Learning to Learn and the Simple Pleasures in Life

I've been so busy having fun for the last few days that I haven't had a chance to blog! I have taken a leaf out of William Nealy's book (Mountain Bike! A Manual of Beginning to Advanced Technique) and am learning to learn. His theory goes something like this:

Most mountain bike learning is of the self instructed variety. You ride progressively harder & harder stuff and learn from your mistakes. Eventually you will train your body to react quickly and instinctively to a wide variety of obstacles and trail conditions while having loads of fun. The golden rule of successful self teaching is 'Be kind to your student'. Before you begin a self training session RELAX; this aint Wall Street. You can't lose riding a mountain bike. If you are working on a technique and you fail 2 or 3 times in a row STOP!! So something else & try again later. This is called 'training to failure'. If you push a training session beyond 3 successive failures you are 'training to fail'. As you become more adept at self teaching and pushing yourself appropriately you'll be able to discren where good (beneficial) training ends & bad (regressive) training begins. HINT: lack of fun marks the spot.

Couldn't we apply this approach to any new skill we want to learn? Dare I suggest that we could even use it to learn non physical skills? Try hard a few times, but don't keep trying if you're getting nowhere, do something else & come back to it. That way you are not setting up a pattern of failure associated with that skill or task Works for me. On Wednesday I tackled a steep chute that has defied me every time I have attempted it (no more than 3 times each occasion!) and I did it! I had a great day's riding & finished it off with that. I wanted to celebrate, whoop, holler, jump for joy....so I did! And then I did it again, just for kicks.

On one of my journeys across the back roads of the Dublin mountains, I passed a little old man and his wife, girlfrend, sister (?) in a Mark One VW Golf.


I noticed the ccar first, a lovely old goldy green colour...and then the driver caught my eye. He must have been it's 'one careful gentleman owner', he looked so proud, happy, smug almost...and it made me smile. He didn't notice the effect he had on me, but that smile lasted all day, it set me up for a great day's riding. A simple pleasure for him, maybe even a random act of kindness.

Happy Friday.