Hello everyone and welcome to this week's episode of the Cloudbase Mayhem. You've got Miles here doing the opener because Gavin's on the boat transferring it up to Thailand and the moisture killed his computer. So that's good for me and hopefully that will be good for you too. On that note, let's start with housekeeping because I'm in charge. This week, there's no housekeeping. This episode features Maxime Bellarmine, blogger, pilot, author, and paragliding legend. He's written a few books that provide structure and insights into the sport we love, the mindset that's essential to not only winning competitions but being safe in the air, and a lot of really interesting science all folded into a very approachable and understandable way to pursue the sport that is so important to us.
I think that Maxime is probably the full package as we say here. And I think what you'll find in this fairly lengthy episode is something that works for almost everybody, whether you're a P2 pilot, a P4 pilot, a world-class PWC comp pilot. There's just a lot to learn here and really exciting to hear. So with no further ado, let's just dive into it. This week's episode, Maxime Bellarmine with Cabin.
Maxime, welcome to The Mayhem. This has taken us a lot of time to put this together. You're a pretty busy guy and seem to be traveling a lot. I know you just got back from Brazil, but I've been really excited to talk to you because your books have just really drawn me in. I've really enjoyed it. I've really enjoyed them. So I look forward to kind of piecing them apart with you and teasing out some of the stuff that was harder to write and get your thoughts on all things paragliding. But welcome to the show and thanks for your time. Thanks, Gavin. Thanks a lot for the invitation and also for the nice words. It's really warming and I really appreciate that. It's been a long time since we tried to set up this conversation and I'm really interested in having this conversation with you and sharing it.
It's really great to see all your adventures. Yeah, well, and let's just tuck into it right from the start. Charles gives a really good kind of opening to your books and talks about, you know, you making this really cool move in Serbia and winning the World Cup there. So we'll get into that. But your first book, I don't know if you read my review. I reviewed it for Cross Country Magazine a few months back. It kind of takes us, you know, you talk about the personal journey and focusing on your weaknesses. I've got all kinds of notes here. I'll let you talk about the book. But first of all, why the book? Why was it carved up into two different sections?
And what's your kind of background? Help the audience understand your personal background that allowed you to write these books. All right. So first, yes, I read your article, Gavin, be aware. And I thank you for that. My personal background is like I started paragliding in 1994. So a long time ago. Sure.
And it was because I live in the Paris area, but my family is from the Alps. And I could see some crazy guys falling off the mountain for years already there. And my girlfriend at the time, she had a lift. They were for some time. And she decided to go for a training course without telling me. So when she came back, she said, oh, it's great. But I said, sure, I'm convinced it's great. But what did it tell you? What didn't you tell me about this? So I made my first course in 1993 or 1994. And then the two of us living as a couple in Paris, we only practice like 10 days, max.
20 days a year. So for the next 10 years, I made some very interesting progress. And I could fly 100K flights, but it was like a leisure. It was nothing more than this. What happened is that it's a bit personal, but that's how life is. We split. And I just wondered, how could I keep on practicing this very nice sport that I really enjoy? Right. Right. Right. Right. My very good friend at the time told me, hey, look, I tried competitions.
And it's over weekends here in the French Alps. And you come and they put you in a shuttle to go up the hill. And then they give you a lunch package for the food. And then if you land out and you don't reach goal, then there is a retrieve to pick you up. Sometimes on Saturday evening, there is a party. And it was quite a good description of the competition. Yeah. That's valid. Yeah. Yeah. So I tried and I bite into it. So I made a first year in the regional comps here in France, second year at the national level. Then I went for international comps. And the year after, I was entering the PVC scene.
So it completely changed my practice. As I moved from maybe 10, 20 hours a year to 100, 120. But nevertheless, that's not a big number.
And first comps I made with the top French pilot at the time, long time ago, I could see them fly. And I couldn't understand what they were doing because it was like paramotoring for me. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What they were doing. So I wanted to understand better the triggers and the important factors to improve my practice and to make some progress.
Being an engineer, I also have an MBA degree.
Still living in Paris. Yeah. Yeah. And I started my own company. It's the same year I started paragliding. I founded a company, a software company. It was the early days of the GPS. So we were selling software and developing software about mapping and routing and navigation and then tour planning and so on. So I had little free time. So all my vacation time was dedicated to paragliding. So six, seven weeks. a year, but it's not enough to make the progress I wanted to make. So as I could not practice a lot, I had time during the winter to reflect on the practice and to look for what's important and how to prepare as well.
Because you can fly and simply fly and fly again, and then you will make some progress. But I think that it's not only about practicing. I think the training and the preparation, as in any other kind of sport, is very important. By the way, that's why my book is splitting in two. So you have one first part about preparation, and the second one is about the execution, about the real flying.
So I went a lot to the library to find books, to discuss with... sportsmen in other disciplines or the kind of practice. I found a frame that is used in many sports that divides the performance factors into four different categories.
Namely, physical training or physical aptitudes, then the technical, then the tactical technique, is about what you are able to do and perform. And then the tactics is related to what you do compared to others. And the fourth one is mental.
And I think this one really was an edge. It was... How can I say that? You know, to practice, we all have at high level, we all have the ability to practice. We all have the same level of technique, more or less. Some are better than others for sure, but that's... That's granted that we all have a good technical skill set.
Tactics, well, nowadays tactics are pretty limited in what you can do to confront a gaggle.
Then physical, ah, yes, something is interesting about physical training. We are not... We are not... We are not seen as sportsmen quite often, or we don't behave as sportsmen. So I trained and I prepared my body to be prepared for long flights and to also have a better recovery and to be also fit for six days in a row, seven days in a row. So I put some house into the physical training. And then I think what made the big difference for me is the mental training.
That's where I mentioned that I had a personal journey. I think it helped me not only becoming a better paragliding pilot, but also a better person. Because I had to look into me and to understand the way I behave, the way I think, the way I act, the way I decide, so that I could use this better in a competitive scene. So you see, I had this approach of categorizing the performance factors into chapters.
And you asked me about writing the book. In fact, writing the book only... I think I wrote this book in 2015. So four years ago in French. So it was after like 10 years of practice that I felt like I was ready to share and to put in a single shell all my knowledge that I was willing to share, not only knowledge, but also experience.
Something that happened also is that when I started training, I was traveling for international competitions.
For sure, I have friends and I have family. So I send them emails to tell them, oh, I've done this or oh, I've done that. Oh, look, I'm not too happy with what I did here. Maybe I should improve that. And I was not very...
What's the word? I was not very happy because I was making a lot of copy and paste into my emails from one friend to another, to my family. To my sister or to my father. And that was not nice, you know, not having this personal mode. So that's when I started to... I set up a blog where I could share with my family and friends my little adventures. And it became obvious for me that first, I loved writing. And second, that it helped me. To be honest with myself, every evening, about what I produced during the day,
I could recalibrate myself for the next day. So I could clearly put on paper what was good or bad, whether I should improve or I should accept. So that for the next day, I would make an improvement somewhere.
And...
With those blog entries, every single day during competition, so I had a lot of stuff accumulated there. It also helped me to build an audience.
