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Single-minded immersion.

Emotion and thought are focused.

You are totally engaged, ego is out the window.

There is a perfect moment stretching into the future in front of you.

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Early in my flying career, part of my job was teaching aerobatics. Aerobatics sucks you in. If someone ever manages to think about floating vs variable interest rates while in the middle of a barrel roll, they need to be whisked away to an off-the-books medical research facility somewhere.

Aerobatics and flow go hand in hand. You are at your limit and at your aeroplane’s limit. You can feel when you pull up into a loop just how much energy the aircraft has left to give – pull a tiny bit more and you’ll stall. There’s no instrument in the cockpit to tell you this. How is it that you can feel the interaction between the airflow and the wings when you are neither – you’re just strapped in the thing. I loved it. Admittedly, aerobatics wasn’t to everyone’s tastes, but the cleanup story is one for another day.

So, to paint this picture, I’ll cover getting in touch, the setup and the result.

1 – Integration

Integrated with your machine or your environment. This is where you trade sitting on a motorbike for being part of the system. It’s peppered through our language – in the zone, in the groove, bike is an extension of me. It’s poetic, and justifiably so: We are dealing with a reaction your brain has to your environment – integration is personal. The Bee and I are a team.

If we swapped bikes halfway around a ride, the lack of familiarity with a different bike will impede integration. The same applies if you haven’t ridden in a month or more – it takes a while to get current again. Instead of being 5 seconds behind your bike, you and your machine are worth more than the sum of the parts.

2 – Interface Displacement

This idea deals with the limit of your perception. I can tell whether I’ve coozed my steak by how it feels when I cut it. I don’t have to touch the steak with my fingers or taste the charcoal – my perception extends to include the knife. When you are integrated well with your machine, the limit of what you can feel expands to include the bike, right down to the contact patches of the tyres. You feel the back end getting squirrelly, that feeling of being planted and riding through a corner on rails.

The term ‘slipping in’ is used to describe this. There’s an increase in co-ordination, a decrease in reaction time, and a reduction in the energy required to ride. Think Paris-Dakar – I’d have passed out after 20 minutes from the effort of controlling everything. But those guys are so at one with their machines that it’s almost all automatic, leaving only the big picture decisions to the rider.

3 – Prerequisites

You must be competent (some skills automatic)

The road must be challenging

That challenge should motivate you

The absolute key to this is that all three have to balance out.

4 – Hello Flow

That equilibrium is critical – that’s where the natural effortless feeling of gliding through a twisty road comes from. You’re on form, you’re challenged and your brain is fully engaged in the moment. Bliss. If you were aiming for this, welcome to controlled flow.

If you’re surprised by this swish new feeling, be warned – uncontrolled flow is a feedback loop that leads down a dangerous path. You feel flow, which is awesome, and it releases endorphins. You carve through a corner, a study in perfection, and you get the next burst of feel-good. Your risk profile goes out the window, because the more you’re challenged and more you rise to it, the riskier it gets and the better it feels. Uncontrolled flow is the itch the adrenaline junkies are trying to scratch, and once in a while it ends badly.

Controlled flow, where you are aware of your state of mind, allows for faster learning, smoother and faster riding, and more enjoyment and satisfaction.

This should herald the end of the techie posts for a period of time – no more heavy stuff! I’ve added a Hero to my arsenal so expect some GoPro goodness in the next post.

JK