The death wobble and over-correction, a motorcycle diary
Morning!
“Drive safe, and text me when you get home!”
I imagine most of you with a driving license have heard this sentence when you’ve set off from a friend or loved one.
This weekend, I’ve set off from four different groups and so it’s really stuck with me – and as I type this I recognise that I didn’t send my parents the text last night: ‘ey up, I’m back safensound! x
I’ll typically respond with a “I always do!”, and, “I will!” because I always do, and, I (nearly) always will. And yesterday evening, shivering in a scalding hot bath, was the most time I’d spent reassuring everyone I was alright…
Your new best
Over the past three months, the F&T podcast has caught up with practitioners of wide-ranging disciplines who’ve landed on a very similar point: “best” is both unique to us, and changing all the time.
If you’ve put in 10 weeks of training to improve your 10K time like my clients and I have, it’s likely (by sticking to the plan, making sure you eat enough and sleep enough and build your workload incrementally) that you’ll improve what your previous “best” was.
The easiest “best” we might derive from a plan like this is that you beat your previous personal record, i.e. you got faster. But if you didn’t record an improved time, then maybe you performed more effectively – the run felt like less effort because your heart rate was 20BPM lower, or your cadence was quicker and each step was less bone shaking, or maybe you actually enjoyed it this go round!
Within this effort, and after the fact, as your coach, I’d ask you to compare lemons with lemons: what was your aim on the run?
If it was to beat your previous time and you didn’t but your prep was perfect, did you actually run the same course? Was it heavy rain and slippy this go round? Did you sleep okay two nights before? Have you been stressed or ill? What’s happening with your relationship? And if none of these have negatively impacted you: did you just not want it enough? Did you have all the tools but actually lack the drive?
I wouldn’t try to give you excuses, instead I’d want to understand what correlated with the performance we saw.
It might be, in the other direction, that the conditions weren’t in your favour and still you overcame, and what can we learn from that?
And maybe there’s no analysis needed.
Maybe you ran what you ran and achieved what you did, and that’s great whatever the outcome because it’s never really about the one race, it’s about the journey, the story, around it as one event in the rich tapestry of your existence.
If you’re interested in this idea of a changing best, I think you’ll like
It’s hard not to take injuries personally with senior physio, Niell JJ
particularly Niell’s take on ego resulting in injuries and getting in the way of progress and our shared understanding of incremental workload to get back to your best and then succeed it.
What on earth is a “best” life with life coach and yoga teacher, Maddie
Maddie’s ability to look at a situation holistically and have you question whether you’re actually aware of what you want has been massive for me this summer.
How many lies will you tell yourself? with BJJ player and coach, Lucas
Lucas has dealt with injuries and illnesses that have capped his ability, and he knows that given a choice of languishing or performing at a different level and learning to adapt, where both an be uncomfortable existential moments, the active choice typically has better outcomes.
Becoming the first Spartan with a stoma with head coach, Lindsay Bowers
Lindsay has overcome a number of health scares and complications to find her love of fitness and sustain it and to inspire it in others, and, most recently, set a Guinness book of records effort as the first Spartan DEKA Fit competitor with a stoma.
When we grip too tightly, we lose control
In sports performance literature, there’s a studied idea that there is typically a sweet spot for what we might think of as performance enhancers and limiters, whether that’s confidence or anxiety, doubt or ability, where you can be over-confident and not anxious enough to your detriment, for instance.
And yesterday, all of the above came to a head for me.
As I left lunch with Tanny, one of my oldest London mates and a newly qualified coach, his wave goodbye and “get back safe yeah!” (heard so many times that I almost don’t hear it) became my actual goal in a way I’ve not experienced in a long time.
Google said it was a four and a quarter hour drive from Greenwich to Sheffield. At 200 miles that sounded about right, particularly if I took a break to shake my legs off.
I’ve got too many anxious friends to tell them this in-person…
It took me an hour to get out of London, weaving through normal traffic and then lane splitting slower than the locals but still with building confidence ride-to-ride to get onto the M11. And from there the roads were pretty clear, it was sunny, a bit spitty, but nothing to write home about, until whoosh, from my left side, my bike drifted right while I stayed upright.
All good.
All good.
I’ll just tuck in, zip my jacket right up – and then again, this time a wall of wind as I overtook a lorry, and found myself on the right hand side of the third lane having started in the middle.