And I was also part of a team. And to promote that team, we were giving conferences. And so to prepare and to run these conferences, I prepared some PowerPoints, a presentation where I try to put my ideas in a clear way so that they could help others to find their own way and to make their own progression. I'm not pretending I have recipes or I have answers for everything, but I think I can help to ask the right question and then to find a way to answer those questions. Yeah, and you've done a really good job of that. You stress journaling in both books, the importance of keeping a notebook in your flight deck.
This is not something I see from many pilots, but I certainly see it from some. And you take us through the journey of those four categories, physical preparation and technical ability and strategy. You take us through these really well, but you do focus on the journaling. And I find... One of our recent guests, Alex Roby, does the same thing. He has a fantastic... He doesn't do many comps, but he's really good at big triangles and identifying the good days and identifying the good launch for those days, which is really important. But like you, he's very limited in time. So he might get 10 days a year where he can go do these big...
Try to nail these big flights. And it sounds like for him as well, journaling is important. And blogging was a really important piece of the equation. Yeah, I listened to that podcast of Alex. I met Alex during the PVC Australia two years ago. And this guy is so modest and he's low profile while he's so tall and such a brilliant pilot. And I think I share many common views with him. Yes, sure.
He's a really great guy. And I think we are... You asked him about being an engineer and the approach of an engineer. Maybe I share also the same mindset as he has. There's so many engineers in this sport. I was... The first really interesting conversation I had with Michael Vichy in the 2015 X-Alps was all about that because he's an engineer. And I just find it fascinating that minds like yours, they're certainly not like mine, are so attracted to this sport. I love it. Yeah. The point is that we... Not depending on the way our mind is built, we all have also affect and emotions. And this is something that is... Well, should be common.
And... Alex didn't talk too much about this, but I would like if I ever knew, possibly talk to him, I would like to discuss with him about emotions, the way he managed this and... He explained this about being cool at the beginning of the day and everything will be fine for him because he's picking up his days. He will never be in the air when it's a nasty day because simply he doesn't want to do that. And he doesn't have time to do that. And I really share this approach. That's really interesting. Yeah, that's a great approach to risk management, isn't it? Which you often really don't have that. And you call that out in your book. You know, you can't really...
You shouldn't get too stressed before taking off about the weather conditions of the day if they're bad because you're in a comp. You got to fly anyway. Exactly. I also use the Earth rate monitor to analyze my... At first, it was to analyze my energy consumption. But, you know, there is a good correlation in between your heartbeat and the level of stress. That's your feeling. It's not fully correlated, but correlation is good. And what I could see is that the lower I was, the slower my heartbeat was. So it's not totally natural because you could expect that when you're low, you should be in a rush to find for thermal and not willing to land and so on.
But no, that's where I'm the coolest person. It's when I'm low.
And on the contrary, when I'm high, I'm flying fast. That's where my heartbeat raises. You're excited when you're low. You're focused probably. Exactly. Yeah. And you need all your abilities when you're low. You need to have your full concentration. You need to have your technical skills at the top so you can squeeze everything. You need to have every possible opportunity to climb up. You point that out really well in the second book in performance that the – or sorry, the efficiency and execution. You point that out that often when we're going to goal, our focus becomes quite narrow and we lose the ability to take in all the information that we've had like you're talking about when you're low and you're really open to every possibility.
That often becomes quite narrow going into goal and that has gotten me a bunch of times. You're just so focused on this end point that you forget that you're still flying a paraglider. You still got to take in all the information and find better lines and look at other people and you're quite succinct about that. Yeah.
I'm also a qualified coach for paragliding since 2010.
I'm also an instructor for cross country and SIV and so on. So I'm coaching people and groups on comps. And August this year, I coached a group of five pilots that went to Turkey.
And once again, I can tell you once again, there was one guy who landed short of goal. And he could not tell me about what happened. So we simply had to look at his track and at his instrument. And he simply didn't look at his instrument about the, you know, it gives you a full set of information, glide ratio, efficiency, height above goal and so on. And the instrument is just on his cockpit, 30 centimeters from his eyes. But he didn't see it. He simply didn't look at it. So you need to, when you make some track analysis,
it helps you to come back to reality. We have lots of impressions and feelings when flying. But sometimes we have to reconnect with reality. At personal level, I think maybe you've noticed this and maybe you smile or laughed when you read that in the book. But during my progression, I could feel like I was dozy. I was sleeping a bit in the air after one hour of flying. So I used my watch to set an alarm so that it would beep. It would ring every single hour. Just to be sure. I really like that because it's amazing that,
you know, when we're flying, it seems that, I think what attracts almost all of us to flying is that you can't be doing something else when you're flying. You're not thinking about your bills. You're not thinking about your girlfriend. You're fully in the moment. But you're not fully in the moment a lot of times. There are a lot of times in a flight, even in a competition where I'll have to grab myself and go, get back in the game, dude. Where did you just go for the last couple of minutes? Yeah. So another story about this. It's, you know, it's a lot of things. You asked me about Brazil. I was there three weeks ago for the PVC.
It was not the last task. It was the one before the last task.
I was getting into goal, full speed. And I usually, I have very few collapses. Very few. Um.
And 66 meters from the end of speed section, I can tell you the distance because I checked on my log track afterwards. I had a full collapse. The wings started spinning. A huge and nasty cravat on my left side and so on. So, um, to tell you the full story, I didn't sort it out first. At first, I went to the last 66 meters to have my head in the air. Then I was too low to stall my glider to clean out. So it was an interesting moment. But I sorted the thing and I could climb back to the line and to finish it.
But I, and the goal line was like five k's after. So I kept on thinking, but where was my mind? Where was my mind? And I can't tell you. I think that for some personal reasons, I was not, my mind was not set on the comp. I was distracted by some other things. And I cannot tell you how and why it collapsed. And I cannot tell you what I was thinking. So the conclusion is be focused. Keep your mind on what you're doing because you are flying. You know, those machines can be animals sometimes. So, yeah. This is, this is jumping around a little bit, but I paid a lot of attention to the world championships this year, partly because a very good friend of mine and co X-Alps pilot, Cody Mittanck, a guy I train with quite a bit.
He lives here in Utah. Did really well. He had a great race and in Macedonia, but I was watching it too because it seems like, you know, one of the things we learn when we first started getting into the comps and you talk about your book, in your book, and you make this distinction really well, but I think it's worth fleshing out is it's, you know, we used to fly very much, you know, glide to goal was what we were paying attention to in our instruments. It was foolish to, you know, be thinking too much about glide to end of speed. But now clearly everyone is flying glide to end of speed. And then worrying about getting into goal. I mean, it just again and again and again, if you were flying glide to goal in the world championships, you were in the fifties or back, you know, you just had to hammer it to end of speed and then survive.
It's an interesting change that, well, I don't know if it's a change. You should remark on that. I've been in the game a lot less long, not nearly as long as you have in terms of competitions, but this seems to be an interesting change. So, yeah, it's, you're totally correct about this. It happened in the past, but not that often. The frequency of it happening is, and it was dramatic in Macedonia because on many occasions, even pilots like Julien Viert or Charles Cazor landed out due to that fact that they went down, down to the end of speed section, and then they couldn't climb up and make the line. So I'm not totally at ease with this, personally, because I think the risk, not the physical risk, but tactical risk is so high.
