Coming to the mountain biking world from a firm half-decade on the road, I knew I wasn’t prepared to hop straight into a new lifestyle of ‘hucking gnar to the max’ without taking baby steps. I have a lot of training in long, disciplined endurance events, and the idea of shuttling a van to the top of a hill and fueling myself with Red Bull was entirely foreign to what I know and love about the culture of riding bikes. I have a lot of love for the feeling of covering ground on my own, and I just wanted to add some dirt into my life to spice things up beyond the bland tarmac that successfully bored me off the road. I’ve found myself sticking to cross-country mountain biking for now, which is a more race-oriented style of riding that focuses mostly on speed, flow, and putting out lots of power on a lightweight bike. The biggest problem with this, however, is that I live in Central Pennsylvania, and my closest trails are the radical, unkempt rock gardens of Rothrock State Forest. It’s a fantastic place to ride, but XC bikes aren’t exactly designed to chomp through terrain like this without hemorrhaging speed. Therefore, it’s important for me to make up momentum as much as I can between nasty bits in order to avoid walking like a quitter.
Coming up on a rock garden or massive drop, it’s hard to think that the carbon fiber bike beneath me (with tubing that’s 2 millimeters thick) could ever end up on the other side unscathed. There are just too many jagged edges and too much evolutionary danger detection within my nerves to feel comfortable plowing through, but I’ve learned that momentum is ultimately my friend. I’ve learned that a lot of mountain bikers find success in stopping their overthinking, and this can override that pesky sense of self-preservation. They charge into tech like this at an absurd speed, and they’re ironically the ones who make it across these features the most intact. Sure, there’s still technique beyond just putting the hammer on the pedals, but confidence is key. I feel like there’s some level of deactivation in the fear centers of the brain present here, which isn’t very helpful for most other facets of life, but perfectly appropriate when we haven’t quite evolved to understand bike physics at the foundation level. Bikes have a strong tendency to just keep freakin’ going forward, and it always impresses me to see someone stay upright when they ride through everything Rothrock employs to keep featherweights like me scared out of our minds.
Leave a Reply