Recently, I’ve taken up trail biking, and strangely, there are a lot of parallels between becoming a trail biker and overcoming OCD…

Ever since last summer, I’ve been apprehensive about getting on a bike, considering that my legs used to give out on me frequently when I walked. If one of these attacks happened as I rode a bike at 20 mph down a road, I could get seriously hurt.

But this week, I got back on my bike anyway and rolled into the woods, following a friend of mine who’s an avid trail biker.

At first, the trail was smooth and wide, and I felt great. But then, to my horror, a patch of roots and rocks showed up right in front of me.  I braked hard and skidded to a stop.

“How can anyone ride over that?” I said.

“Just let it roll. Don’t think about it too much.”

Being a beginner, every little rock in the trail seemed like something to worry about. Surely my little bike tires couldn’t handle all that, right? But soon, I began to discover that things that seemed like a big deal really didn’t matter.

This is how the intrusive thoughts of OCD are. I have all kinds of crazy and upsetting thoughts popping into my head like the little bumps in the trail. My instinct is to put on the brakes and try to “go around” the thoughts by carrying out compulsions. But if I just let myself roll through them without being afraid they’ll send me over the handlebars, I end up having far less trouble. No matter how scary the thoughts seem, they’re only thoughts—they can’t hurt you if you just keep rolling.

As the day went on, I got more and more confident in my abilities. Before long, I was barreling down the trail over much larger roots and rocks. True, I was sometimes afraid of what I saw approaching, but I chose to ride over those things anyway. It wasn’t so much that I’d become a more skilled biker in a couple hours—it was that I’d simply begun to believe I could make it through the obstacles.

Similarly, the first time I went through CBT, learning to not carry out my compulsions initially seemed impossible. How could I possibly roll through the intrusive thoughts without canceling them? How could I get through my exposures? Over time, I began to learn that I could survive the anxiety that came with not doing my compulsions or following my rules. Before long, I was rolling through all kinds of terrible thoughts without doing any compulsions—and nothing bad ever happened. Once I’d tackled the smaller rocky thoughts, I could later learn to ignore the bigger, more challenging ones.

After several miles of biking through wooded, rocky, twisty trails, we rode back to the car, exhausted but high on endorphins. I was muddy and had a few scrapes from occasionally riding too close to thorn bushes, but guess what? I’d made it, even though I wasn’t sure I could. I never crashed once and had somehow had a blast.

“You know, I think you’re a natural at this,” my friend told me.

“Thanks! It must be my running legs,” I said.

But I know that it wasn’t just my fitness. It was because I’d had plenty of practice learning to push past fear and anxiety thanks to eight months of OCD therapy. Who knows? Maybe it can work the other way around, too. Maybe trail biking will make me more confident about facing my fears in this summer’s CBT sessions…