The point is that when what's at stake is a world champion title, so you may be tempted to play the game. And we are playing a game also that is a bit different from the good old days.
It's a bunch of 50 guys coming together to go. And when 49, 49 guys decide to glide and to get low on the end of speed section, do you want to be the one guy who is smarter and will make the end of speed section higher and good? And then be sure to go to the goal line. Well, you won't be that smart so long because you'll be three minutes behind. So if you want to play the game, you have to,
you have to play with the others. So it's more about tactics and the way we fly together now, which is much more homogeneous.
We are not that far from a, I'm not sure about the, the, the, the world in English, but we are flying a single class competition more or less. While in the past we had 10 different gliders that were available. I know it's a bit different. I'm not complaining. I'm just saying it's it's it's simply your fact. Sure. And I'm really, I'm really happy with the gliders we are playing at the nowadays.
In your book, you, you, you do a great job of talking about, you know, in, when you're, when you're first really, you're, you're flying a lot of your first comps, you know, the, the first thing you really have to get good at is just the technical aspects. You have to become a good climber. You have to become a good glider. You have to learn how to stay with the gaggle, but then there's a jump. You have, To win tasks, to get on the podium, you really have to, Russ Ogden always talks about discipline in terms of, you know, not being the rabbit, not doing crazy things too early, not leading out. And you talk about the difference in leaning out in the mountains and in the flatlands, which is great to call out the difference, but you do have to start learning how to break and how to kind of follow your own intuitions like you did so fantastically in Serbia.
But it seems like we've had quite a few pilots on the show that have talked about to know how to do that, they have to spend some time being the rabbit. You know, they have to spend a few years bombing out a lot. How do you approach that? Yeah, but to be honest, that's also the fun part of being the rabbit, you know, so don't we practice for fun? So we do. And some pilots will be rabbits for the full extension of their life and that's good for them. But if you want to climb the ladder. You know. So each step is more difficult than the previous one when you are going up the scale.
So making progress is possible for everyone, but somehow you know, the marginal gains are getting smaller and smaller, but the effort to make those gains are getting higher and higher. What you described, it's about your mental attitude and the mental control you have on yourself. So that's good. That's why I stressed out so much about the mental preparation. And I saw we discussed about this personal journey. But yeah, I guess that if you want to reach the top position, you have to get a grab on yourself and to have an extreme control of the way you act and behave and take your decisions.
And that might be. Counterproductive in terms of fun.
But that's a balance that everyone has to find in between feeling good has been for being a champion or feeling good because you're you're proud of what you've produced.
Myself, I think I've evolved in that regard. I was really looking for top positions for a long time. And then I think in recent years, I really.
I'm still competitive. I think I really enjoy being at the top of the of the list. Be aware. But my priorities are a bit shifted towards fun instead of win. Is that because Maxine is that because of just time in the limited time you have or just age and coming to a different realization about the sport? Do you mean do I feel wise?
Yeah, I'm not so sure. You know, I'm young. It's simply that all those are younger than me. That's my problem. That's a great attitude.
Yeah.
About this is that I came to realize some years ago that I realized most of my dreams in paragliding. And. I. I. I wanted the loss on I achieved a lot in my. It's not pretentious. It's simply I'm just telling you I'm proud of what I'm I don't know. I'm happy with this. But for some for some ambitions that I had. Um.
Uh, it has been very hard for me to to accept that. Um. Uh, sometimes. You have. An external non controllable cause. On which you have no leverage or no influence. For example, as. Um, to qualify for a world championship. That's something I've never been part of and I will never be part of. And that has been really hard for me to accept that. It's kind of.
Resignation. But I never resigned. It's simply that I've never been selected. And that's the point. But. Accepting this. Um. I don't mean it's fair or unfair. I don't. I don't. I don't mean this. I mean that. I had to realign myself. Um. To. Uh. We question the motivation. I had. And, uh, the goals. I set for myself. And once I. I. Went over that. Although. Then it was clear. The reasons for me for flying for traveling for this. Going. To the new sites for. Uh. Uh. Uh. Racing with friends. That's what I'm looking for. And I'm happy when I do that.
At the end. With all those. All the things that are clear.
I'm competitive. It's because my mind is clear that I'm doing good things. And if my mind is foggy or if I'm under the influence of external influence, then. I will. Be good. Um. Uh. And I prefer to be clear with myself. And to have my own goals. That's what I want to say. Yeah. Uh. You know. I was going to say. For. For you to qualify for the world championships is. Is a lot different than for us. You. You come from a tough country, man. There's. There's. There's a lot of talent. Yeah. We. We. We have a volume and a quality of this volume of pilots that is really impressive. And they are all my friend. Be aware. I respect them. Uh. Uh. As human beings. As pilots. They. They. Most of them are really good friends.
So. Uh. We. We. We. We. The level in France is incredibly high. That's. That's for sure. Yeah. It's it's it's very impressive in the. In the. The. The. The support system you have in the coaching like you're talking about. And the. And uh. I mean. I'm sure just the funds. Uh. You know. The. There's so many more people. So there's more people contributing to the sport. Uh. It's it's uh. We're very jealous. Yeah. Yeah, we also have a very good terrain. We have a high density of pilots.
The economic level of our country is not so bad. And so, yeah, we have a good number of excellent pilots, and there will be more in the future, I guess. Yeah, yeah, of course. Of course. Talk about weaknesses and how you clearly spend quite a bit of time in both books. We talked about the journaling, but how do you learn from them? How do you incorporate that into becoming a better pilot?
Well, my opinion is that maybe with the exception of Krieger,
you cannot have all abilities. You cannot be good at everything.
Failure is part of the game, or weaknesses are part of the game. So I think they are necessary to be identified for you as a pilot,
because first, maybe you want to train them and to be better at them so that there are not any more weaknesses, but some will remain weaknesses. So you have to identify them so that they are not an obstacle for your own performance.
You can be... What kind of example can we take?
Maybe you're not good at following others.
Well, then it's difficult in the kind of game we are playing now with the goggles. But then you will develop other abilities and other qualities, like the analysis, or the technical skills, or the ability to climb fast, or your decision-making process will be maybe better. So you will play on your assets so that your weaknesses are not obstacles.
I'm convinced that we are playing at a game where everyone is making mistakes.
And I think that's very difficult to complete a full week of competition and being able at the end of the week to say, I have not made a single mistake. So the point is that we are making mistakes, but we want to minimize them in terms of volume and of consequences. And even if we are making a mistake, we must be aware, self-aware of them so that we can correct them the fastest way. And we have to make sure that we are doing everything in our power to make it possible.
