Confidence vs. Swagger

I wish I could say that as an mtb late-comer, I discovered that I have an inner Jill Kintner that doesn’t think twice before hucking her meat and riding all the sketch gnar at warp speed like it’s a bike path. I wish I discovered I am the girl in the helmet who looks at the bros lined up before a jump, flies by them, and then tail whips in the air. (I watched my friend Gretchen do this once at Demo and it made my heart sing.) But the truth is that it’s a rare day on a trail with technical features that I feel brave enough to hit features boldly and carefree. I spend a lot of time on the brakes, I overthink, and I know that if I rode faster many things would be easier (though perhaps not less scary, at least at first). I like working on my skills and do so whenever I can, but there’s a lot to learn. For me, mountain bike riding is the search for the feeling of descending over technical but fun terrain with speed and flow and no fear, and climbing without putting a foot down and with fitness to spare. Fear of falling off my bike gets in the way of both of these, descending far more often than climbing.

Knock on wood, I haven’t broken any bones crashing (that I know of). I have left plenty of skin behind on the trail, bruised a tailbone, bruised a wrist, smashed a knee, squished fingers, and rolled in poison oak. The scariest falls are the slow motion ones, especially when something unexpected happens and I fail to unclip, tip over, and roll down the woodsy/rocky trailside or tumble down the trail itself. These haunt me, and I replay them in my head like movie clips, but they are pretty rare events that have not seriously affected me.

I have learned that repetition can increase my confidence, and so can equipment choices, though at times I sacrifice speed and power for good feelings. First of all, I heart flat pedals. I have flats on my trail bike (a Stumpjumper). When XC decides to get rowdy, I may also put flats on my XC bike, as I did during the Mills Peak bike race (many folks raced full trail bikes for the descent while I white-knuckled it on my XC bike with bigger tires and flat pedals). However, this feels like cheating and I battle the “shoulds”: I should always ride my XC bike clipped in, the voice says. I try, little voice, but I don’t always succeed.

Pads. Pads aren’t cool, especially if you’re an XC racer. Ergo, I’m not cool ;). I was surprised when riding with the women’s Roaring Mouse team when I noticed that I was the only person riding very rocky sections of the Tahoe Rim Trail with knee and elbow pads. Sure, they inhibit motion a bit, but I didn’t want to go back to the classroom on Monday with stitches. Most mountain bikers wear pads, but I’ve learned that XC racers rarely do. We’re just really vain, I think, and pads aren’t aero. Also, supposedly we’re not likely to crash because XC trails aren’t too technical and we’re better than they are — indeed, these are the lies we tell ourselves. XC courses can be very technical, and you’re probably racing on tires with only the 3D illusion of traction. Despite my own vanity and desire for full range of motion, I usually wear elbow pads and knee pads if I’m riding single track with roots and rocks and if I’m not racing. (I usually do the vain, aero thing when racing.) First, pads help trick my brain into feeling confident that if I fall, I’ll just bounce like a kid wrapped in Charmin and then pop back up. This happens! Second, if you’re a Santa Cruz mountain biker, you know how poison oak likes to reach out and caress you. I’m a poison oak magnet, and wearing pads has decreased my annual plant torture by a lot. On the rare occasions when I’m not wearing pads, I usually at least cover exposed skin when riding oaky terrain.

Tires. My Blur TR came with Rekon Race tires, which I have since learned mean that you have to use the force (your own skills) to create traction. They are not confidence inspiring, but boy do they roll! Just one month after getting my Blur, Michael and I planned a birthday ride for my 45th starting in Los Gatos, up Limekiln to the top, over to the top of Mount Um, and then down all the way to Santa Cruz. At the top of Limekiln, the fire road forgets it’s supposed to be a pleasant fire-road-y grade and gets steep, and stays that way for what feels like an eternity. It is a grind. Little birthday ride me, gassed near the top, bravely clipped in and mentally battling my bald-ish Rekon Races, feels a back wheel spin, fails to keep my head up and look ahead, fails to maintain speed, and tips over unable to unclip. Upper Limekiln 1, Leuner 0. On impact, I nailed one of my knees with what I think was the dropper lever. I tried to laugh it off, wound up crying, felt terrible for ruining the ride, and we had to turn around and limp/ride back to the car. Husband was not phased. A week later, my knee felt fine, and we swapped out the Race tires for regular Rekons and also put flat pedals on my Blur, since I was still getting used to the new-to-me geometry of an XC bike. On a day off, I headed to Limekiln on my own and sent it, making it all the way to the top — I recall that I even had a tailwind. I’m sure there was some karma happening there, but I also had more confidence in my bike set up and more fun riding it.