We rounded a bend and faced north, the wind was still there but it was behind me; I’d take a tailwind over a headwind any day of the week.
As we hurtle past signs for Cambridge and Ely and face west again, again the crosswind hits. And this time, thankfully it was just me on the road as I went all the way from the left to the right of the motorway. There was no hard shoulder, no layby or refuge point, this was it, I either had to adapt or, likely, crash.
70MPH wasn’t an option if I was facing west.
I scrubbed my speed and got back into the left lane, I used my satnav not to look at the time it’d take to get home but to figure out when I’d be on the A1, where there were definitely places to stop, and when the road was going to snake me into this new danger.
My goal had suddenly swapped from get home in 4.5 hours (or less), to “Get home safe yeah”. And so I talked myself through the best driving I could do in the worst conditions I’d faced:
If I matched a lorry’s speed, I could use it as a shield – one lorry driver even caught up with me to do this; if I hung my left knee out and tucked in, I found the stretches where it was just me were more manageable; pulling the front brake and gripping the handlebars tightly rarely goes well (see below): let’s go back to easing off the throttle and back braking when things get hairy; and don’t touch the clutch!
As it turned out, slow was smooth and smooth was fast, and, allowing for a shake off and a petrol stop at the end, I managed to get back in around 4.5 hours and alive.
The drive I thought I was in for, wasn’t the one I got, but the outcome by adapting was easily the best I could have asked for. And when your bestie’s pre-empted how cold you’ll be so has run you the bath you were dreaming of, well, maybe the end result was even better than expected.
The death wobble
I’m now 2,500 miles into riding this bike – not bad going given I didn’t have one or know how to before April! – and a major motivation for me getting lessons and working towards a license were to minimise accidents going forwards.
In October last year, Beth and I were on a scooter in Laos wearing ponchos and shorts in driving rain and came off in the slowest and frustratingly simultaneously obviously-going-to-happen and nothing-I-felt-I-could-have-done-about-it moment.
She jumped up straight away, shaken and shaking with cold. My left leg was trapped between the bank and the bike. Big metal on bone feeling. I was devastated that that had happened to her, and then livid at myself for coming off.
We decided against driving the last kilometre and walked to a guest house that served the most warming (and necessary) vegetable soup and amphetamine-like coffee you can imagine.
Essentially, I tried too hard to correct the thing I foresaw as causing the accident: I gripped too tightly. I was tense through my elbows limiting bike self-correction and pulled the front brake on a slippery surface and anyway too hard causing the skid and crash.
My lack of knowledge and ability combined with trying too hard resulted in failure.
The death wobble as a particular topic can apply to any vehicle with steerable wheels, and is typically triggered by something external having an outside effect due to something internally out of alignment or repair.
On a motorbike, that might be the wheels misaligned, or a loose bearing; in life that might be someone criticising your cooking after one or both of you having had a tough day at work.
When the bike starts to wobble, its handlebars turning left and right although the bike is still upright and you’re still going in roughly the direction you need to be, the worst thing you can do is grip tighter and “correct” it.
Instead, you’d be wise to loosen up, ease off the throttle, and, in some cases, take your hands off the bars altogether. Provided another bump in the road doesn’t come up, the bike will find it’s normal again, at which point you can interrogate what was out of whack and what you can do to prevent – or at least limit the chances of – it happening again
You can say things happen for a reason
Time’s not wasted if it’s enjoyed, or learned from. Somethings will happen outside of your control. Somethings will be absolutely within your purview.
You won’t always be right, you can’t always be right. And if you don’t have the knowledge or experience to make things better, trying too hard without accruing or applying learning might actually make things worse.
Fine, you didn’t beat your PB because it was raining. Fine, you broke up because of x, y and z. That can happen. But if you wanted a different outcome, what will you do differently next time? Will you allow yourself to not know again and slam the brakes? Or will you ease of the throttle and ask what can be done?
If you’re interested in this idea of fixation and correction, you might like
Running should be for everyone with Professor David Forrest
Particularly Dave’s recognition that when he based his training on beating his marathon PB, he ended up going slower and
And that’s it from me! I hope yas are well and had slightly drier/less gusty moments since we last spoke.
Podcast
In this week’s episode Sayem and I catch up on his first 12 weeks with me as a coach in a journey that clearly spans five of the pillars we like to think about each week. Look out for this on Spotify or YouTube from Thursday morning.
Much love
J x