I skipped over something earlier that we should have talked about. With the physical preparation, again, you spend time on this on both books, which I love because it's not just that we might have a five-hour task, and those are rarer and rarer these days, but we are looking to fly for a long period of time. And when you add up the hour before the start and then maybe 120K task, and you might have a tough section, it could vary. It
could vary. It could easily
turn into a five-hour task. But in the flights like Alex is doing or 10, 11-hour tasks, you say for a pretty typical five-hour flight, you could easily burn 4,000 to 5,000 calories. So it's not just the expenditure of the energy, which is massive. That's a huge caloric need that day after day really adds up, especially something like the World Championships. But what, you know, my trainer for the X-Ops, what we're always talking about too is just the resilience and the durability of the body. You know, you can take a pretty hard landing if you're fit and just walk away. You can't do that so much if you're a heavy smoker and you've never been to the gym.
Right. So I totally concur. You summarized it quite well. I think it's necessary for the performance, for being fit for one task, it's also necessary for the recovery. So you're able to reproduce your effort and also to have your mind correctly working because your brain is a huge energy consumer. So if you want to think right, you need to eat right. So you also need to drink right.
So that's why I try to stress out with the, the, the,! your, the kind of food you decide to eat in the morning or during your flight or at the end of the day is important.
Maybe when you're young, full, you can do whatever you want and your body will just manage it. But on the long run, it does not work that good in my opinion. So that's why I went. We have a, an institute for sports in France for Olympic sports. And they, they, they, they have very interesting literature about the way we have to, to monitor food and the way we have to monitor or irritation hydration.
And the point with iteration is that once you are dehydrated, it will take you very long time to recover. It's not simply, oh, I feel thirsty and I will have a drink and then it's over. No, if you are dehydrated, you'll be dehydrated for a long time. You and that's not something that we want to face. So that's why we have to regulate or food intake and the, the, the, the, the weather as well. I think also that what you pointed out is very important. I had to use my rescue. For time twice. I smashed into a cliff and when your body's put under so much pressure on, so shocks the fittest, you are the best because it will, it will be better for absorbing the energy of,
of falling down on the ground. But also it will be better for your recovery after. So it's not only a matter of efficiency and being fit during the task, but in my opinion, it's also a matter of safety to be fit. Could we, could we talk about maybe that if they're all interesting, all of them, but the, or the more interesting reserve toss that you, you've had, you said you have four, but I always think these are great learning options. Opportunities, unless they were just benign. It doesn't sound like it. If you crashed into a, as soon as I pronounce that word reserve, I thought I had just, open the door that you were asking about this.
So yeah, we can, I'm hoping to discussion about this. That's, that's, that that's fine. Yeah, they all happen in over two years. So it was a specific period of my career when I was making fast progress.
You know, sometimes playing with the limit, you sometimes step over the limit. So I think it's the summary of my, my story of a reserve tosses. One of them was due to equipment. You know, I had a rise of failure. So this one we can skip out. The story behind is nice because it was in South Africa and I landed out and I had three hours walking under the sun and monkeys and snakes and so on. But the flying part was,
to be summarized to a razor break failure. So that's, that's it. I remember that. Yeah, you know, when you're sponsored, your equipment manufacturer is not really willing you to tell you about this.
we'll leave that one.
Now, but the others, yeah, it's about flying fast along cliffs. Two of them. One of them up in the incentive layer, the other in means during the European championship.
And I twice times also when we were playing prototypes. So I had either carbon rods or fiber rods into my wing and those were prototypes. So I'm not blaming them simply that. I could not get control back of them. And I use my reserve and I finished that story by banging on the are not only banging, but also walking, you know, under my reserve or walking on the cliff to stay away from it. So I was a reason to learn.
And yeah, in the incentive layer, I landed in the cliff. And my reserve was hooked over. Some kind of food. And I was on a very small,
my vocabularies to show there, but I was on the very small step flat on the on the cliff. And so I was okay there. I was wondering, well, if the shopper comes to pick me up, how will he manage to get to get here? But then there was a thermal passing by and so my reserve really flated. And he hooked me from the from the. So I had a second flight in the in the same way. Same day. Yeah.
Those are spectacular cliffs that must have been exciting. Yeah, that was that's that's an interesting memory. Yeah.
Yeah. And the one in Austria. Yeah, it was you to my failure to what happened. Is that we had a turn point that was slightly off the cliff and I wanted I was I think I was in the front like top five of top ten position and we were in the plus four against the cliff. And then I could see above the cliff that there was a nice water cloud. So I said, oh, it's maybe better to get far from the cliff right now before getting on top. To avoid the. Water effect. So I was the first one to to slightly.
Curve my route to get away from the cliff to go to the turn point. That was not so far. And I was the first one to to collapse.
And it was not a nice collapse. So I had to crevice and so on. So I stole my glider and it took me a very long time to stabilize the stone. And once I. I cleaned out the glider. I say, okay, now I have a window to release the glider, but.
Falling along the cliff did not give me a clear position of the horizon. So when I decided to release the glider, you know that you have a window of opportunity is when your glider is in front of you that you should release your glider when you're stalling. My glider was behind me. So I make made an attempt. To infinity tumble before it existed. And I say.
I clearly failed and I failed to my lines. And so that was over. So I use my reserve on that.
Well, that's the story you wanted to hear it. This one was really traumatic for me because it happened during a European championship. So I was so proud of being.
Of representing my country. It was so important for me. You know, the country flag and so on. So I was really disappointed of about what was happening. And also the conditions and I think I was not in the right mindset again. I was it was the first flight of the camp and it had it had been a very difficult.
Process.
To get to the start point of this first task. So I think I was you mean with you with you mentally was very difficult to get to the start point or just the actual race like they had weather. So the process to be present on take of the day got you. You know, you were distracted. Yeah. And but this one.
I took it seriously because I really asked myself a really something. I am looking for in life to do to smash into cliffs or what about my skills? Am I out of my abilities here or so? I stopped flying for several months.
I looked for some. Some.
Expert on psychological support.
I went to meet the first one that was recommended by my Federation, but it's a matter of of match. So I think our personalities did not match. I didn't like the guy but he gave me some very interesting books to read. Help me understand some mechanical behavior for for mine. So it was very profitable profitable for me. Yeah, but the guy was not the right one. So I found another one who was was a former high-level sports guy.
He was practicing Kung Fu and karate and so on so but whatever in a matter of couple of hours or maybe three times. I met him. I could. I have a clean plate in front of me. So it was I found my answers and I found my solution and I came back to flying because that's really something I like and I went back to the practice Hill also to practice more and to increase my ability to recover collapses and to also prevent collapses. Are they since then it was in 2010. I never had any more major incident.
In. The last nine years. So but it was really necessary to go through that. It was a I'm talking of this maybe with some distance now, but it was really necessary and really important for me. Can you can you summarize I want to dig into that. Can you summarize because I think a lot of us a lot of pilots have dealt with what you're describing there. I would call like a fear injury. You called it traumatic, you know, throw in your reserve. Going into the lines the first day, but there's also, you know, beyond the fear of the incident. It was the trauma of representing your country and being at the Europeans and being the first day. Can you summarize what he did for you and the work that you had to do?
Yeah. Well, it's a long time ago.
Also, I think I'm not denying things, but also maybe I'm forgetting things. You know, I'm telling you again. I'm young, but you're younger than me. So maybe I have some trouble with my memory. No, no, no. I'm serious. Now.
Yeah, it's about your motivations.
