Yikes! Riding a bike is so difficult! Its so scary for a start. Today we Camriders were on 500cc machines for the first time. And we drove down onto the A14 going north out of Cambridge, jostling with the articulated lorries that look just big from a car but look enormous from a bike. As our instructor urged us to wind it up to 70mph, the signs flashed by detailing how many deaths that stretch of road had claimed last year. We survived, me and a female school teacher who looks around my age or a bit younger, but with so many faults pointed out by our increasingly grumpy instructor (who has a bad knee injury that we could see was getting more and more uncomfortable) that by the end of the day I am feeling despondent about it.
I have one more four hour session then on Thursday morning I take the test. I will have to really focus and sort out my faults in that four hours or there is no chance at all to pass. Hmmm. Interesting. Learning new skills later in life is interesting and certainly an opportunity for reflection: how do I deal with criticism and lack of confidence? Do I deal with it better now than I did 30 years ago? Is it harder to learn? Do I understand physical learning? I’m also keen to know what brought the instructors into the job. Maybe I will ask. I notice some similarities in how I respond to a tough day on the bike to my experience as a student nurse when I was in my early thirties coping with very high stress situations (e.g. first ward of training on a head injury unit). There’s something similar about the vulnerability of being in these situations with little confidence. However now, its not so ghastly….
Watch this space (if anyone ever does) to see how I got on with the test on Thursday.