Mindful Motorcycle Racing
Sharing a breakthrough that has made all the time I've spent in this hobby worth it
I didn’t grow up playing sports. When I started riding at the track, I found it took me longer to pick up the pace than some of my peers, who I felt were natural athletes. At a rate of 10 weekends at the track a year, I spent one year in C group. One year in B group. One year in A group. This year, I’m in my novice year of racing.
I had a vague, intuitive sense that riders who picked up the sport naturally had a much better feedback loop than I did. But I didn’t know exactly why. While I could discount it to age, myself at 37 vs younger riders in their early 20s, I felt like there was something more.
Faster riders I watched could find a very natural body position, generate more turn-in rate, and maximize traction. I had some sense that these riders had better kinesthetic sense. They knew how to move their bodies and where their body parts were in space relative to g forces and position.
This didn’t seem like something I could get better at without switching sports. So I mostly left it alone. This remained a constant fact that I accepted as just how it is.
But recently I read a book that changed my mind and greatly improved how I trained. I realized I was doing things that prevented good habits from efficiently forming. And while it’s true the learning rate slows down with age, I was penalizing myself twice by how I approached training.
A long time ago, I learned how to do public speaking and give presentations. Every time I had to give a talk, I spent a lot of time preparing. After making the slides, I wrote down what I would say on each slide, and then recited the words over and over until I could recite the whole talk. While the outcome was usually ok, there were clearly more efficient ways to get the same results.
When I read up on how experts did it, I found some useful tips, like building a few sets of key points per slide, having them roughly in your head, and then letting yourself talk naturally after each slide came up. And when I tried this, I could intuitively come up with whatever I needed to say with minimal thinking. It took almost no time to switch to this approach, and it also gave the best outcome with the least amount of work.
Little did I know, many years later, this would be the same approach that would help me improve my track riding.
In The Inner Game of Tennis, Timothy Gallwey talks about two selves that exist inside us: the thinking self (Self 1) and the body self (Self 2). Self 1 includes all of the thoughts that appear inside of consciousness. And Self 2 is the implicit self driving all of our actions. It’s clear to anyone in our sport that Self 1 isn’t the one in charge most of the time. While we ride, we act instinctively.
But when we are learning, we tend to make Self 1 the main person in charge. We read or get coached up on technique or think critically of our own riding. And we use our thinking brain to time and force our body to execute “the ideal plan.”
In the last few weekends, I was riding my mini moto VMC 190 at Dixon kart track. I had always struggled with a hairpin left-hander and a left-hand sweeper. I was getting better at them, but like my riding in the last few years, progress was incremental. My approach was to get close to the corner. Then I thought of one action I needed to do better—either vision or some body movement that forced it more on the inside. Then, through sheer will, I hoped I’d improve.
The result was usually lackluster. My Self 1 was in full force, dominating and critically thinking about my mistakes from the past lap. By focusing too much on body position, I didn’t have the cognition to move my vision out enough. Or, by focusing too much on vision, my body didn’t improve.
But this past weekend, I applied some of Timothy’s advice on dealing with Self 2. I let Self 2 take charge. Using Self 2’s language, through emotions and visualization, along with sensory inputs, I tried to give Self 2 confidence and tried to maximize the visual inputs along with sensory inputs. I felt the weight of my inner thigh on the tank and my foot on the inside peg. I felt the position of my chest and head against the G-forces of the corner. I felt the traction of the front tire against the handlebar. I widened my vision and moved my head towards the corner and exit preemptively.
Before riding, I visualized what I wanted to get out of each of the two left-handers. And I let go.
As I approached each corner, I let go of my rigid conscious control and trusted that Self 2 would eventually figure it out. And I was amazed by what happened. Through each of the difficult left-handers, I handled them like before, but now with fewer mental constraints. Then, after each lap, I saw myself get better. The more I relaxed and focused on feeding Self 2 what it needed to do the job, the more I found myself pushing pace, traction, and turn-in rate. I weighed the inner peg more and more after each lap as I found new ways to move so that I wouldn’t be crossed up. By the end of the day, I had improved a lot. Way more than a typical training day.
It was astonishing.
By believing in my body-self and letting go of tight conscious control, I made the biggest improvement in a training day. An experience I had only attained on a few race weekends this year, when the competition was so close it put me in “the zone”.
It didn’t stop with just this one improvement. I spent the rest of the way focusing on helping each self do their best work. For Self 1, I focused not only on vision and sensation, but I also started to incorporate breath-work as I ran my laps. I avoided this in the past as I wanted to spend my mental capacity trying to get my body to execute what I wanted it to do. But now I started being able to trust my body to do what it needed to do and had excess mental capacity. By doing breath-work, I found that I could recover from mistakes faster and put them behind me, clearing the plate for the next lap.
By applying the advice I learned in the book, I was able to move away from my default self-critical, analytical mindset, which I use all day, every day in my work as a software engineer—but had a hard time turning it off when it came to riding. Heck, I even thought it was an asset!
If you’re just here for the racing, this was the insight. But fully experiencing this duality of mind and body in something I’ve been grinding away at particularly intensely this year felt closer to spiritual fulfillment.
I’ve always been fascinated by the thinking part of the self and how there seemed to be another person inside of me that I didn’t quite control. In my 20s, I lived by the “just wing it” mantra, thinking I was some young hotshot. I under-prepared for everything and threw myself into conversations with strangers in all situations.
A few years ago, I felt disconnected because my body didn’t do what my brain wanted. If you know me closely, you may know that in my late 20s and early 30s I suffered from severe sleep apnea. Undiagnosed for years, the lack of oxygen during sleep and the constant arousals did damage to the frontal cognitive parts of my brain. At my worst, I was a zombie during the day. I experienced depersonalization, a sensation where I felt like I was in a movie, watching someone else play my body. I could still make decisions, talk, and move throughout my day. But there was a disconnect between what I was thinking and what I actually did.
Previously I’ve read up on the topic of dualism and the divisibility of consciousness. In Sam Harris’s Waking Up, I learned about the split-brain problem, where patients had their brains cut into two separate parts, each connected to one half of the body. Researchers could get the two distinct parts to communicate without the conscious person being aware of what the unconnected hand was doing. But it wasn’t until now that it was anything more than an academic curiosity that could explain some of what I experienced in the past.
The much more interesting learning is that you can communicate and delegate to the parts inside of yourself to get the job done. And by letting go this way, you can reduce the feeling of “trying too damn hard”.
Trusting the body-self is often second nature to many people, especially those who grew up playing sports. But for myself, this was a huge breakthrough. Being less critical of my riding and letting go of cognitive control will improve both my enjoyment of the sport and my performance. And it connected a lot of loose dots in my head about how we can seemingly execute highly complex, conscious behaviors without a single active thought.
Hopefully, this helps you find a little more speed, and a little more peace, out on the track.