So that's a kind of starting point. Why are you doing this? But also for what are you doing? What what is your benefit of practicing? So that's not a motivation. That's a reason. And what can you bring home once you have done a nice flight? Oh, and so it helped me to see clearer into my motivations. Maybe also in that period when I was making fast progress my ego. Was not what maybe overdeveloped, but it was a very pregnancy.
Why the pleasure?
The ambience the sharing time with friends and so on was something that I could not see. But in fact, that was my reason motivation, you know, and so I came back to traveling meeting people and discovering new sites. That's that's what you what is important. For me. Also, he helped me. In identifying better my own personal values. My values are what are my core beliefs and core characteristics that will help me define my action and my course of action.
And I can tell you for example that world. Work is something important for me. But Justice as well and I felt like I'm hurt when something I feel is not fair. For example, fairness, it's been like Justice respect is something very important. So I have to respect myself. I have to respect others and I have to respect the conditions. And so once you have made that list of three four five values.
It will give. You a clear bearing of the first. It will give you a clear position of where you are who you are and then the bearing of where you want to go. And what's the reward you expect and you will deserve once you follow your own your own path.
Yeah, your book is it's it's so timely for me because it's the I'm. Going through a lot. I think motivation is such an important aspect of this and it when you and you talk about this in your book very well, but you know for like for me when you when you're first learning and you go to comps not to win but to learn, you know, they're going to be good to you. They're going to be great teaching tools. You're going to learn a ton about all the technical aspects and also tactics and all the things you talk about. And so I think motivation is a really important part of your book. And so they're they're they're quite at least for me. They're quite easy to enjoy and then then things shift and then it's oh I could actually do really well here.
And so your motivation shifts and you know part of where I'm struggling in my own flying career right now is that I try to look forward and anticipate what that could be like, you know, so the big projects. I've done like the Rockies Traverse. Or the Alaska project. What's so hard about those is that they end, you know, what's so hard about the X helps is that it ends you put so much effort into the training and the preparation and the logistics and the team and and then you have this magnificent experience Alaska Rockies, whatever comps, you know, and then it ends. And so right now I'm in this position of trying to decipher them.
The correct motivation for the future, you know, is if I put a ton of energy into competitions and you win a Superfinal, for example, or you win it, you know, that's fantastic. That's a lot of fun. But who cares? Yeah, right. Yeah, right. I don't know what my question is there, but you talk about this very well in your book and it's just.
Yeah, I mean. It seems to. To me, like the the more sage path is the one you've chosen now, which is to just go do it, to have fun and to be with your friends. You know, I don't know. I'm not sure what the question is. It's more just. Yeah, but I see the course of the discussion and I think it's about self-assessment and self-awareness.
There is. Yeah. I mean, there are lots of works at the moment about what is called full consciousness, you know, but it's really there are many works, medical works about the way your brain is working and socialities or emotional or brain is. It's not only irrational. And what you're describing is that you prepare yourself to to suffer and to participate. And you're doing it in an event. And when it comes to the end. Well, you you're lost. Yeah. But the point is that where you present during the execution with you, where you there in the moment where you performed, was your mind open to grab all the positive vibes that we are on you when you were somewhere lost in the exile.
So somewhere lost in the role. Look, is.
It's. If you're simply struggling and willing the the to the well or willing to achieve a certain result or to prove things to yourself or to others. Maybe you are not in the right.
I'm not criticizing getting be aware. No, no, no, no. You're talking about extrinsic and intrinsic. You do really well in the first book. Yeah. Yeah. And so it's about being, you know, there is a saying, and I don't know if it translates well into English, but for many sports, it's about being myself here now. So I have to get rid of whole pollution. I have to be in the present and not in the past or in the future. And I have to be at the task at hand and not doing something else. So it means that you need to live in the moment. Well, it's a kind of philosophical sentence at two cents.
And I think it can help as well to not feel that emptiness after an event, because... Because you will not be empty if you are filling up yourself during the event of everything good that you are doing. And you are doing this thing because you like it, because you enjoy being there. So you must be aware of your joy at that moment when you feel it. And if you don't feel it, maybe you should look for another activity. Yeah, I did all these interviews with a bunch of the athletes after the race. We're just about to release our third one. And this was a very common theme. You know, Chrigel talked about it in his 2009, his first campaign in 2009 and in 2011, that he kind of went into a really dark place afterwards.
And he's solved that by now he has just more goals. You know, before the race even starts, he's already has goals for other events that he's doing. And for me, I... I... I want to not have to have other goals to fill that space. I want to delve into that space. You know, I want to live in that and understand it and feel it and not solve it. I don't know if it's even solvable. But like you said, be present in the... In the being done with the race. You know, that these are... These are parts of life that we have to go through. And it can't all be the rush of the ex-Alps.
That's just... It's ridiculous. But I think that's... I think that's what we all struggle with is that... That adrenaline, that high, that, you know, the things that we feel in competition are... Are very lucrative for our minds. And it's hard to give it up. Yeah. What you described about the goal setting also is very important in my opinion. And if you simply have one goal that is too easy, then you will not be so happy about reaching... Your target. And if you have a goal that is too high, then it's going to be difficult and you may resign. But having only one goal, I think it's not a good idea. Having several goals and intermediate steps is...
I think it's the right approach. And it will help you develop also your self-esteem. So every time you reach an intermediate goal, hey, you made some progress. So you can measure it. And then you have a tangible way of assessing. You're assessing yourself in a positive way. So this goal setting is really important for self-esteem, your self-confidence, and your motivation. And yes, what you... I'm not so surprised about what you said about Chrigel and the change he had to do. Because also Chrigel is having, I think, quite good mental preparation. I think he spends a lot of time on that. I think his confidence...
Confidence is consistently the... There's all the reasons that Chrigel is Chrigel. But I think it's the confidence. To me, it's the confidence that stands out. And I think about it constantly, even during the race.
It becomes so imperative to stay in the air. It's pretty hard to fly as fast as he does because he's so confident he's not going to deck. But in the X-Alps, it's not the same as in a... In a PWC, if you bomb out, you've got FTV working for you and you have a lot of... And you get in a car. In the X-Alps, you've got to run up another mountain again. You've maybe lost two precious hours of the day and that's the difference. But his confidence to do... To just consistently take risk and to gamble. Not risk with his life. I'm not talking about that kind of risk. I'm talking about just flying fast and flying low and flying straight. Man, that's...
That's a whole other level. Yeah, I know what you're talking about. I participated in several I Can Fly competitions here in France and around. And I remember... It's funny because I participated twice in the Air Tour. And the first one, I spoiled it because I decided to take off in conditions where I shouldn't have decided that. So hopefully, a tree was there to save me and to grab my... My tip... My glider's tip when I inflated. And I was grateful for that because the flying would have not been nice. But then I felt so stupid because I was exhausted.
I was willing to move forward. I was not so bad position. So I was playing the game of the race and so on. But I was really hungry with myself. I spent the next day walking. I... I... I... I was not able to decide whether it's... A nice grassy slope with a light breeze was...
