What a Mountain Bike Trail Taught Me About Coaching, Stress and Letting Go

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I had one of those moments today where something quite ordinary suddenly became a much bigger lesson. I was at Mushrif Park, out on the mountain bike trail with a student I’m working with. I was following behind him, although “following” might be giving me slightly too much credit. He was moving through the trail with a confidence and ease that I was struggling to match. I found myself watching him as much as I was watching the trail.

The uphill sections were hard for me. That wasn't particularly surprising. I’m carrying more weight than I would ideally like to be carrying, and there is no escaping the physics of that. Going uphill on a mountain bike takes effort. You have to work for it, and sometimes you simply have to accept that something is difficult and keep pedalling. I was tired, and I was conscious of how much harder I was working than my student seemed to be. Then we started heading downhill.

This was where things got interesting.

I expected to recover on the descents. Surely this was the easy part. Gravity was doing most of the work, the bike was moving, and I shouldn't have been expending anywhere near as much energy as I had been on the climbs. But I was still getting tired.

In fact, I realised I was working incredibly hard on the downhill sections.

The difference was that this time I wasn't working against gravity. I was working against myself.

I could see my student ahead of me, riding down the trail almost as if he was completely absorbed in the experience. He wasn't thinking about every bump or every turn. He wasn't trying to anticipate every possible problem. He was riding the trail as it came, making adjustments as he went, and clearly enjoying himself. I, on the other hand, was tense. My shoulders were tight, my hands were gripping the handlebars far too hard and my muscles were braced for something to happen. I was constantly looking ahead, trying to anticipate the next obstacle and thinking about what might go wrong. Rather than allowing the bike to move underneath me, I was trying to control every movement. I wasn't just riding the downhill. I was trying to survive it.

And that was the moment something clicked for me.

This is what stress and anxiety can feel like in everyday life. The interesting thing about stress is that it isn't always caused by the thing that is actually happening. Sometimes it comes from everything we add to the thing that is happening. The conversation itself might not be that difficult, but we spend hours worrying about how it might go. The meeting might be perfectly manageable, but we have already played out five different versions of what could go wrong. We might be facing a genuine challenge, but alongside that challenge we are carrying fear, uncertainty, assumptions, self-doubt and the constant need to control the outcome.

All of that takes energy.

And sometimes we don't even realise how much energy we're using because being tense has become so normal to us. We can become accustomed to living in a state of anticipation, always looking for the next problem, the next threat or the next thing we need to fix.

We think we're tired because life is demanding. Sometimes we are. But sometimes we're tired because we're fighting the experience instead of experiencing it.

This is one of the reasons I have become increasingly interested in the role of coaching. I don't think coaching is always about finding another strategy, another productivity technique or another thing to add to an already busy life. We already have plenty of things to do. Sometimes adding another thing simply gives us another thing to worry about.

Sometimes the most valuable work is about identifying what can be taken away.

What expectations are we carrying that don't belong to us? What worries are we spending time on that we have absolutely no control over? What assumptions are we making about ourselves or other people? What are we trying desperately to control that was never really ours to control in the first place?

And perhaps most importantly, what is the story we are telling ourselves about what is happening?

I'm not suggesting that we can simply decide not to feel stressed or anxious. Life doesn't work that way. There are difficult situations that require action, uncomfortable conversations that need to be had and genuine problems that need to be solved. But there is a difference between dealing with a difficult situation and adding another layer of resistance to it.

That distinction became very real to me on that trail today. I couldn't make the uphill sections disappear. They were hard, and I had to work through them. But on the downhill, the problem wasn't the trail. The problem was what I was bringing to the trail.

I didn't need to become stronger to get down the hill. I needed to relax.

I needed to trust the bike a little more. I needed to loosen my grip, stop anticipating every possible problem and allow myself to respond to what was actually happening rather than everything I imagined might happen.

There is something quite profound in that.

We often talk about resilience as though it means becoming stronger so that we can carry more. Sometimes it does. But perhaps resilience can also mean becoming better at putting things down. Knowing what is ours to deal with and what isn't. Knowing where we have influence and where we don't. Recognising the difference between preparation and overthinking, between awareness and hypervigilance, between taking responsibility and taking on responsibility that isn't ours.

That is where the idea of the circle of control becomes so useful. There will always be things outside our circle: other people's opinions, decisions and reactions, the past, the future and outcomes that depend on many factors beyond us. We can spend an enormous amount of energy trying to control those things. Or we can bring our attention back to what is actually within our reach: our choices, our responses, our behaviour, our boundaries and where we choose to put our energy.

I think that is one of the real gifts of coaching. Not necessarily having someone give you the answers, but having someone help you see what you have stopped noticing. Sometimes we are so close to our own patterns that they become invisible to us. We don't notice how tightly we're gripping the handlebars. We just wonder why we're exhausted.

Today, a mountain bike trail gave me a rather unexpected reminder of that. The uphill taught me that some things are simply hard and require effort. The downhill taught me something else entirely: sometimes the thing exhausting us isn't the hill at all. Sometimes it's the resistance we're carrying in our own heads.

Perhaps that is a question worth sitting with. Not just, “What more do I need to do?”

But, “What can I let go of?” Because maybe the next step isn't about finding more energy to keep going. Maybe it's about stopping ourselves from wasting the energy we already have.