It’s that time of the year again where we all start to get a bit nervous! Whether you are a club level rider, a state level rider or even a national series campaigner, this time of the year seems to awaken the butterflies that go into hiding over the Christmas period.

It’s this time of the year where you will ask yourself if you have done enough preparation. If your bike is set up quite as good as you originally thought. You may even be dealing with a niggling injury that you’ve almost put behind you. All of these things are part of pre-season jitters and no-one is immune to it!

Correct pre-season preparation is vital for success on the track. Image: Alex Gobert.

Preparation is the ticket
When it comes to dealing with your pre-season jitters, nothing beats good preparation. Now preparation can mean a bunch of different things. There is bike and body preparation. There is even ways you can prepare your mind for the tough mental task of a race season. But the preparation I’m referring to is race preparation. It is what most of the top level pro riders are doing or about to do around Australia at the moment.

I lost count throughout my career how many times I lobbed up to the first national event of the year thinking I was on top of my game, only to find that I had a bit more work to do than I realised. The main areas are starting and race fitness. You can practice hundreds of starts in your back yard during the pre-season but they don’t compare to lining yourself up against a full grid of riders on an actual race day.

Likewise, you can string together a very productive off season training schedule and have a great fitness base, but nothing picks up your race fitness like racing. Football players call it game time and most other sports have their own term for it but it all translates to quality time in a competitive situation.

First one out of the way!
One of the truest things you will ever hear is that you can’t win a championship at the first round, but you can certainly lose it! A big part of a successful championship bid is dealing with the anxiety and nerves of round one. You won’t be the only rider trying to find their rhythm at the start of the year also, so it is usually a time where a lot of crazy stuff can happen throughout the whole field.

The start of any series is the perfect time to make sure that you aren’t one of the unlucky riders and by being in the right place at the right time you can keep away from the chaos.

Keeping your racing fun is one of the key’s to a successful season. Image: Simon Makker/Makkreative.com.

Pressure
Pressure is without a doubt one of the biggest factors towards any pre-season jitters. It can mean pressure from your parents or pressure from your sponsors, but the big one for most people is the pressure you put on yourself. Finding a way that you can deal with these different pressures will definitely help in your preparation for the season.

Quite often a rider will come along that does great through juniors, gets into seniors and strings together a couple of good years before securing themselves their first factory ride. You would think that would be the final ingredient to complete the package but this isn’t always the case. Sometimes the pressure from factory teams where the rider is expected to perform is too much for certain riders to take and the rider will take a massive step backwards.

All of a sudden the weekends aren’t fun anymore, the results start to suffer and before they know it they find themselves a privateer again. It’s not all bad news though as the majority of riders that secure themselves factory rides step up to the plate and rise to the occasion.

Set Goals
We have discussed Goal Setting in an earlier column however on the subject of pre-season jitters you can make life a lot easier by setting your goals during pre-season. If you go into your first major race blind without setting goals then you really don’t know what to expect. You should always have a plan, and a back-up plan. Your goals can be reassessed during the year and changed accordingly but going into round one without a plan is not a good idea.

Relax and have fun
A very small percentage of Aussie riders actually do the sport for a living, so if you are one of the majority who don’t have to win to put food on the table then remember why you are riding the bike in the first place, to have fun! If you can remember that when the gate is about to drop in race one of the season then it will all be put into perspective.