Guess what?! I can ride my bike with no hands! That's one of the very cool things I learned on Sunday during my training. I also learned to properly steer the bike (hint: not with the handlbars), to counter-steer, the physics of steering a bike, how to do a proper lead-out, how far I can sprint on a bike, and some other racing etiquette and tactics. All of these new skills have given me a lot more confidence on the bike, knowledge about the physics of the bike, and were just fun to learn.
Remember when you were a kid and you wanted to learn how to do something? I'm betting that you didn't go to the library to research it. You likely didn't ask your parents. You probably grabbed a friend or two, went to an appropriate spot, and...practiced! As kids, my sister and I were friends with the family up the street (Hi, Winarskis!) with two of the sisters the same age as each of us. The four of us spent countless hours practicing headstands in their living room, doing god-knows-what on the street on rollerskates or bikes, and finding out at exactly what point did you need to bail from the wagon while riding in it down our super-steep driveway. And while I was going around the same loop in the office park on Sunday, again and again, trying to get my hands off my bars and my body upright (the key to riding no-handed), a song that my brother used to have on tape when we were kids popped into my head: Practice Makes Perfect. It's actually a horrible song, but I couldn't stop singing it! "Practice makes perfect, practice makes perfect, the more times I practice the better I will be!" I'm sure the recesses of my brain connected that song with what I was doing: playing like a kid.
That's exactly what we were doing! We had a group of girls, and we went out and learned a skill, one at a time, and did it again and again. For hours! When was the last time you did that? We're not kids anymore, and playtime is not spontaneous very often, but we can still schedule it into our lives! In fact, scheduling a time to go learn something new from an expert (thanks, Lorri!!!), makes the experience even better! As adults, many of us feel more comfortable having someone teach us how to do something rather than just figure it out on our own. We've come a long way from the days of hurtling our body through space just to see how it feels. And since we're likely carving out time from a busy life, streamlining the process of learning a new skill makes it easier, so having someone show you how it's done makes it more efficient. This Tri-Flow Women's Development Program is 6 weeks long, and we learn a mind-boggling amount of things every week. Maybe you don't have the time to commit to something like that. (Frankly, I need to learn a lot to feel confident racing.) But there are 4 hour clinics or weekend clinics that will teach you more about your bike and bike handling skills. It doesn't matter if you're a beginner or not, I encourage you to get out and spend a morning or afternoon playing like a kid again, practicing over and over. Because practice makes perfect!