Was good to be used as a takeoff. I was simply pissed off with myself. I needed to exhaust myself by walking the day after. And two years... Two years after, I participated again in the Air Tour. And then I was with a friend. And then I was with a friend. Again, in a rather good position. And we were facing... We were on top of a mountain. It was quite windy. He decided to take off. And I had still the memory of that previous edition. And I said, no, I don't feel it. I won't... I will not do it. And then I went down, went up again on another takeoff and so on. So I... I lost the race there.
And I was again so pissed off with myself. So making decisions under so much stress and exhaustion. Well, that's another level. And you went through that also, much more than I did. And the combination of physical exhaustion together with...
With having decisions to take is a really difficult game. I'm impressed by the low level of... Of accidents also. I think we have such a preservation instinct that helps us under such situation. But you will be the interviewee. I will be the interviewee the next time we talk about this. It is remarkable, the lack of accidents. I mean, there was a... There were a lot of people that had to pull out with injury in 2017, which was interesting because the weather in 2017 was really terrifically bad. And it was basically just flyable or not flyable. But there were still a lot of accidents, mostly that early on with all the fern.
But the 2015 race, for me at least, was way scarier. Because we were flying in a lot of wind almost that entire race with a couple of exceptions. You know, day one was perfect. But the rest of it was so windy. And it's really interesting to me the headspace that I think most of the people, in the race, get into. You get into this headspace where nothing is going to go wrong. You have the move. Day after day, you know you're exhausted and you know that you're probably not... But it just doesn't matter. It's very strange. I mean, literally the day after the race, I would go flying in conditions that are half that bad and they would be terrifying. I wouldn't be able to handle it. I'd go land.
It's just... It's an incredible... I guess you talk about flow in your book. I guess it's like an experience. It's
like an extended
state of flow that you get in where you just have the move. You know, I've got this. I'm sure that's part of the addiction. Yeah. I have read years ago a definition of flow in Conscripting Magazine. But I think the definition I have, or maybe it's the French approach, that is a bit different. It's when you don't need your cognition. You don't need to make a decision. Your body will act according to the feelings you have. So it goes direct from information to action, overstepping the decision phase. There is no decision.
You're simply doing things because that's the thing to be done. You are fully, as we said before, you are fully yourself there in the moment. And there is no distraction.
Also, it's a state where time passes by quite slowly. You have the impression that everything is slow. And you have the impression that everything is smooth, you know, be blurred.
Well, you have to be low to be light on the booze. So also, I'm not talking about this. So you have to be�� fully in possession of your capabilities to do that. I totally agree. Maxime, I want to, I've got pages and pages of notes here, but I also want to be mindful of your time. If you wouldn't mind, there's just, you know, I kind of wrote some highlights of many different aspects. So these aren't necessarily in a particular order, but feel free to answer them in a long format. But could I just touch on some topics in your book and you expound however you want, and some of them you might not want to expound on at all, but like for example,
fly full bar permanently if climbs are greater than two meters. Talk about that, but in relation to the time of the, you know, the beginning and the middle and the end of a competition, because we talk about, you know, you don't fly, you typically don't just press the full gas in the first third of the race. You know, you're, you're a lot more conservative. You're being disciplined. You're flying in the gaggle. But anyway, talk about that. Yeah. So by the way, I might read, I might, I might write another book in a couple of years because things are evolving a bit. But first of all, we are discussing here about speed. And everyone has to be aware. That to fly fast, you have to climb fast.
You know, it's not because you're flying fast that you will, you will climb fast. It's the other way around. You have to be first a good thermal pilot. You have to first focus on your abilities to climb fast in thermals. Then you'll be, you'll be in a position to fully use the full extent of your speed bar. Then about this. So flying at full bar as soon as there is a plus two meters per second, it's a matter of relation to the Mach ready.
And that's the first point. The second point is due to the fact that we are flying in gaggles so that the time to
identify and center a thermal is reduced compared to someone who is flying alone cross country flight.
So about this Mac ready thing is the Mac ready theory tells you that if you're if you anticipate a certain value at the end of your glide, then there is an optimal speed to be taken. So the stronger the expected thermal, the faster you'll fly. And the second point is about probability. When you fly in a gaggle, the probability to find out to go through a thermal zone is getting much higher than when you're one or two pilots isolated. So this will increase your tendency to fly fast because you will gain from a stronger thermal without losing time for looking for it.
Then about the use of the thermal. So the first point is about the speed of the speed along the course of a task. I think that's where things have changed a bit in the recent years.
Yes, people tend to be conservative at the beginning, but that's not so true. It's also depending on who is present there and the perception they have of what is called the leading bonus. Some pilots are tempted to go in flight. They're not at the beginning of the race because they think they will be rewarded by more leading bonuses. So that's a psychological effect, but that can raise the pace of the race.
Yes, the closer you get to the end of your task, the friendlier people get.
Because you feel the smell. You feel the smell of going back home and you want to be the first there. And you don't take full hate in thermal. You simply grab the best of it and as soon as it decreases, you go for finding another one. You are more going from bubbles to bubbles than from thermal to thermal. For those of you listening too, I think it's beyond the scope of the conversation now because these are not necessarily complicated concepts, but important concepts that you really need to understand. And Maxime, you've done a really good job of that, but it's not just MacReady, but Reichmann and Cochrane. These are sailplane pilots that have come up with some very good concepts that it's quite, for me at least, it really helped to understand all three of those together and to use all of those three together and yet still understand where they don't factor for our speeds and our glide compared to sailplanes.
So you have to kind of connect them together. couple that on top of that, but I look forward to trying to put all these in my brain and utilizing them because the Reichman and Cochran were new to me. So I appreciate that you pointed those out. I'm not sure if you want to comment on this, but I love this quote or I love this thought. The right question is not, will conditions improve, but are conditions good enough?
Yeah. Again, you're touching something sensitive about the purpose of my books. I think, or I'm willing my books to be for every pilot. But for sure, I have a competition background, a competition image.
The name performance, is really related to comparing yourself to others. While performance is about taking the best out of yourself and reaching your best possible level. That's what I would like everyone to reach.
So yeah. So the conditions, if you are flying in a competition, who cares about me, you know, whether analysis, I'm sorry to be that bold, but you're, everybody will be flying the same condition. So if, if you're on takeoff waiting for conditions to improve, but the window is open on the start is in 15 minutes, or even if the start is in one hour, those conditions are good. Just take off and fly. Don't wait for something I possible on which you have no control to happen. And that's true as well for flying. You have to, to be aware of the evolution of the conditions.
Is there a veil coming? Is the wind picking up? What about shadows? So sure you have to take the information as it comes. And you have to also anticipate on the evolution of those conditions, but don't bet on the future. Just take conditions are there. I think it's related to what we said before. But I think it's related to what we said before. But I think it's related to what we said before. Yeah, for sure. Touch briefly on, cause I don't, I don't know that this needs too much more than what you put in your book, but it, this was also interesting for me to just think about, even though I think it's naturally, I think we all naturally understand it, but optimized waypoints and wind, tailwind, headwind, and then optimized waypoints and terrain.
Yeah. So about this, you have to be good with vectors to understand it. Maybe some will be also interesting to, to help people understand, but if you are going headwind to a turn point, and then once you've tagged the turn point, you go backwind.
