Target fixation

The U.S. Half Marathon is com­ing up soon, and I’m reg­is­tered for it even though I have not by any stretch of the imag­i­na­tion trained enough for it. I have spent a lot of this year let­ting my focus drift away from run­ning, and to date I have run only 82 miles in 2005. At this time in 2004 I had just run the U.S. half and had logged over 240 miles.

How did I get here? By look­ing away every time I had a race com­ing up, and think­ing I’d focus on it lat­er, that I’d get around to train­ing even­tu­al­ly. By not focus­ing on my goal or on where I want to be. I can talk about the oth­er things I’ve been focus­ing on, and I can talk about all the oth­er stuff I’ve done this year… it’s been a real­ly good year for me, but on this ele­ment, on this goal, I’ve fall­en down. Each time I had a race com­ing up I looked at the date and thought, “yeah, it would be nice to do, so we’ll see. If I can train for it, maybe I’ll do it” instead of keep­ing my men­tal eye on where I want to be.

On my motor­cy­cle ride Sun­day I rode behind a new­er rid­er for a stretch. This guy was on a hot sport­bike and hon­est­ly I don’t even remem­ber what kind. It was a CBR or some­thing like that. Vroom vroom and way too much pow­er-to-weight ratio for such a new rid­er, but the guy was try­ing real hard. He looked like he’d nev­er been on moun­tain roads before and he was scoot­ing his butt over the side like he was at the race­track. It looked like he was try­ing to turn the bike entire­ly with the weight of his body rather than by countersteering.

At one point going up the moun­tain before we went in to Cal­is­to­ga, I don’t know, I think it might have been Route 29 but don’t quote me on that for sure, we got stuck behind some­one in a car going just fast enough that pass­ing gets tricky, but slow enough that you don’t want to be stuck behind them on a nice twisty moun­tain road. The kid saw an open­ing and passed. And I’ll say this now: in hind­sight it was bad judg­ment for him to pass on that cor­ner, but I’m pret­ty con­ser­v­a­tive about pass­ing in cor­ners and I passed the car behind him.

As soon as I got around the car, I saw mis­ter sport­bike hit the ground. He lowsided on the next curve and tum­bled out into the road while his bike end­ed up on its side next to the guardrail.

One of the first things that you’re taught about rid­ing a motor­cy­cle is to look where you want to go. This is true for bicy­cles as well, that if you see an object in your path and you keep your eyes locked on that object, it does­n’t mat­ter how hard you push your han­dle­bars to avoid it, you will hit. I think the log­ic goes some­thing like this: most of your steer­ing is real­ly done sub­con­scious­ly, and your brain is trained to go to the spot you’ve tar­get­ed with your eyes.

My eyes locked on to the most obvi­ous tar­get in the road: the fall­en rid­er’s head.

I was going too fast to stop before I hit his head, but I knew that my front wheel hit­ting his hel­met would be very bad for him and for me. A hel­met is a big enough obsta­cle that it would ruin my upright line and spill me as well, plus for him, neck injuries and any­thing else that comes with hav­ing near­ly 800 pounds of bike and rid­er run over your head. It was not going to be a pret­ty scene.

I forced my eyes to the patch of pave­ment just to the left of his head, pushed my left han­dle­bar for­ward, and swerved right past. Not as much room as I would have liked, but in that cir­cum­stance all I asked for was not to hit the kid, and that’s what I got. The kid was fine, his bike was fine. He’ll have to get his left frame slid­er replaced, but that’s what slid­ers are for. There was­n’t even any real cos­met­ic dam­age to the bike and the kid did­n’t do any more to him­self than scuff his leathers.

The rea­son I’m writ­ing out this sto­ry is about the focus. If I’d have kept my eyes on his hel­met, all the know­ing what not to do and all the hop­ing and try­ing not to hit it would­n’t have helped. I had to change my focus and choose the place that I want­ed to go instead of let­ting my ini­tial pan­ic reac­tion pick my path.

This is the same with my run­ning. I got up this morn­ing and did a lit­tle bit more than I’ve run in the last few months. It was only 1.2 miles more than my reg­u­lar run, but I kept the same pace, and I actu­al­ly got start­ed and went instead of lolling around in bed. I’m not say­ing at this point that I’m going to run the U.S. Half. It might be too much for me to build back up to in too short of a time. But that’s where I’m look­ing. I’m putting my eyes where I want to be, not where I am.