With Rapid Training Coach Ryan Decarteret
Q I’VE NEVER LIKED riding in the rain, but recently I’ve started to get really anxious about it and can’t seem to sort myself out.
It’s taken the edge off my motorcycling because I don’t go out if it’s raining and spend the whole time fretting if it starts. Short of going to a shrink or moving to the Sahara, is there anything I can do?
Please don’t print my name, I’d rather my riding mates didn’t know. Thanks.
A THE FIRST THING to say is there’s no shame in feeling anxious – almost all experienced riders have felt like that about one aspect of their riding at some time.
For me, it was after a big crash when I was younger – a van pulled across in front of me. I was nervous of certain junctions for months afterwards. No shame in that.
I’ll give you some tips in a minute, but given how nervous you sound, my first piece of advice is to get some training with a good coach who’s set up with intercoms.
With nervous riders, I find it can be incredibly useful for them to have a voice in their ear telling them when they’re riding well. That can be very powerful because they’ve often lost all their confidence.
Obviously, I can point out errors, but nervousness is usually a mindset rather than a skill deficit, so the main job is to boost confidence – and one way of doing that is through positive reinforcement.
Clearly I don’t know how you’re riding, but I’m guessing you’re doing a lot of things right and it might help to have someone experienced point that out to you.
The next thing is to contemplate the hard facts about riding in the wet. For most tarmac, rain reduces grip by about 30%. This sounds a lot, but because we’re not using 100% in the first place we don’t actually have to back off that much in the wet. Rainwater is not ice.
This means most of us can safely ride at almost the same sp
