Cornering Lessons: Target Fixation

(Unnamed rider carving one of the fast corners at Cross-Vegas while I shake the camera excitedly)

This post comes from an event I see every so often in Chicago called the "Cornering Clinic." It's usually sponsored by a shop or a coaching service and the goal is to make a triathlete or aspiring roadie better at turning their bike.

These clinics are probably very useful, but I intend to chip the stone away to the most important lesson you can take away from a clinic, so you can save yourself some time, find a parking lot on your own, and get to practicing.

The key to being good at cornering -the most important thing in fact- is knowing how to avoid or work with target fixation.

A little history: target fixation is a neurological impulse that causes a person to stare at an object, fixed or moving, and blank out the things around it. It's a useful evolutionary skill for all predators because it allows them to lock on to a target and chase it down, even in the chaos of other creatures running around and brush and trees getting in the way. We most likely had target fixation passed down to us from our tree-dwelling ancestors who had to visually lock on to a branch in order to swing through the trees.

Although target fixation is great for hunting, Tarzaning, and seeing the image in those 3D Magic Eye posters, when piloting a fast moving vehicle it's the number one cause of self destruction. When moving fast, you need to be cognizant of all your surroundings and have sweeping vision to see all obstacles.

Here's a scenario that every single cyclist has encountered at some point: You're riding fast through your local park, going down Suicide Hill -the one with the wicked turn at the bottom. You've done the turn before at slower speeds but now you're pushing it to see if you can go around without tapping the brakes. Then, right around the apex of the turn, you see a light pole that you've never noticed before. Your brain is trained from millions of years of evolution to lock on to objects, and so without a conscious effort to avoid fixating, it does what it does, and now your body is moving towards the pole because it is hard-wired to follow your eyes. You panic, grab handfuls of brake, and because you are reading this now I know you narrowly avoid disaster. That's target fixation in action.

And here's a video of target fixation from a first person view:

You see the first motorcyclist go wide and head for the trees? Since his pegs weren't scraping the ground before hitting the grass he was probably target fixating himself, but the person we want to focus on is the POV rider. Watch how he made it through the turn, but for some reason instead of swerving to avoid the crashed rider's bike, he rode right into it, in fact he curved a little bit towards it. Target fixation caused his body to move towards an accident rather than avoiding it. If you look up target fixation on-line you're going to get a lot of motorcycle videos. The motorcycle world has long-since acknowledged target fixation and it's a topic in every Motorcycle Safety Foundation licensing course. For whatever reason the bicycling world has been slow to address it. 

So now that we know what target fixation is what do we do about it? There are a few methods you'll want to be aware of and incorporate in your daily ride:

1. Look through the corner. Target fixation is a natural thing to do and it is very hard to fight your instincts. Therefore, when you're learning to fight target fixation it's a good idea to focus on something down the road, past the corner. This could be another rider or a spot on the pavement, but the idea is to focus on where you want your bike to go. Again, your body follows your eyes so if you look past the corner, that's where you'll go. This takes forethought, so go into a turn knowing where you want to end up. 

2. Scan. If you are going into a blind corner, consciously update your focus and look all around you. If you're making a right turn, keep your eyes updating on the inner right side. If you're turning left, look to the inner left part of the road. Things can get weird on the road so you need to train yourself to have a cat-like attention span and always be updating your vision. 

3. Accept that target fixation isn't always bad. Master cyclists work with target fixation, not against it. Check out this video of Gregory Bauge vs Kevin Sereau: 

In the second shot (40sec in), look at Gregory Bauge's head once Sereau goes down. While he's sprinting he's looking down, but once he gets knocked to the side he instinctively target fixates on a point in front of him and relies on his muscle memory, handling skills, and the gyroscopic forces of the spinning bike wheel to auto-correct. Now Bauge is an amazing athlete, but if he had focused on Sereau or kept his head down he probably would have crashed. The lesson is: when things go crazy, just keep looking to where you want to go and let your body and the machine figure the mechanics of it out on their own. 

4. Practice. Learning how target fixation works on your body is a skill and it takes time to master. The good news is that you can practice "looking through" any time, whether driving, jogging, cruising on your townie, or whenever you're moving and maneuvering. 

For further reading, do check out what MSF link I posted above. In the future I'll get into some other cornering tips that will increase your confidence in the wiggles.