Even as I’ve learned that pads, flats, and tire choice can lessen fear, which also increases confidence at the same time, it doesn’t seem to last for me. I am always working on building confidence on a different bike, a different trail, in different conditions. In my imagination, what does last that I wish I had is swagger. Here’s what I know about swagger:

Swagger comes from total belief in yourself and also not giving a f*ck. The riders I admire most have both confidence and swagger.

How does one get both confidence and swagger? What is the difference between them? I’m playing armchair sports psychologist, so bear with me.

I once had a world class climbing coach, Justen Sjong, tell me that I looked defeated before I even got on the wall. He said adjusting my attitude toward the hard things I was trying to do would help me be a better athlete and perform stronger in the moment. He challenged me: “Stand at the base of your [climbing] project and try to look arrogant. But don’t worry, you can’t actually be arrogant. If you shoot for arrogant, you’ll actually just look confident.” In retrospect, I think Justen was actually trying to teach swagger.

Swagger is an attitude, a way of looking at challenges before engaging in them as if YOU are trying to intimidate THEM. Having swagger, for me, would be rolling up to a techy rock garden and telling it that there’s a new sheriff in town as I roll straight into it. Swagger is having that same gaze while rolling toward the rock garden, unintimidated, and deciding to walk it, because it doesn’t matter and it doesn’t get to affect my ride experience.

I think it’s easier to have swagger if you already have confidence from prior success. Confidence, for me, comes after I successfully do something hard, ideally repeatedly, and build a positive memory. Anything that leads to success builds confidence: skills, fitness, experience, for example. Failures can reduce the confidence built in a certain situation, so confidence is always in flux: you win some, you lose some, but try to keep it on the plus side.

My theory is that if I gave fewer f*cks about outcomes, I would have more swagger. This would help me accomplish the successful repetition needed for confidence because I’m caring less about any hiccups in the process. And confidence then creates a positive attitude for more successful repetitions, which then leads to self-belief, which creates the swagger. Another way to look at this is to follow Ted Lasso’s advice to Sam: Be a goldfish.

My new tactic for working toward swagger is that I celebrate every freaking thing I do on a bike that I’m proud of, even if it’s not that impressive in the grand scheme, and especially if I’ve decided to walk something technical because I wasn’t feeling it. Care less or not at all if possible about what doesn’t go well. This also includes giving myself more opportunities to be proud of myself.

Yesterday, for example, I was riding my XC bike with race tires while clipped in and on single track. It’d been a while since I’d done this, and I was not feeling like a boss, but I was out for a joyful afternoon ride up and down John Nicholas Trail on a warm fall day. JNT is not a super technical trail, but it’s a climb and it has a couple moments that require engaging the brain and using body position and momentum. One of them is a short but steep climbing pitch that can have variable conditions. When I got there, I was dismayed that it was sandy, like a beach. My fitness felt amazing, but my brain did this math pretty quickly: bald tires + sand + steep pitch + clipped in = too many hard variables, high likelihood of spinning out with uncertainty of unclipping successfully. For the first time in ages, I stopped at the base and walked up that pitch. I felt really ashamed of it at first, but then actively decided to not beat myself and keep enjoying my ride. I also knew I had another opportunity coming up to be a little brave.

A few turns later, there’s a section of switchbacks to climb. They weren’t as loose or as steep, and I decided to roll into the first one with speed and talked to myself out loud: look through the turn, keep your head up, keep pedaling. If I sound a little like a noob, that’s because I still sometimes am, and talking to myself out loud helps me get through technical stuff. Each switchback gets a little trickier, and near the top there’s one with a channel of rocks that goes well if you remember to really pedal through it, which I did, while saying “pedal pedal pedal pedal”. I’m sure I sound hilarious on the trail. Anyway, the best part isn’t that I sent the switchbacks, it’s that I went from being bummed about walking the steep pitch to feeling proud of myself and redeeming my feelings about the ride.

I wish confidence building was linear and increased as my experience as a rider increases. I ride a lot and try to make that math work, but it never does. Really, if I am brave enough to try new things and harder things, then experience doesn’t equal success all the time, but it does add up to some cumulative trail knowledge, bike knowledge, and endurance. While I can continue to always find little (and sometimes big) successes to celebrate on my bikes, and I continue to try riding in new places on new trails, the one thing I can always control is my attitude about approaching hard things. I am so grateful that my body allows me to even ride a bike at all– this hasn’t always been the case! — let alone do it in the dreamscape of trail systems and with friends and also in races. I can use what I do know to roll with as much swagger as I can muster, or not, and not care about walking when I need to. I can also give myself props for doing hard things, like keeping my head up and looking through corners while pedaling around chunky switchbacks, or like making time for myself to ride a bike during the work day.

To date, swagger has never been my default vibe – I’m far more likely to be self-deprecating, and occasionally confident after surprising myself. But maybe it can be practiced and learned, or at the very least, faked.