Soft Eyes

While the off season is relatively short here in Norcal, there's always stuff to work on.

I have a laundry list of things I want to do to the race car "while I have time", but I also work on the driver in the off season. A few months back I spent a lot of time trying to find mental exercises that I can use to sharpen my skills while not on the race track. So here's one technique that I practice called "soft eyes". Read up on it at http://www.nlp-now.co.uk/softeyes.htm or Google search for it.

I practice on the street (safely, mind you). I try to soften my visual focus and use all of my peripheral vision to track the cars around me. See everything. All at once. In low resolution. I started off by trying to track everything in front of me, then added the rearview mirror, and then finally stretched it to encompass both side mirrors. I switch back and forth between focus and soft eyes. Switching back automatically is the hardest part, and takes effort to build the habit. Once I could do that every day, I started to do it and added random math problems (let's count out the powers of 13 or 17 or 29) to the exercise to simulate the kind of stuff I do during a race. I'm not adding numbers in my head during a race, but I'm always thinking. It could be strategy, or observing and storing where I could set up to pass someone on the next lap. Or even stealing someone else's line and figuring out why they're faster than me.

The more I train my brain to do the "easy" stuff automatically, the more I can use my brain to figure out the hard stuff. So I practice, and practice some more.