Early on in my racing career a more experienced rider told me, “The more worried you are about crashing, the more likely you are to crash.”
Always be suspicious of neat little formulations like this. They always leave a loophole – in this instance he failed to appreciate the magnitude of how much I didn’t want to crash. It turns out that if you spend the whole race cowering ten lengths off the back of the bunch, you’re pretty safe. Of course if you want to get a result, you have to learn to mix it. But you don’t have to learn to like it.
