We’re in constant battle with riders and teams. We like the drama and the action, so we analyze each moment of each race, blowing it up to max size to feed our bench-racing appetites for the next six days. This leads to the theory of only being as good as your last race, because we’re going to discuss each “last race” to death.

This is the exact opposite of the way riders and teams play it. They’re dealing with nerves, pressure, and danger as it is, so squeezing extra emotional juice for every race just leads to exhaustion. Training harder or getting madder derails a program, so they’re all operating on that “keep calm and carry on” motif.

Unfortunately, there’s a method to this lack of madness, so it’s not going to change anytime soon. James Stewart could have been in the dumps after an Anaheim 1 crash, but that wouldn't have put him in position to win a few weeks later. Ryan Villopoto could have let last season’s early disappointments do him in, but he learned to ride out the lows to allow for another high. Heck RV even dropped the dreaded “have to get back to having fun” phrase last year. No! We want drama and gossip and emotion. They use diffusing terms like building while we want to talk about what’s already built.

Ryan Dungey is perhaps best at managing the season as a whole, and while we’ll all get angry over his calmness (except for those few weeks of #AngryDunge earlier this year), he stays in every points race by staying even all year. Dungey’s trainer, Robb Beams, gives insight that pushes the watch even longer-term. Week by week? He’s talking six months by six months.

“Yeah, everyone says you’re only as good as your last race and last win, but the human body rejuvenates from the inside out every six months,” he says. “Literally every six months, bones, muscles, cells—it’s all new. “You’ve got to build a racer so his average and top speed is there, but it has to be sustainable for five months of supercross. If you try to operate in the red line the whole time, you’ll burn out.”

The long and steady approach doesn’t mesh with today’s A.D.D. environment, but it can’t work any other way. Stewart, once the crash-or-win guy, now speaks at length about the powers of acting the same on the good weeks and the bad. Justin Brayton, one of the hardest workers in the pits, talks about the conversion.

“I think one thing that I have gotten better at is to be a little more even and to enjoy that second at Phoenix but to not enjoy it too much,” Brayton says. “The eighth and ninth—trust me, it’s difficult. But then on Sunday when I get home and I see my wife and we’re hanging out, it makes me realize that racing is very, very important, but it’s also not the end of the world, and the good thing is I was healthy and I had another weekend to prove myself. And they say you’re only as good as your last race. The whole week when I’m only as good as an eighth is not that much fun, but it’s also motivating.”

“When you have a not-so-good night and you’re sitting in the motor home at 11:45 and the rider thinks he’s not good, he’s not fast, he’s not fit, that’s where you get into the psychological battle,” Beams adds. “They just think they suck. That’s not right. That’s why I say I don’t live in a world of emotions. I try to know things based on heart rates and human performance data.”

Human performance is the point, but bench racers want a little human emotion. And so the battle continues. —Jason Weigandt

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