So you're going north, for example, to a waypoint, you tag it, and then you go south. Every time you take a thermal in your way to the, to the turn point, you will slightly draft a drift backward.
While if you go for the turn point, tag the turn point, and then go backwind, then the wind will drift you in the right direction. It's pretty easy to understand. And this can be turned into an equation and into a model to show you that if you are, for example, facing a 10 or 15 kilometers per hour wind, you can drift. And if you decide to, to take a 0.5, in fact, you are just not climbing. You are on your glide ratio to the turn point. So it's not worth taking a 0.5 meters per second. But if you go to the turn point and come with the wing, the wind in your back, and you find a one meter per second with 15 kilometers backwind, it's equivalent to a two-way turn.
So it's maybe a bit different to difficult to understand, but what you read on your value as the average speed of climb is not the real speed of climb because it contains also a part of your drifting towards or backwards related to the turn point and to your goal. So that's when the wind is facing you. So you can see that the wind is facing you. So you can see that the wind is facing you or pushing you. And then about wind coming from right or left. Then for example, if you are two guys gliding together and the wind is coming from your right side,
I would recommend you to slightly change your direction and be on the right side of the game. Because if your friend is on the right side of the game, you can see that the wind is coming from the left side of the game. So if your friend on the left finds a thermal, then you will be pushed by the wind to reach him. While if he's on your, or if you find a thermal, he will have to fight against the wind to reach your position. So it might be five meters, 10 meters gain, but hey, look at classification incomes now and you'll see that every meter is important. And I also liked how you pointed out, you have these great little summaries at the end of each chapter, but - Yeah. When in doubt, if you're thermaling in wind, when in doubt, thermal towards the sun or towards the wind or both.
But that is such a, I mean, I think I've done that naturally, but I like that you put it in my brain. It makes a lot of sense. There's a lot of things like that. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We are doing things naturally and also because we have experience. So not everything is conscious in our mind, but when you actually, when you actually, accumulate the experience, then your brain will keep what worked out correctly and what didn't work out even without you being conscious of that. And that's why you are doing the right thing. Yeah. And another unconscious one, but also really good to point out in flatlands, you know, we divide the sky up.
You talk about dividing the sky up into the thirds layer, and this is one of the things I learned very early on.��������������������������������� � � � B
when you're in a group. So when you're solo, that's really what you're thinking about. You're thinking about flying the terrain. If you're low, you're thinking about flying the crowd, clouds and the terrain. If you're in the middle and you're just flying the clouds or the sky when you're up top, but when you add the group dynamic to it, then it becomes a percentage of that versus flying the people. And again, it's, I think, you know, it's, it's just, these are good things that you've, you've pointed out. I don't know if that needs comment, but yeah, I like that a lot. And then with mountains, I had always heard the thirds regardless of flatlands or mountains, but you say drop it in the mountains and just, you, you only have the, you, you forget the two thirds and you divide it into two halves. Yeah. You have terrain and you have the sky.
That's it. Yeah. No, easy. But again, I like the differentiation.
Improving position. You talk about when you're solo, you're limiting collateral damage. I take that as just to be you know, try to limit the mistakes. Yeah.
Talking about this, that gives me an opportunity to talk about those leading points we mentioned before.
I'm not happy with the way currently scoring is working. So, and especially with leading points, I think they are not rewarding the right qualities. And I will give you an example. Brazil, again, two, three weeks ago, in a 100 kilometers task, I stupidly decided to have an initiative on the first glides after 10 kilometers and it did not work out. So you can call me stupid. I would be totally in agreement with you. Um, but then I went on the chase mode to catch up with my friends that went away. I took a new start from where I was. And then I had a five Ks, um,
five kilos is, um, is advantage. On for the next 80 kilos,������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 80k's, at the 90k's mark 10k's from goal coming from a different line, I could top up the lead gaggle and I was so happy with this and then I could make it to goal, I would say in the 5th or 10th position what happened when the classification was out was pretty expected, I dropped out to the 60th place maybe, or even worse because I had no leading bonus all those guys in the gaggle, we didn't take any initiative but just flew together you know, good friends, they'd stay together they had whole maximum attack points or leading bonuses, while I took all possible tactical risks and took initiatives and not being rewarded by this so I'm sorry I slightly slided away from your question just to sneak my
comment, but yeah you see what I mean and what I feel yeah, and this is something that I just personally struggle with because I'm not math is not, I'm not real strong at math, I'm not an engineer but I see a lot of the really good pilots, like one of my mentors is Josh Cohn, he's just terrifically consistent and he's always one to watch he's always a threat, like you he doesn't get a ton of hours but he can show up at a comp and he's got a really good chance of winning regardless of the level it is but he's also one that I know like really understands FTV and really understands lead points and he really gets into the details of all this and I just I don't have that kind of mind how important is it to really understand that or is it better to just you know, just fly the day
I think not all of us are the same so I think the answer is personal but I think the answer is personal so if you're there for the comp you fly the comp and that's it and I don't see a very good answer to this question in fact Yeah, I just, like with the lead points I just, I don't know really what the best move there is it just seems like I understand why they're doing it but it doesn't, like you said it doesn't seem like it's rewarding the right thing Yeah, the story behind is that if we go back to the origin of those leading bonuses they were called early birds for the hang gliders so the purpose of having these leading points in the system into the gap formula is related to stargaze yes, right so now we are trying to to fix some
wound or to fix some problem with not the right tool and I designed another kind of scoring you know, the time-based scoring and Jörg Ewald made a really great job of improving this and now it's catching up in various countries and various competitions I don't pretend it's solving everything but I think at least it's more legible and more understandable both for the pilots and for the public so
because I really want to find something else those leading bonuses are are are not rewarding the right behavior hmm
you called out goal altitude or glide ratio to goal and this was something I just felt kind of silly to not pay enough attention to but I've never really paid much attention to goal altitude I'm always looking at glide ratio to goal so just briefly discuss why we should be paying attention to the other yeah so
let's let's make things simple we have wings that fly more or less at a glide ratio of 10 hmm if we are facing wind for example maybe this glide ratio will drop to 7 or 6 hmm
glide ratio compared to the to the ground because we have this front wind headwind the point is that maybe the wind could pick up only slightly by 5 km more and then your your glide ratio will drop to 5.5 instead of 6 so you may think that it's not really important but in fact it's really important and the way you can assess the importance of this change in the glide ratio is the altitude above goal this altitude above goal gives you the risk that you're taking if you see that you had a 200 meters above the goal line at 6 to 1
maybe 5.5 will cut that by half or maybe reduce it to nil so it gives you another perspective about your chances to reach the goal and the margin or the risk tactical risk that you take for reaching goal by the way some instruments use a kind of security altitude like maybe 50 meters to be sure that you reach the line at 50 meters above goal so that your glide ratio to goal is not compared to the ground but to some virtual point 50 meters above the ground and then you can compare your glide ratio to the glide ratio of your wing to see if you're
on glide or above or below it hmm uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh you talk about biathlon which I thought was a really good comparison but can you talk about optimal activation point and body activation versus mind activation yeah so activation we could describe it at the level of heating or energy of your body and mind so we can clearly imagine that someone who is entering a boxing arena has a high activation while if you're playing chess
