How Saying No Builds Confidence and Improves Your Mountain Biking Skills

Photo credit: Bartek Wolinski

Most of the time, confidence is key to riding your mountain bike well. Being confident in your abilities, confident in your equipment, confident in the group, confident on the trail, confident to give something a go.

We love confidence and we’re often trying to build more of it. By contrast, not being confident is often seen as the primary reason for being unable to ride something.

While confidence is aspirational, every now and then, I meet a rider whose attitude makes me uncomfortable. They’re too confident. Confident well beyond their skill level. So confident they don’t listen to the riders around them, respect the trails, respect the sport, or respect the consequences of their actions.

More often than not, these riders are fairly new to mountain biking. They’re still learning to appreciate what it takes to ride different types of trails, and they’re improving quickly. They’re also still learning the subtleties (and not-so-subtleties) of trail etiquette. These are things that, like bike handling skills, also develop with experience.

What I admire about these riders is they’ll give anything a go. But in not knowing their limits, or the differences in technicality between one trail and another, or the effort other people in the group are making to keep them safe, they not only put themselves at risk, but they change the whole dynamic of the ride.

In a research study on mountaineers, Jacquelyn Allen-Collinson, Lee Crust, and Christian Swann found that experienced, high-altitude climbers valued other climbers who knew when to say no: no to pushing through fatigue when it meant they may not have the energy to get to safety later, no to pushing on to the summit no matter what, no to being mentally tough only to get into a situation where the risk wasn’t worth the reward.

It’s not hard to see how this value system applies to mountain biking, far more than we tend to recognise. Just like in climbing, experience teaches us how to pace ourselves for the journey yet to come, how to assess the terrain in relation to our skills, our equipment and how we’re feeling on the day, and what kinds of people we want to head out with for different types of rides.

With experience, we also get better at knowing when to say no. Or, what’s more commonly heard on mountain bike trails, a ‘not yet’ or ‘not today’ while working out what skills to keep working on in the meantime.

Like climbing, navigating risk is an important element of riding – understanding when and how to push beyond your comfort zone, and when to walk away or work up to something for a little longer. If the risk is high, take a moment to see what measures can be put in place to mitigate those risks. (See the Mind Body Bike column in our last issue for several ways you can do this.) But don’t be an idiot about it.

If you find yourself dealing with risk by riding something ten levels above your skill set without taking any steps to work up to it or when everyone around you is wisely advising a course of action different to the one you are taking: check yourself. Check your behaviour and what it means for the riders around you. Get clear on the group’s expectations for what they hope to get out of the ride and be the rider you want to ride with as well.

If you’re a rider who’s hard on yourself for saying no, maybe give yourself credit for doing something that’s more valued than you realised – even by the most experienced riders. That’s a really important form of confidence to keep developing too.

[REFERENCE]

Allen-Collinson, J., Crust, L., & Swann, C. (2018). ‘Endurance Work’: Embodiment and the Mind–Body Nexus in the Physical Culture of High-Altitude Mountaineering. Sociology, 52(6), 1324-1341.

Learn more about using your mind to get more out of your time on the bike from Kath Bicknell at:

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