My feet are on the ground and my hands are squeezing the handlebars of my bike. I look down at the heavy tread on the front tire that represents one of my two points of contact with the earth. Those tires are ready for anything I can point them towards.

If only I was as confident.

The dirt trail ahead becomes rocks, some overlapping, some with pointy edges, all in a row. I’ve ridden this feature four times and haven’t made it all the way through yet. I don’t have enough speed to get up and over, but speed isn’t what I really need. It’s more about the skill to pick a good line, keep my balance even when I’m slow, and keep my pedals from hitting the stone and bringing me to an unexpected stop.  

With mountain biking (as many things, sports-oriented and not) the important parts are staying relaxed and knowing how to fall. These do not come naturally to me.

I ride the rock garden for the fifth time and fall. It is the worst one yet and I scrape the pedal studs designed to keep my shoes in place across the top of my knee, making a 90 degree cut that I already know will leave a scar.

I turn to my instructor and admit that I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. “Think about it like this,” she says, “by the time you get to the first rock, you’ve already ridden it.”

She must sense my confusion through the layers of sweat, dirt and chain grease streaked on my face.  “You’ve already ridden it,” she repeated. “If you look ahead on the trail, which you should be, then your eyes have already taken in all the information they need to know even before you get to it. You don’t have to look down – and you shouldn’t - because your mind has already figured out a way through.”  

I look back at the rock garden where one of my clinic-mates is attempting (in a much more elegant fashion) to ride it through. “Huh,” I say doubtfully. But then remember that I showed up to this lesson in order to learn something, so maybe even this airy-fairy kind of advice counts. “Okay,” I agree, the reluctance heavy in that one word.  

I ride back to the beginning and this time instead of keeping my eyes firmly fixed on my front tire, I don’t look at it. I glance at the feature, even though I had already memorized the arrangement of rocks, and then fix my eyes on the yellow flowers blooming ten feet beyond it on the side of the trail. When I feel the first bumps underneath the bike I say out loud, “I’ve already ridden it.”

Surprising to everyone, most especially myself, I make it through without falling. “Yes,” I hear her exclaim as I make it past the last rock.

“That was easier,” I say dumbly, as if I hadn’t expected her superior advice to work.

“It is,” she smiles, her sunglasses sitting on the apples of her red cheeks. “If you can convince your worried mind that the hard part is over, it actually can be.”

Huh, I think. Pretend the hard part is over.

I realize with a jolt that this could work. Here on the trail, but further afield as well. Saying yes to the scary thing means I’m already over the hump, in a way. By the time I do the actual thing, I’ve already played out all the scenarios and contingency-planned the unknowns. But there will always be unanticipated unknowns no matter how hard I try to reduce them. Maybe they aren’t nearly as scary if I pretend that I’ve “already ridden it.” If I put more faith in the preparation and everything that went along with it.

Rarely do things go the way we imagine. The artwork I envision at the beginning of a project is never even close to the final product. The vacation never proceeds along the path I outlined in my head. Maybe that's the most beautiful thing about having "already ridden it”: it frees you up to see the unexpected things that happen rather than memorizing the tread on the front tire. Instead of looking down at the ground, I can listen to the bird chatter and feel how lofty it can be to ride through the sagebrush on a sunny summer day.

Then all that’s left is to lift my head, put my eyes on the horizon, and ride out the bumps. 

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