hmm you should have a lower activation than the boxing guy um and we are both boxing and playing chess while flying so um it's a matter of first when we take off we will have as we discussed before we will have some energy consumption we should be at the right temperature and who amongst us is having a jog or even a a stroller walk before getting into the harness and walking to the to the to the take off so we should warm ourselves before before taking off because we will produce some effort
and then during the flight there will be phases when thermaling when we are active and we need to also have a good sensitivity and we will be physically active with our arms and then on glide maybe we will use much less of physical abilities we will still be pushing with our legs but we will use a bit more for mind so this activation is to to have the right level of of energy and activation depending on which phase we are into are we thermaling are we preparing the future are we gliding are we seeking for a thermal
all of this depends and we will necessitate a different level of activation not so it's not a big spread but it's there are some variations above around the average and that leads perfect segue into that's all kind of decision making and talk about the funnel well the the funnel is something that I well I don't know if it's me but it's a kind of a concept where before taking off before the briefing you can collect all possible sources of information
you don't have many decisions to make but you accumulate information and the more you go toward your flight the more you have to narrow the possible annoyance that you feel from the exterior I mean you you you it's like your vision it has to be wide and then you have to focus slowly and slowly into your own flight and that's why I don't like to be interrupted when I'm getting into my my harness because that's when I want to stop interferences from the exterior I just want to center myself on myself and
I don't need additional weather information or information about the course I know it so I I focus on what I need in terms of resources to take the right decision for what's coming what's coming is do I take off or not right on left or right of the takeoff that's what I need to think about at that moment so this funeral is a kind of um um
of process where you start your day at the breakfast by chatting and by discussing and by taking all kind of possible information until the time you take off and you have to be by yourself for yourself hmm you have this thought on learning to lose I'm just going to read this this is directly from your book I just I really liked the distinction here learning to lose is not learning from failures learning to lose requires psychological work on oneself to be able to choose the right mindset to learn from failures is to learn from failures and look for causes and correct yeah look for causes and corrects and then not and then not respect them yeah you there is lessons to be taken from many experiences you know so um
that's way of um of keeping your motivation as well um and not being uh in at the bottom of the pit and sad and you know um um there there we are living experiences um um and those will enrich us yeah so um I I I I don't say that there is always something positive to be taken out of an experience no but there is something to be learned as a possible way of improvement for example or as something that you don't want to reproduce because you're not proud of it and it's not necessarily like a positive um um a strict positive attitude it's also about uh an attitude of um
of uh resilience of being able to build from what you live yeah and I I want to correct what I said there it's not respect but the last part of that was to learn from failures is to look for causes correct them and then not repeat them I said respect them which is totally different um uh
Max you know Maxine let's see there's one more that I wanted to talk about and then I've got to let you go I know you've got to go get your your kids and this is I could talk to you for hours I can't wait to fly with you and actually talk to you at a comp I'm sure that will happen one of these days but um just finally back to decision making too the actually I'm going to completely change this the when I look at comps the really high level comps you very consistently see the same people um you know you have your incredible talents and I would call them rabbits like a Maxine you know who's just an incredible pilot um but he's got a pretty good chance of being in the top five and also 80th because he's you know he pushes so hard and I think that that's you know that's part of his he's trying to learn how to just consistently fly fast but when you look the you know especially in the last couple years
um you know you're very in the top ten you're seeing six or seven of the same pilots over and over again what have they really learned and you talk about this in the book is there any I mean there are all the obvious things that they've learned but how do you think of them well first I respect them so so I think them of them in a great way um I think in my opinion consistency is really um a differentiator or something that if a pilot is consistent in my opinion that's what a good pilot should be so um but that's that's a person that's an opinion you know so maybe others will have different opinions and uh
also I think that we fly like we are and um pilots who are reproducing again and again very high level of performance they are not nervous people in the life they are calm they are cool and I I think that's the the pressure is having little influence on them some others like well they they they fly and they work with pressure and that's also source of motivation and energy for them so um but most of the very um um regular pilots are
smooth you know um no heads
and uh
yeah I'm trying to see I think about my friends like Julien Vier for pilots like this also pilots that are not so well known like Jurij Vidic and they are so consistent over the years and over the comms I'm so impressed by what they are able to produce I think that cool and calm thing is a really good call out uh I think you're I think that's you know when I look at Chrigel you know it's compared to everybody else at the X-Alps he's very cool he's very calm you know in many ways he seems to be enjoying it the most because he's so calm and so I think that that's a good call out that's a good point yeah I think it's also self-fueling the the self-confidence for example so
yeah they they are just they are just aware and sure of what they can produce and they have no doubt so yeah things are good for them hmm Maxime there's so much we can talk about here your books are packed with information uh for those of you listening if you haven't read them go out right now grab them they're both on Kindle they're just terrific reads they're something I go back to over and over again uh thanks for helping me Maxime and thanks for helping so many of us with uh such great concepts and and great things that we can really execute on so thank you uh you're a treasure I really appreciate your work and I can't wait to fly with you one of these days I can't believe we haven't
I really would like to fly with you as well Gavin I really appreciate and that was a really nice conversation we feel like we are well we are passionate and we could talk for hours about this and it's really an interesting matter that we are sharing we are we are a community and um yeah it's a it's a battle of passion and pleasure absolutely thank you thank you Gavin thank you Maxime talk soon
if you find the CloudBase Mayhem valuable you can support it in a lot of different ways you can give us a rating on iTunes or Stitcher or however you get your podcast that goes a long ways and helps spread the word you can blog about it on your own website or share it on social media you can talk about it on the way up to launch with your pilot friends I know a lot of interesting conversations with you guys as well so thank you very much for joining us today �
!��������������������������������������������������������������� � � than a magazine subscription, and it makes all of this possible. I do not want to fund this show with advertising or sponsors. We get asked about that pretty frequently, but for a whole bunch of different reasons, which I've said many times on the show, I don't want to do that. I don't like having that stuff at the front of the show. And I also want you to know that these are authentic conversations with real people, and these are just our opinions, but our opinions are not being skewed by sponsors or advertising dollars. I think that's a pretty toxic business model. So I hope you dig that. You can support us. If you go to cloudbasemayhem.com, you can find the places to support. You can do it through patreon.com forward slash cloudbasemayhem. If you want a recurring subscription, you can also do that directly through the website. We've tried to make it really easy, and that will give you access to all the bonus material, a little video cast that we do and extra little nuggets that we find in conversations that don't make it into the main show, but we feel like you should hear.
We don't put any of that behind a paywall. If you can't afford to... support us, then just let me know and I'll set you up with an account. Of course, that'll be lifetime and hopefully you'll be in a position someday to be able to support us. But you'll find all that on the website. All of you who have supported us or even joined our newsletter or bought Cloudbase Mayhem merchandise, t-shirts or hats or anything, you should be all set up. You should have an account and you should be able to access all that bonus material now. Thank you so much for listening. I really appreciate your support and we'll see you on the next show. Thank you.