Lone Woman Race
“Time To Dare” series — Article 1
“Many people have big dreams and great ideas, but why do only so few take action and have the stickability to succeed?
Fear (…)
Fear can become your biggest enemy. If you let it.”
Greg Reid “Stickability: The Power Of Perseverance”
So the question then becomes: can you turn Fear into your friend? Can you lean into it completely, and expose your vulnerability so much that you come out on the other side a stronger, more confident person? I believe so. But let me tell you a story, and let you decide.
Once upon a time, I learnt to drive a motorcycle, in the least likely and least reasonable of all possible moments in my life: just after the birth of my third daughter, in between breastfeeds! So much for ‘bad timing’ which has also, in many ways, become my faithful accomplice: a life-feature that I have turned on its head and into my own personal trademark, that makes me feel quirky, and oddly on top of situations.
The gradual and gentle escalation in my education as a motorcyclist, in-between tending to my family and three children (and later birthing two more), was thus sprinkled with moderate and tolerable lashings of apprehension: from handling my first gangly, third-hand, two-stroke Honda NSR125, through a couple other slightly more powerful models, to finally piloting my rumbling Fireblade streetbike on the tarmac of a raceway, nine years later.
Until… I was initiated to enduro: and it was Fear At First Try. And at second, and third, repeatedly. After years of having almost finally mastered the techniques of piloting a streetbike, where you strive for smoothness and precision and lean into the turns with your body, I had to completely unlearn everything I knew. Rickety, jagged and bumpy was the new riding flow: I spent much of my first outings falling over, getting stuck under the motorcycle, and collecting bruises. It was completely frightening, and totally frustrating. And most of all, very indescribably tiring. The word itself reveals the essence of this activity: enduro stems from the word endurance, where the emphasis is placed on resilience (not speed). But as I slowly began to make progress, I discovered the power of wrestling with my fear, and coming out on the other side of it, a stronger rider — and a stronger person. And this became addictive.
Enduro motorcycling, more commonly known as dirtbiking, is practised off-road, on cross-country courses and trails. Obstacles, bumps, tree trunks, fording — they’re are all part of the game. So is falling over. Let’s be blunt and face the fact: enduro is very much a male-dominated world, simply because women (save for some exceptions) are not normally exposed to the opportunity of picking up, and easily training for, such a sport.
Of course there are amazing examples of female riders who have accomplished extremely high levels of excellence in the US, in Europe and even in the Middle East. While Iranian trailblazing female biker Behnaz Shafiei has had to literally defy her country’s social and cultural laws to make her dream come true, other female racers can be said to have benefited from a relative advantage of background and context.
US female champions of Moto-X and Enduro-X competitions such as Tara Geiger, Maria Forsberg, Kacy Martinez and Ashley Fiolek have undergone intensive motorcycle training since early childhood. Not to mention the Spanish Laia Sanz, holder of 13 World Titles in Trials motorcycling, five-time Enduro World Champion in the Women’s category, and winner of 9th overall place at the 2015 Dakar Rally, who literally grew up in a family of motorcyclists, straddled her first motorcycle at age two when carried around by her father, and began racing at the age of seven. The mastery with which these women handle their motorcycles in the Enduro Extreme Games is truly a sight to behold.
So when I decided in 2015 to venture into the Lazio Regional Enduro Championship races, I basically had none of the “true” technical prerequisites to participate, but I did have a pretty clear picture of what I was pitting myself against: my own physical and mental limitations, added to my total lack of racing experience, and my very amateurish driving capacities. Quite a crazy decision, in truth. It was one of those moments when my inner self just took over everything and made the choice. A secret part of me, that yearned to rise to the challenge and grow, commanded: “it’s Time to Dare!”
I grappled at the start of each of the six 6-hour long races with every single one of my latent fears. These exploded and loomed up large before me, like evil ghosts and malicious whispers, every time in that half hour at the starting line, as I waited for the rows of riders to depart, and got ready to start my bike. It all came crashing down on me: my late-beginner syndrome, my lack of skill, my modest experience, my slender build, my fear of getting lost, of getting hurt, of being laughed at, of being a nuisance to the other competitors, and of not finishing the race, at all.
But then as I immersed myself in the races, I focused on just doing, and got into the flow. Many times it was for me a question of pure survival: of not simply totally succumbing in the process. It must be said, I did at times feel so completely exhausted that I thought I would never, ever recover from the fatigue. My muscles and bones still continue to carry the memory of that feeling, like a new sensorial layer, an acquired degree of awareness. Yet, race after race, even though I had to always struggle mentally to get myself going, there was a sense of accomplishment and growth: a feeling of breaking into a million small pieces and then healing again, and transforming into a bigger and stronger version of myself. I was getting better at it, through sheer repetition and determination.
“Don’t let mental blocks control you. Set yourself free. Confront your fear and turn the mental blocks into building blocks.”
Roopleen, Words to inspire the winner in YOU
In many ways, I ran my own race. Time-keeping enduro races, such as those that I competed in, are formatted in such a way that you are not actually directly up against anyone, in particular: the several stages of the 5 to 6-hour long test are raced in a time trial against the clock, where riders must maintain a prescribed mile per hour average over varying terrain.
This means that arriving too early at the secret time checkpoints along the race course entails penalties, in much the same manner as arriving later than the prescribed moment (to the minute!) does. So it is as much about planning, timing, and overall control, as it is about driving your motorcycle across rivers, forests and mountainsides. Riders at the starting line leave together in rows of twos or threes, and each row is given a precise departure time, usually staggered by a couple of minutes from the previous. Only very seldom did I find myself departing with one or two other women at the starting line, and we each ended up setting our respective paces, meaning we hardly saw one another during the unfolding of the competition. At the end of the day, it was a lone woman race, one that I was running against my own self and my own limits.
I had a big dream, a ridiculously implausible one. It made me reach so far out of my comfort zone that sometimes I look back and wonder at myself, for having made the decision, and for having carried it through until the end. I won’t lie: it was an uncomfortable journey, sometimes to the point of desperation, and it certainly took me on an emotional roller-coaster where fear and determination wrestled against one another without respite, and took turns at having the upper hand. The more terrifying the dips were, the more uplifting and elating were the peaks. The experience forged my resilience (a fractured rib at the beginning of race #2 stopped me neither from completing the competition nor from sticking with my resolve during the entire 2015 season, for a total of 6 races spread throughout the year) and it made me more logistically creative: I had to find ways of dodging other commitments to get myself to the races, in between my youngest daughter’s own gymnastic competitions, work deadlines, and a summer family holiday where my presence was required: I always, somehow, found a way.
I am not sure I can affirm that Fear has become my good friend, rather, I would say it is a boundary that we must all push beyond. Fear is very much a mindset, often based on wrong assumptions, that we can set out to work through and beyond, by challenging our own limiting beliefs. The set of trophies that sit on my shelf are there to remind me, every day, that I have earned my tiny little space in the regional history of Enduro as Lazio Female Champion of year 2015, just because I dared to try. It has taught me, and it reminds me, that to believe is to achieve.
“Il nous faut de l’audace, encore de l’audace, toujours de l’audace!”
(We must dare, and dare again, and go on daring!)
Georges Jacques Danton
The “Time To Dare” article collection is composed of narratives and reflections about the courage to:
- challenge commonplaces: the inner and outer “no” voices that hold people back from reaching for their dreams
- take the plunge and do unorthodox things
- set ourselves up for “inner success” despite the naysayers, thus growing our personal anti-fragililty by being daring
The stories are based on my personal experiences, endeavours, projects, and on recollections and musings of other daring people that I have met in my life, and that have inspired my behaviour and thinking.
