I crashed
I was so angry with myself. I could no longer hold anything with my right hand, such was the pain, and I had narrowly avoided being mown down by a low flying chinook helicopter. I was also very obviously flying the wrong paraglider that day, in the wrong place and at the wrong time. What an idiot.
Welcome back to being a novice again.
From Hero to zero
After years of ultra-distance cycling racing, a world record to my name and a win and a few other podium places, returning to being a novice in a completely different sport was turning out to be far harder than I thought. Not just because of the new technical challenges, but also because of the unexpected toll of going from being very good at something, and recognised for it, to also being at the bottom of the heap.
After my monumental set of bad decisions on that fateful day, it was time to reflect on what was going on.
At the expert level, knowledge ceases to be a collection of isolated facts; it becomes a heavily integrated network of conditional information that allows for rapid, intuitive decision-making without conscious reliance on foundational rules. As a very experienced ultra-distance athlete I do not consciously calculate biomechanical efficiency or metabolic output; the body and mind operate in synchrony, responding intuitively to internal physiological cues and external terrain. In practice this means not having to think about when to eat or when, but instead responding to introspective feedback that says eat now, or adjusting to the kinaesthetic feedback to effectively climb the terrain in front of you.
Conversely, as a novice paraglider I have been thrust back to the foundational stage of skill acquisition. I lack the experience in the situational contexts in which I need to operate, forcing me to rely heavily on context-free rules and mechanical imitation. This might be having to go through the rules of the air in my mind whilst flying with others, or working through step by step setting up my wing for take off. And, in the process, making some mistakes and having to start again.
It’s the same reason why I guess when you change job you drop from being at the top of their game to the newbie on the block having to navigate a new organisation, culture and set of challenges. You shift from ‘hero to zero’.
The change of status
At the zenith of my cycling career, my expertise commanded respect, there was a social status associated with being a record breaker. However stepping onto a paragliding launch site as a new pilot, this accrued social capital has no currency. I have gone from ‘hero to zero’ and instead of being a source of insight and wisdom I am a potential liability in a high-risk environment. I am now a factor in the equation that other more experienced pilots have to weigh up.
According to the literature, the psychological severity of becoming a novice again is heavily moderated by the individual's "self-complexity." Linville's (1987) self-complexity theory posits that individuals possess multiple social identities, and the less complex a person's cognitive representation of the self, the more extreme their swings in affect and self-appraisal will be following success or failure. If an athlete defines themselves almost exclusively through the lens of mastery of their specific sport (low self-complexity), a failure to launch a paraglider correctly or a misunderstanding of meteorological data is not merely a learning error; it is a holistic threat to their self-concept. Research indicates that those with lower self-complexity experience greater variability in affect and are more vulnerable to depressive symptoms when facing stressful life events or identity threats.. Conversely, it seems that athletes who cultivate high self-complexity, maintaining multiple, distinct identity aspects, are far better equipped to handle the tensions of career transition. They can compartmentalize their novice status in paragliding, protecting their core self-worth from the inevitable frustrations of the novice learning curve. As my primary focus is as a Dad, husband, in work as a team effectiveness coach in business, and as an author, sport is not the major part of my identity (although it is a very important one). In the same way, if you have defined yourself as an MD and you now find yourself as a coach or a lead in some other activity, your loss of self identity as an MD is ameliorated by the other things in your life which define you.
Does success in one discipline have value elsewhere?
Yes. In this case basic fitness obviously. But the biggest gain is elite level performance is more than being an expert in movement execution; it also requires skills in planning, metacognition, and self-reflection. Metacognition, the ability to know about one's own knowing and to monitor and control one's mental processes, is fundamental to rapid skill acquisition. I have spent years refining my self-regulatory abilities to adapt to physical exhaustion and dynamic race environments. I think I have the psychological support skills to structure my practice, set achievable micro-goals, and process instructor feedback with a high degree of emotional regulation. What this means in practice is using the same techniques I did in ultra-racing to drive performance such as keeping a detailed training log, setting myself goals for each flight and reviewing what happened afterwards to note the next steps in my development. In cycling it was about every minute on the bike having a training purpose and this translates well to flying, not just ‘sitting in the air’ but instead flying with purpose and intent to drive skill development. In the same way, the skills you learn to become a senior leader will transfer from one job to another - if you allow them to.
But there is a downside to this too. While metacognitive frameworks provide an advantage, the physical and psychological habits forged in ultra-distance athletics can act as profound liabilities. When the neurological pathways optimized for one domain are inappropriately applied to a new context, "negative transfer" occurs, making the learning of the second skill more difficult and potentially dangerous. Studies on elite sports officials and tournament chess players (Heck et al., 2025) demonstrate that expertise in one domain frequently breeds a dangerous degree of overconfidence when faced with novel, complex situations. The chess player study explicitly revealed that individuals often maintain an illusion of control and a massive magnitude of overconfidence despite receiving accurate, public feedback to the contrary. The fundamental psychological trap is that those lacking expertise in a specific new domain lack the very expertise needed to recognize their own incompetence. As an elite ultra-athlete, years of dominating the physical environment cultivate a profound belief in my own agency and resilience. I am accustomed to controlling outcomes through sheer will. However, paragliding operates in an invisible, unforgiving fluid medium—the atmosphere. This led to an overestimation of my own paragliding skills and some poor decisions to fly in marginal weather conditions for my level of skill and hence getting injured. Not clever. So we need to check whether mastery really does transfer well and if not, accept the need to learn new metacognitive frameworks.
In summary, my insights are these:
- Think hard about which skill elements are transferable from an area of expertise to a novel activity. Your hard won capabilities could accelerate you to success (and they could trip you up).
- Don’t be defined by one identity - define yourself in multiple dimensions such that the loss of one is not traumatizing. If you lose your job and all you are is that role, then you are in for a tough time. But if you are also many other things besides being the role, then it will be a small dent in your identity.
- Have humility to soak up the learning and to be comfortable with being bottom of the pile - the advantage is you can only ever get better! It reminds you of how hard it is to get good at something.
- Enjoy the journey, the progress when moving from complete novice upwards can be rapid and very rewarding.
I’m back flying again. I’ve about 65 hours of flying time under my belt and am beginning to see the wood for the trees and sensing the possibility of what I might be able to achieve as a paragliding pilot. There’s a long way to go but I’m loving the journey.