Off Road Trails – Choose Difficulty Carefully
One of the thrills of learning new skills is to find conditions that mesh your current competency with just the right amount of new challenge so that you are not bored, but not so much that you are paralyzed with fear.
When beginning with new equipment most of the initial learning is with operation of the machine until it becomes familiar and second-nature. Changing equipment brings new effects on response and balance. Fit and comfort is important so that your body is not affected negatively with movement and pain.
Terrain also starts off being one of finding easy conditions in which to become familiar with performance of machine and body, with time and distance.
After reviewing your reaction to familiar trails you can start to explore more difficult situations both in technical and physical terms. Technical skills can be learned separately in controlled environments, and with repetition until the skill is reinforced and mastered. Physical ability takes time and persistence, is easily lost when not maintained frequently, but can be overdone to the point of injury.
As with many physical sports, training the body should be done gradually and with a lot of baseline low exertion, slowly increasing resistance or speed until the body can adapt to the new, higher level of performance. Recovery from exertion is essential in order to gain maximum benefit.
Once the baseline fitness and strength is established, increasing difficulty in skills is then not hindered by lack of physical capability. Exhaustion can be detrimental to learning new skills, degrades existing skills, and risks injury, even survival if conditions change for the worse.
With these points in mind, choosing new off road trails becomes a critical factor in learning and improvement. There is probably no trail that contains the exact components that meet your desires on any given day. Not only does your own performance change day to day, but also parts of a trail vary from beginning to end. Partners or groups of trail riders add more complexity to the balance of difficulty and ease.
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