After reading in the xavier collos thread I thought about this… I might have already been posted but yea it’s me …
Well do you think fear holds you back from being as good as you really are when it comes to unicycling ? What Im saying is do you think you have the skills but your fear is holding you back ? For an example crankfliping stairs, doing big gaps or even hopping onto stuff… It was like that for me and hoping onto stuff for a bit until i beat my fear. Well you guys let me know what you think… does fear hold you back when unicycling or you just dont have skills ?
sure is!!
a while back there was this gap that I knew was real easy, it was like three feet across and three feet down, but it was scary because there was a six foot drop in the middle…one day I finally said, screw it, I’ll just hurt myself…so I tried it, and didn’t hurt myself!!
Yeah totally, fear is a thing for everybody. It’s a mental thing. If you over come the instinctive ‘fear’ you have in the back of yor mind, you would learn things so much faster.
I take forever to learn stuff, my subconcious mind holds me back…
These are the kind of skills I avoid. You should be afraid of falling when “going big.” The skills I concentrate on learning are more limited by my coordination and the laws of physics.
i know i could do bigger drops than i do, and clear more stairs than i can, but that little voice of “what if you miss and crash? that’s gonna suck” won’t shut up sometimes. gaps usually aren’t too scary for me, unless there’s a really huge penalty for missing, like a 10 foot drop.
I am risk adverse when it comes to physical risk. It’s just my personality. I’ve never been one to just go for it when the penalty of failure is physical harm (or worse). It does affect my unicycling, the types of skills I do, and the style of riding that I do. I don’t take big risk which means I don’t do muni lines that I could most likely do. I pass up things on the trail without trying them. I’ll walk sections of the trail I’m not comfortable riding (like a few sections of the canyon on the Porcupine Rim Trail in Moab). I still have much fun, but I would be going bigger at this point if I didn’t have the fear factor.
I’m not so risk adverse that I’ll chicken out doing things like riding an elevated skinny as long as I can bail safely, but I do have my limits to what I consider acceptable risk.
with me, i think fear is a good thing and a bad thing. It warns you when youre about to do soemthing that you could hurt yourself on, but if you know you can do whatever it is then you need to get over your fear.
most of the time fear gets in the way for me, im sure theres lots of stuff i can do but im to scared to try them.
i knew i could hop up onto the stairs in my yard but everytime i pedaled up to them i just couldnt jump, but then at the skate park there was a ledge that was taller that i tryed because i didnt want to look like a wimp and can now do it
I wouldn’t necessarily call it fear. There are very few things that I’m actually afraid of. Although, I do have a great deal of “respect” for things that might injure me!!! I choose not to ride beyond my comfort zone to prevent further injuries to this old, beat up body as I’ve still got to get a few more years out of it
anyway… fear is a large factor for me. i know i have the skills but sometimes the fear is what makes me bail out of a 8 step… ive gone off of it but im afraid of hitting my hmmhmmhmhm… you know what that is.
Fear, for me, has always been a big part of a lot of the things i do, but for me, i don’t let it effect me that much, I’m always one to push my limits and to just go for it, if gotten hurt a lot in the process but from being able to get over my fear I’ve done some crazy things too =p
im a total chicken… it took me forever to lear how to free mount… cuzz i was like EEEP IM FALLING… but… i probably want really… and ive been trying the rolling hops…and… yeah i do a few tries… but after falling and bending my leg weird… i sorta freak out… and am afraid to break somthing…
We call it the chicken-out factor and frequently make the cluck-cluck sound just before we bail on a doable but scary stunt.
My favorite was trying to learn to ride skinnies long ago. I had an ideal wall with an 18" drop on one side and level grass on the other. The wall was at least 8" wide and probably more. I tried riding it and fell off into the grass over and over again. I figured I was just biased that way that particular day so I went to the other side and tried to ride it the other way. I fell off into the grass the other direction over and over again. It was just my brain telling me, “don’t go off the side, fall in the soft grass.” Definitely a series of chicken-out events.
i used to try stuff that was outside my skill level because i wanted to do it regardless of the consequences… this mentality means you get accelerated learning, with an increased risk of injury… injury sucks as it stops you from riding, and progressing, untill you eventually start to go downhill. i have recently decided to practice and get my skil levels higher than my attempt rate at harder riskier tricks, therefore when i do do them i have the required skill level to be confident in myself that i will land what i wanna do.
you shouldnt be scared, it stops you from feeling confident and will limit your abilities
I am all about The Fear. Not only does it keep me from trying stuff I could probably ride, it virtually guarantees that the first few times I muster up the move to try something harder, I’ll bail prematurely out of fear, possibly getting injured in the bargain.
If I was smarter, I’d pick some things I really WANT to be able to conquer, like skinnies, and then figure out some way to really focus my practice, starting with non-threatening lines and slowly working my way up. Since I just ride and don’t practice, the skinnies I encounter “in the wild” often seem to be above my confidence level.
TB
Those who can, do. Those who can’t, take the pictures.
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I choose not to ride beyond my comfort zone to prevent further injuries to this old, beat up body as I’ve still got to get a few more years out of it