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XNick Bolton E-mail: nick.bolton@thesmartschool.co.uk Web Site: http://www.thesmartschool.co.uk Info: Founder of the Smart School of CoachingPosts by the author (26)

Keep your eye on the road!

Let me reflect for a moment on an amusing, if somewhat painful, event.

I am currently cycling around Belgium for a week, setting out from Dunkirk and cycling to Bruges, Brussels, Ghent and Veurne.

One of my new gadgets is a state of the art satnav for my bike which plans the best route for a cycle and allows me to see every twist and turn I can expect to encounter.

And that’s where my problem started.

Not more than 30 minutes off the ferry in Dunkirk, I was trying to figure out if I was going in the right direction.  I looked at my satnav screen but it wasn’t fully clear so I moved nearer looking at it intensely to figure out if I was on the right track.  Now I know what you’re thinking!  “Surely, you stopped to do this, right?” Errrr, no and that’s why I hit the grassy bank and flew off my bike landing with a thud, a slightly twisted ankle and a very twisted saddle!  No real harm done except to my pride.

End of the story?  Well, not really.  You see I hadn’t realised my satnav was set to “avoid highways” so instead of taking the route I would have expected it took me zig-zagging across the country.  I ended up clocking up 40km extra on the first day til I realised the problem.

So, what’s the moral of the story?  I guess that we need to trust out intution as much as a set of clearly defined goals and a rigid route.  We need to keep our eyes on the road and not get obsessed with the detail of “are we on course”.  And the course we set needs to be useful to us. Oh and maybe it helps to stop ever so often to check we’re on track rather than hitting the bank at high speed!

It’s not much of a philosophy and doesn’t rank with the likes of Plato but it would have served me well on my first day of cycling!!

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