren’t full suspension bike lines. It’s the learning that’s the vital bit, and the thing that we sometimes forget in our rush to get to that final goal.
Whatever, and wherever you’re riding, it’s important to remember (and enjoy!) that it’s a journey. It’s a journey by bike – and that’s the kind of thing you can have a great time doing. Whatever your end goal – whether that’s a backflip over a chasm, clean that rooty chute that always gets you, or a sunset shared with friends at the end of a big day out, just don’t be in a rush to get there. The journey is as enjoyable as the destination.
No, I still can’t play that widdly Dire Straits bit on the guitar, or at least not well, but then I can’t backflip either. However, I’ve enjoyed all of the intervening years heading slowly in both of those directions – comfortable in the knowledge that I’ll never actually get there.