Metaphor-overload: mountain-biking at night
Dr Simon Usherwood, University of Surrey
What was the context/situation/challenge?
Since becoming a dad (twice), I found that I had little or no time during to go cycling, which has been my one (non-wife) passion of my life. I love cycling precisely because it is immersive: I literally cannot think of other things when I do it. There is just me and my bike. Now, I could tell you about my cycling in general, but instead I want to tell you about cycling at night, because it’s new to me, because it illustrates the learning process, because it’s immersion within immersion, because it’s not directly about HE and because it’s good for metaphors.
What were the particular characteristics of the situation that engaged you in an immersive way.
You often read about how sportspeople get into a ‘zone’, where they are totally engaged in their sport, minutely aware of their bodies and their actions. To be honest, I used to think that this was so much hot air, an over-articulation. But then, I too started to have moments like these: weaving through singletrack in Epping Forest, teetering along mountain gullies in the Alps, grinding up road climbs. In these moments, you do become totally aware of what you do: you feel each muscle and how it moves, you can tweak yourself with a level of awareness and understanding that seems unreal afterwards. To just give one example, I had read (I am possibly the world’s only armchair cyclist) that when climbing you should relax every part of your body, starting with your eyelashes. This made no sense (and it might make no sense to you either), but several times, on big, long climbs, I have done this and it made sense (and it made the climb easier).
In short, cycling for me is necessarily immersive, the connection of man and machine essential and intimate. Like chess, it is easy to learn to ride, but it takes an age to learn to ride well, and it is only in the doing that this learning can happen: all the things I’ve read don’t make me a better cyclist – cycling makes me a better cyclist.
But back to the particular experience. I had read (naturally) about night-riding: strap some (decent) lights to the handlebars, head off at dusk, cycle with a companion, enjoy the experience. Me being me, I got the lights, headed out in the full dark (this being the only time available) by myself and winged it from there.
Night riding is different. The loss of a full field of vision and its replacement with a cone of light that peters out after 30 yards has the perverse effect of making one all the more aware of your surroundings. Riding down paths familiar from the daytime, you recreate the views, your eye is caught by strange shadows and your mind tries to remember where the tricky bits are. But the tricky bits are never where they were: at night, the whole manner of cycling changes, as you become more defensive (in case a branch looms out of the dark) and you engage all your other senses. For example, you can’t see what gear you’re in, so you have to feel it through the pedals; you can’t see everything you’re riding over, so you have to relax your whole body to cope with the unexpected.
So to find yourself plunging down a track, in the dark, hoping that no-one’s dragged a tree trunk across the way since last time, peering to the edge of the light to find the next corner, limbs flexed to absorb any unnoticed stones, ears filled only with the sound of your breathing and your pedalling, all of this takes you to a level of immersion that is total and profound.
What forms of learning / personal development / change emerged from the situation?
In brief, I slowed down. A lot. A family, too many past accidents and a total absence of desire to be walking back all conspired to make me (more) cautious.
As I said, night-riding was something I’d read about, and thought about, and then thought about some more, so my first forays into this new experience were
short and careful.
But then I regained my confidence: I started to go further, go faster. As I practised these new techniques (that I had probably read about, but certainly had
discovered through doing), I found that I was experiencing a new level of immersion: the rush of bushes and trees as I charged past, the more open style of
riding that was not so much defensive as progressive, the instinctive switching between low- and high-beam lights depending on the terrain, the knowing
where to stow bits of kit so I could get my hands on them without a struggle. And again, I found myself emerging from this experience, into the light of my
front door, with a grin on my face and a nod to my wife’s question about whether I’d had “a good time”.
It’s iterative. Each time, I am night-riding, but each time I’m learning something new, trying something out. Each time, I’m building on my past experiences,
adapting to new situations. And it feeds back into my day-riding too: the discovery of more time of my bike allows all my cycling to improve.
And it has taught me to appreciate the multitude of dimensions that cycling has. To stand in the dark, lights off, on top of the North Downs, looking at the
distant lights of human activity, listening to the sleeping countryside, feeling the cocoon of warmth from your personal exertion, is a special experience. To
quote Lance Armstrong (7 times winner of the Tour de France and cancer survivor), “it’s not about the bike”.
What words/concepts/feelings would you use to describe the immersive experience?
IndividualOther-worldly
Different
All-encompassing
Strange
Indescribable
Familiar, yet new
Unexplored (and waiting to be explored)
Unstructured
Transcendent
Full of potential
Personal
Fun, but scary
Cold
Makes me aware of what I don’t know
Liberating
What principles or lessons can be drawn from this story?
·Lesson 1 – try new things. Reading isn’t doing and until you try for yourself, you don’t know what it’s like.
·Lesson 2 – persist. New experiences are disorienting: that is both their strength and their weakness. We struggle to re-orient ourselves and discover new things in the process, so there has to be follow-through.
·Lesson 3 – always wear a helmet. For all my words above, I still took the tools I needed to cope if things went wrong. In HE, we have to give students tools to help them pick themselves up and dust themselves down.
·Lesson 4 – we don’t just see. My light only picks out a small fraction of what there is to be seen, so I have to use all my senses and my understanding to build a picture of the world. Students need to engage all their senses.
·Lesson 5 – learning is personal. We can only take students so far in the learning process: they have to find their understanding.
·Lesson 6 – be open to the unexpected. I took up night-riding to get more cycling time, but I found a new experience and learnt new skills (e.g. how to avoid rabbits at dusk). Likewise, students (and staff, more particularly) need to come with open minds to new learning opportunities: immersive learning goes where it goes.
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