Racing motorcycle calls for total concentration, because the aftermath of a minimal distraction can cause one to crash. Especially at club events I have seen so many times riders that suddenly miss their brake mark, for apparently no reason. My finding are that normally it’s extremely difficult to maintain the same focus from lap to lap, from session to session. Also the same rider that as beginner was so tense to the point that he could not see more than 30 feet ahead of his bike, later on he could experience the risk of zoning out while riding. It’s like the majority of us experience every day with the car, when a series of thoughts, a phone call or conversation with someone takes away our focus from driving. On the bike is the “meditative effect” that can cause the problem: the repetition of the same actions, over and over, becomes like a mantra, a special form of meditation that if clears totally our minds from other thoughts, at the same time it can leave our minds “empty” and so proned to be filled with other distractions.
If at the race track, during a club event, the best way to keep focus and remain alert is to rest at frequent intervals, what can we do to improve our concentration when at home?
In the same way we train our muscles we should train our brain. Personally I use Autogenous Training (AT), a technique aimed to reach an inner harmony through different exercises of relaxation. I know only the foundation of it, something learned as teenager in Italy when road-racing professionally with bicycles: my team hired a psychologist to teach us how to reduce the anxiety and tension normally experienced before a competition.
After all these years I still find myself to close my eyes and doing my meditation every time I feel stressed or under heavy pressure. At the race track I have created a series of mental and physical actions that help me to recall the proper mental status needed to stay focused and on the alert through the day, especially while teaching in the Rob Lombardi’s School or Coaching for different clubs. In effect the risk of loosing the concentration is higher when we go “slower”, at a pace that is “too” comfortable, a pace where the adrenaline leaves more space to the endorphins developed by the throttle-brake-throttle mantra.
Everybody is different, so I don’t think that AT is better than any other type of meditation training as long as the person finds what it does works to properly tune his or her mind to the challenge. As you can notice in TV, at the start of a MotoGp race, each rider has his own set of actions to get mentally ready for the challenge. Rossi has a very particular one that starts with some sort of leg stretching, followed by a sort of pray (I am just guessing) holding the left rear set, followed by the adjustment of the underwear while riding and standing up on the pegs and finally checking over and over the alignment of the front tire on the grid.
It has probably started as a superstitious act but I am positive that now Valentino uses these “mental triggers” to recall the required mind set to race in MotoGp. I specify MotoGp because there is no way he could adjust his underwear when strapped on a seat of a rally or F1 car ...
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