The Brit Team has had a bad day.

After storming round in the lead gaggle all day it all went very wrong in the last 15k because we all got stuck and watched the chasing pack fly over our collective heads to take the glory and more importantly all the points.  By the time we’d got ourselves un-stuck we’d run out of time to get to goal and we all landed just short.  Cleverly not only had we managed to get stuck but all three of us who should have been scoring had managed to do it in exactly the same place.

Getting stuck on a competition task is about the second worse thing that can happen.  (Being just short of goal is probably the very worst).  After nearly 100km of flying at quite a brisk pace we were all looking forward to the final part of the race when our collective brains all seemed to go blank.  We’d all been low, we’d all got back up and only a fairly simple climb out from El Penon (the main flying site) separated us from Goal Glory.  Except it didn’t happen.  Why?

Flying a task well is a bit like playing Tetris when you’re getting each brick to fall nicely into place time after time.  As they are all falling into place so well there’s plenty of time to position the ones arriving at the top of the screen.  Get one out of place, however, and it all starts to come apart and quite quickly the things are arriving so fast that you just can’t make them fit and – GAME OVER!

Getting stuck is a bit like this.  You’ve been flying all day, making calculated decisions and occasionally taking a risk or two that’s paid off and things are going just perfectly.  I’ve noticed that you almost always get stuck in what should be an easy place and I think this happens because you can’t quite believe that you’ve had all that luck, all those good decisions and all those risky moves come off and now, here you are, on the simplest and easiest climb of the day and it’s not working.  Had it been a risky choice you’d just move on and assume it hadn’t worked but because it SHOULD work you stay there.  And stay there.  And stay there.  ‘Come on you git’ you keep saying, ‘it always bloody goes up here’.  10 minutes pass – ‘there must be cycle soon’ you mutter.  20 minutes – ‘for f*ck’s sake, come on!’.  30 minutes – ‘Unbelievable, f*cking unbelievable to get stuck here of all places’ you howl to the indifferent sky.

Finally you give up and go on a death glide to a really stupid place and ‘Bingo!’ it comes out and you’re on your way again, albeit last.

Writing all this down it seems so obvious so why can’t we work this out for ourselves in the sky?  I’m not sure but I think it is something to do with what I talked about earlier.  You’ve spent all day making good decisions, taking great gambles which keep paying off and, like a gambler, you just can’t accept that the easiest bet of your life is just not paying off so you throw good money after bad and keep betting on the same ‘sure thing’ even when it’s not working.

The fact that three highly experienced team mates spent the best part of half an hour soaring a spur which was obviously heavily lee-side and dangerously rough whilst watching their almost certain Top 20 places slip away to become a bomb out probably tells you as much about the stubborn self belief and suspension of reality needed to be a good comp pilot than it does about our collective intelligence and ability to fly.  (I should explain that we were too low to go to where the other pilots were getting lift otherwise we’d have obviously just followed them)

It’s almost like you can see yourself making the bad decision as you do it but you do it anyway.  Worse, once you’ve done it you just can’t let go of it because you just CAN’T be wrong, not after all that great flying you’ve just done.

But as I said in yesterday’s blog – ‘tomorrow’s another day…’

Mark H

[Check this space for video clips, to be put up shortly]

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This entry was posted on Friday, January 30th, 2009 at 6:06 am and is filed under Mark Hayman's Blog: Fear and loathing on planet PG. You can follow any comments on this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.