Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles
Issue link: https://magazine.cyclenews.com/i/1217238
VOLUME 57 ISSUE 9 MARCH 3, 2020 P129 ebrate. Having moods is part of normal human behavior. People too often conflate mood with mental illness, especially when it comes to depression. I wish psychology had come up with a different word for it, because people think that being stuck in a sad state is the same thing. It is not. Depressive disorder has to do with dopamine levels and your brain's inability to perform basic everyday functions. Yes, chronic stress and sadness can lead to depression, but simply being sad does not mean you are clinically depressed. Riding your motorcycle might put some salve on the stress in your life (it certainly does for me), and improve your mood with a nice dose of endorphins, but we are talking about mood here. Not mental illness. Think of it this way, you might feel crummy after binging on too much sugar during the holidays, but this does not mean you have diabetes. Are you on the road to type 2 diabetes? If that pattern continued for too long, perhaps you would be. Eating more vegetables might help you feel better, but your salad didn't "cure diabetes." But back to my point. Our group text got me thinking about the so-called "definition of insan- ity," vis a vis the yearly grind that supercross racers face. Here we are at the midpoint of the season where a field of hopefuls have been doing the same thing week after week—some for the third, fourth, fifth year in a row. All but one of them is expecting a differ- ent result. Are they insane? Some would say yes, likely for different reasons. Most would say that these riders are determined athletes striving for greatness. Like any athlete, their craft is honed over years of practice, which, of course, means perform- ing the same task again and again until you nail it. And from there, practicing it still until you nail it 10 times out of 10 rather than two or three times out of 10. That sounds more like the defi- nition of determination to me. It might sound insane, because as humans, we have an innate tendency to oversimplify and rapidly judge our surroundings. In doing that, we tend to cast aside the ideas or actions that weren't successful and don't typically revisit them. In today's forward-thinking society, this might seem like close- minded, judgmental behavior that we should break ourselves of, but think of it in terms of a caveman who needed to figure out that fire is hot and he probably shouldn't touch it. Or that there's a sabre- tooth living in that cave; I probably shouldn't go in there. Any caveman slow to learn these types of lessons because he was trying to remain open-minded to the possibility of a different outcome was far less likely to successfully spread his seed. So what is the psychology behind this ostensibly counter- intuitive need to reattempt the same feat year after year? After it has eluded so many riders time and again? (Perhaps the more relevant question is what on earth would possess the caveman to jump on that sabretooth and try to ride it?) Where does this burning desire to conquer the impossible come from? Can't say I know the answer to that—not in words anyway, let alone any scientific terms. But look to the face of whoever is hoisting the AMA Supercross number-one plate over his head at the end of the season and perhaps you'll see the answer. Who's face will it be? Can't say I know the answer to that either. Even at the halfway point of the series, I'm only 50% sure I could predict the outcome. Supercross racing could be considered what science calls a chaotic dynamical system. These systems evolve with time, there- fore, the further into the future you go, the less likely you are to predict the outcome. We're half- way there, so it probably makes sense that I'm only half sure. The only logical prediction in a chaotic system is to expect the unexpect- ed, which of course, flies in the face of our previous misattributed Einstein quote. No one expected Cooper Webb in 2019. Perhaps after three years of expecting Eli Tomac to win it, he's finally unex- pected in 2020. CN