Stay below 70%
Image by Manpreet_K from Pixabay
A very good rule of thumb when riding a motorcycle on a racetrack is to stay within 70% of your maximum capacity. Because you will need those spare 30% when you mess up – which you will. I love to do track days with my motorcycles. It’s the best practice there is. To expand your skill level and learn exactly where your current limit is and how it feels to approach it. That has saved my ass and perhaps even my life on several occasions in the real world, which is less forgiving than a racetrack.
When your limit is well known, every ride becomes much more relaxing. You always have a gut feeling of how much capacity there is available to you at any given moment to handle any unexpected situation that might occur. One perfect example is when I was riding in the countryside in Nepal some years ago and a sheep ran right out in front of my Royal Enfield. I calmy did a panic brake with full lock on both wheels – an achievement in itself on an Enfield – and both I and the sheep lived to see another day. I missed it by less than one meter at 70 km/h, so it was a pretty close call. Even though I had practiced emergency braking hundreds of times, I still locked up both wheels, which you do not want to do! Especially not on a bike. But I did everything else perfect. Solid anchoring on the bike with my knees firmly gripping the tank, the point of focus was on the horizon and zero load on the handlebars. If you do all that, the bike will stay stable even with a locked front wheel. A little load on the handlebars with a locked front wheel and you will hit the ground instantly. It still amazes me to this day that I have probably never ever come as close to a crash as that day in Nepal. And my pulse didn’t even rise the slightest. It was back to business as usual within seconds. I felt I was in complete control of the situation the whole time. Needless to say, I had countless hours of practice. And that is the best life insurance you can get, if you are a biker. Or a rider/driver of anything that moves.
Yesterday I thought about the “Stay below 70%”-principle when playing the drums. There are some similarities here in music. A “crash” in the music domain will only hurt your pride and not your body. And that is probably a reason that at least I often venture far beyond my 70% when I am playing. I know I am not alone. And just as on the racetrack, that means that I have less or perhaps no margin of error. Just like when riding a bike, things happen when you are playing the drums. You might need to change your position on the seat or something even simpler like trying to remember the next part of the song. If you don’t know the song you cannot relax properly. It’s the same thing on the racetrack. If you don’t know your way around the track, your survival instinct will prevent you from mashing the throttle. But when you know the coming three corners like the back of your hand, the feeling of mashing the throttle through them is one of the best there is. And it is very similar to when you enter the zone while playing your instrument. When everything snaps into place and just works. For me, that usually only happens when I know the song so good that I can stop thinking about the structure completely and only focus on my playing. Depending on the song, the required time to reach that level will vary greatly of course.
With my current completely insane project of learning to play Bleed on the drums as a beginner drummer, it hit me quite hard yesterday that I probably won’t be able to play the song completely in the zone until I can stay below 70%. Considering that the song Bleed is arguably one of the most challenging and difficult pieces of music ever composed on the drums, this might take a couple of years to achieve. Luckily, I am not in a hurry. It’s a very interesting project to me. Is it worth it to just skip all the Simple, Intermediate and Advanced songs and do a Quantum leap to God-like difficulty? If I can pull it off and play the song in a one-take, every other song should be easy as pie. That’s my hypothesis. We’ll see in a couple of years. The water beats the stone, given enough time.