With every ride, you need to challenge yourself in at least one aspect of your riding. This does not always have to be some huge accomplishment and actually it is better if they are not. As you start to ride more (or are an experienced rider) achieving these accomplishments does several things:
- Improves Confidence – As with anything in life as we accomplish set goals are confidence and moral increases. With biking, these goals improve our overall feelings on our riding abilities. This will lead to even better rides in the future.
- Improves Riding Skill Sets – When you challenge yourself in your riding and accomplish the goals that you set out for yourself, you tend to raise the bar a little bit more the next time. Each time this bar raises, your riding ability and skills raise with it.
- Creates Excitement – I don’t know about you guys…but I get pretty excited when I achieve goals I set for myself. This gets me even more encouraged to try the next challenge and better my skill sets even further.
- Prevents Top Out – Beginner riders will find that they see huge gains in the beginning, but as they ride more their skills and abilities seem to flatten out. In this post I explain how important the first 30 days of riding is for this exact reason. To prevent your riding from becoming stagnant, set small goals for yourself when you ride.
I am not trying to say that every rider is going to be the next World Cup downhill champion, top endurance racer or cross country machine by setting little goals while you ride. Each riders goals and challenges are different. Here are some examples of ways you can challenge yourself during your rides.
- Try to clear that trail feature that you haven’t tried before.
- Climb in a harder gear.
- Take one less break.
- Ride a harder section of trail than you are used to.
- Go on that mountain group ride.
- Session a section of trail until you clear it.
- Try to keep up with a faster rider (within reason…don’t want to blow up and ruin the day!).
- Try a singlespeed.
- Ride longer distances than you are used to.
As with any goal…you need to be very specific. This is extremely important because you need to know the exact point in time that you achieved the goal you set for yourself. This sense of achievement while riding is very rewarding. Most of the time these are goals that I set in my head and no one riding around me even knows the difference. It is complete self fulfillment and I am normally just smiling to myself. We are out on the trail to have a good time and make our lives more enjoyable. I never want to get the feeling that I am just going through the motions while I ride.
How did I challenge myself today?
For todays ride I met Tweety, regularjoe and Concrete Blond for what was supposed to be a cool down ride from Saturday’s Ellijay hammerfest. We started off in what felt like 500% humidity at a pace set by a yellow jersey. We started the ride heading for the Dwelling Loop and I was in the big ring. For some reason I kept it in the big ring and half way through Dwelling I decided my goal for the day was to keep this pace on Dwelling without leaving the big ring. I followed Tweety for the remainder of the lap and before I knew it we were at the end. I had done the entire lap, at a fast pace, in the humidity and in the big ring. I was happy with what I had achieved and that was my challenge for the day.