Afraid of drafting or group riding? Share with me why.

[OakLeaf]

I've been thinking about this - and kind of dredging my memory since I haven't been riding at all lately - and knowing that I used to be extremely comfortable in pacelines (absent squirrels of course) but came back a whole lot less confident after my faceplant -

I think a lot of ANY type of vehicle handling comes down to visual skills. That soft focus and total awareness of what's in peripheral vision, "seeing with your whole eyes" as I call it, becomes exponentially more difficult when you're keeping a very close eye on a 21 mm wheel two cm in front of your own. It's soooooo easy to tunnel your vision down to the wheel in front of you. And (as I learned the hard way TWICE, sigh), tunnel vision is the precursor to target fixation.

Then, seeing what's directly ahead of the paceline is at best difficult, and when you're riding with a lot of people bigger than you are as I typically did, impossible, so learning to read the road and the behavior of other vehicles when you can see them becomes extra important.

I'm not sure how to teach visual skills, but I know it's important to mention them.