Mojo, confidence, groove, the zone, call it what you will – I’ve lost it. And it’s proving pretty hard to find again. Can anyone help?
At the end of March 2013, I broke my hip in the closing kilometres of the ABSA Cape Epic. At the time it seemed like a hard fall but nothing dramatic, but it soon became apparent that all that adrenalin was masking something more serious than just the usual tumble.
To some extent, injuries are a hard-to-avoid part of mountain biking. Anything which involves going quickly in an only partially controlled environment involving various non-yielding surfaces, rocks and trees, protected by a bit of polystyrene on one’s head and a partial covering of a single layer of lycra clothing is going to offer the opportunity for the frail human body to take a bit of a battering. And indeed, broken collarbones can almost be regarded as a bit of a rite of passage; some people escape, but that level of injury comes around for many of us at some point. (I did encounter a German chap at the 2011 Cape Epic who had done a total of nine collar-bones – his shoulders were criss-crossed with scars. At that point, surely you’d wonder if you were doing something wrong, or had offended some higher power?)
Anyway, I did a collarbone in 2011, was off the bike for six weeks, then on the bike indoors, and raced a solo 24-hour after 11 weeks. That period felt pretty crappy at the time, but looking back it wasn’t much of a big deal (although admittedly I was probably lucky – more complex fractures requiring surgery can take much longer to recover from). The fitness came back without too many problems, and I didn’t really suffer from any psychological after-effects.
Breaking a hip has felt like a rather different order of magnitude. It’s the kind of injury where people look a bit surprised to hear you’ve done it, because it’s pretty unusual for people under retirement age – someone told me it was the hardest bone in the body. And the recovery process reflects that – a three-hour operation to pin it back together under general anaesthetic; six weeks no weight bearing; three and a half months on crutches; four months without getting on a bike outdoors. And ongoing physio after seven months, to counteract the effects of a weakened glute, over-compensating hamstrings and all the other complications.
From a physical point of view, assuming the recovery continues without hiccups, I should be OK though. And getting fitness back is just a process. A boring process, but a process that it’s possible to follow. It’s just time and hard work. I’ve done it before, and I’ll do it again. There shouldn’t be too much doubt about the outcome. But the mental side – the mojo – is different.
The way it has manifested itself is dramatically to undermine my ability to descend quickly. I’m never going to be Steve Peat; and my high-speed descending has always been something of a weakness – plenty of overtaking uphill, only to lose some places on the schotter downhill – pretty standard. But particularly after some one-on-one skills coaching over the winter, I found that at the Cape Epic I was full of confidence, and descending faster than I ever had; a moment to be particularly pleased about was overtaking Roel Paulissen on a bumpy dirt road descent. Yes, he was probably holding back a bit for his slightly slower team-mate; yes he was on a hardtail and I was on my very capable Bianchi Methanol 29 FS; but nonetheless I felt pretty chuffed at the time. And until that fateful snagging of a bar-end on a wire attached to a vine coming into Lourensford on the last day, I had ridden a pretty flawless race, not coming to grief once.
(Here’s Jaroslav Kulhavy doing a pretty good impression of my crash (at about 2:10), only he finished up on the winners’ step with a bit of blood on his leg rather than going under the surgeon’s knife (and drill) three days later… )
Post-injury, though, while I can feel the fitness and strength coming back, the mental side is proving harder to master. Singletrack descending is actually fine, because it’s too much fun to have time to think. In fact, it’s almost a case of the more technical, the better; because all that intense focus is on picking the right line and getting the body in the right place. Only when you get down it do you think “wow, how did I do that?”.
But on the open, fast stuff, I find my brain very quick to start thinking “what if…”. “What if I overcook a corner”; “what if I wash out the front wheel”; “what if I miscalculate and clip that tree”. And of course, if the brain is thinking that, it’s not focused on getting round the corners; the shoulders tense up, and perversely all those outcomes are actually made more likely. That, and the brakes go on more often, and earlier, than they should do. Net result – losing time out of every corner, not even being quick enough in a straight line downhill at speed, and generally not enjoying the descending unless it’s on singletrack.
I’m pretty sure it’s not a technique thing. Or if it is, it’s only at the margins. I reckon I know what I’m meant to be doing, and (mostly) can make myself do them. Outside foot down, look where you want to go, only brake in a straight line, find the apex, relax and be smooth.
Oh, hold on a minute. It turns out that last one is easy to say, but hard to do. The other ingredients in fast descending are simple physical steps. But the step that involves switching off a certain set of thoughts just isn’t as easy.
There are improvements, slowly. The more riding I do, and the more those rides passes without incident, the more the confidence is edging back. But it is really difficult to push away those negative voices with their doom-laden messages.
Have you ever lost your mojo? What caused it? And how did you get it back?