Philosphy of Mountain Biking

The Philosphy of Mountain Biking

Posted by Kris on April 20th, 2005

These experiences will kick your ass and soothe your soul. Some are free, and some might cost you several thousand dollars and important pieces of your body. It’s less important that you accomplish them all than that you spend a lifetime trying.
Some are inevitable. Some are inexorable. They must be chased with joy and malice. No one has done them all. Someone can.
Separately, each of these things is minor. Together, they weave the true, pure, full off-road life. They are fundamental, ethereal, profound, stupid. This is not a checklist. It is a guide. You will start this quest in secret. When you fail at one, you might cry or laugh. Same when you succeed. You are not a mountain biker just because you ride a mountain bike. You are a mountain biker when you reach deep into the sport and grab something alive, something that kicks and screams and laughs and squirms.

Here’s how:

• Jump something higher than your knee.
• Take a day off work and ride 9 to 5.
• Stop for sex during a ride.
• Bust a collarbone.
• Begin a ride at 2 a.m.
• Get your mother on a bike.
• Drop out of a race.
• Learn to true a wheel.
• Nap beneath a trailside tree.
• Follow a rabbit’s line.
• Descend something you couldn’t walk.
• Climb something you couldn’t descend.
• Shake Ned Overend’s hand.
• Name your own private trail, and years later realize that that name became the name.
• Have a hot shower at the Pedro’s festival.
• Ride a 24 hour race.
• Ride with someone who invented the mountain bike.
• Break a frame.
• Take the biggest trip of your life just to ride your mountain bike.
• Climb Mt. Tam, then breeze past Repack because the swoopy speed of the new B-52 singletrack is a way better high than a dirt road nostalgia trip.
• Pass an animal that’s trying to outrun you on a singletrack.
• Have grit buried so deeply in a wound someone else must scrub it out while you scream.
• Land an accidental jump longer than 20 feet.
• Smell like wildflowers instead of sweat when you get home from a ride.
• Ride by something that could kill you ; a croc, a poisonous plant, a hopped-up dealer on a street corner.
• Win a race.
• Scam something free from a company.
• Scratch your new car with your bike, and look at the bike first.
• Recover from an accidental nose wheelie in front of a crowd.
• Ride an illegal trail.
• Do $200 worth of damage trying to repair a $10 part.
• Fry yourself way off the back in a cyclecross race.
• See Bob Seals in a speedo.
• Understand why Leigh Donovan is way cooler than Missy Giove.
• Flat at 45 mph on a dirt road.
• Miss an important meeting because you didn’t want a ride to end.
• Finish a great ride with an almost-as-good home-brew or homegrown.
• Think seriously that if you’d just started earlier or trained harder you could’ve been a pro.
• Realize you’re wrong about that pro thing.
• Fix a broken component with a zip-tie instead of buying a new part.
• Ride better than someone you consider great.
• Say “screw it” and crank up a scary credit card balance on your dream bike, even though your job ends in a month.
• Write 500 times in a notebook “ I don’t ride a mountain bike because I’m a mountain biker. I’m a mountain biker because I ride a mountain bike.”
• Customize your treads with a razor.
• Break a bone.
• “Adopt” a different pro racer each year. Follow his or her career during the season. Get dangerously close to being a stalker.
• Bonk hard at least once.
• Skip your usual Saturday morning ride and go out to breakfast with family or friends.
• Save a trail from erosion.
• Spend an hour searching for a dropped screw.
• Begin the hardest race of your life with a hangover.
• Race the Kamikaze.
• Take your dog on a ride.
• Stay in the sport long enough to fondly recall simpler equipment.
• Have a great bike stolen.
• Ride Moab’s Slickrock Trail.
• Hide a trail from your friends.
• Whenever you see a phone number in Mountain Bike magazine, call it an ask for free stickers. Use ‘em to wallpaper your bathroom.
• Share your water, food and spare tubes.
• Take a vacation without your bike.
• Ride a Critical Mass.
• Go to the beach, take off your shirt, look like a dipshit with a farmer’s tan.
• Ride slicks in the mud.
• Finally learn to do that flip turn and enjoy riding switchbacks.
• Own at least one neon Lycra jersey that you’ll be ashamed of in years to come.
• Be a messenger.
• Ride on the traffic deck of the Brooklyn Bridge.
• Take apart and successfully reassemble a Shimano rear derailleur.
• Recite Shakespeare’s “Once more into the breach, my friends” speech from Henry V during long climbs.
• Justify a $5000 bike to a homeless person.
• Ride so hard you hurl.
• Buy something you later think is dumb, then sell it to a “friend” for more than you paid for it.
• Join IMBA.
• Lay your bike down at 35 mph and walk away unscathed.
• Ride a World Cup Downhill course.
• Get lost on a ride and sleep on the trail.
• Get old, fat and slow.
• Learn to ride fast on a rigid bike.
• Cry your eyes out at the Madonna de Gisallo. .
• Read a Rock Shox owner’s manual.
• Flip over a handlebar.
• Ride a downhill wheelchair.
• Stop eating corn dogs before rides.
• Take your road bike on singletrack.
• Drive into the garage with bikes on the roofrack.
• Sleep with your bike ; at least once.
• Ride by moonlight.
• Have your spouse ask you what you were dreaming about because your hands kept “braking” in your sleep.
• Go on a ride to make up with your significant other.
• Catch poison ivy so bad you need a shot.
• Honestly say that one of the five best days of your life involved riding.
• Ride so much you lose a lover.
• Realize that no bike in the world can make you better.
• Go mountain biking where there are no mountains.
• Buy an expensive tool that you can’t use.
• Ride where humans are not dominant ; a jungle, a rain-forest, a veldt.
• Stop during a race and help someone with a mechanical.
• Spend at least a weekend at a mountain bike festival.
• Philosophize with Bob Roll.
• Walk more than a mile with a flat tire because you forgot your pump.
• Explain the difference between Shimano HG and IG.
• Do trail work instead of a ride on a beautiful summer day.
• Finish a ride in weather so bad no one else even started.
• Ride singletrack on an off-road tandem.
• Descend 6,000 feet in one day.
• Climb 4,000 feet in one day.
• Ride a NORBA National or World Cup Course.
• Turn on five friends to mountain biking.
• Fix a broken anything on your bike or body with night falling, no one else around and the wrong tools.
• Ride Mount Snows Naked Crit.
• Get in an argument with your mate because you ride too much.
• Build the perfect berm.
• Balance at a standstill long enough to make people notice.
• Do a week-long off-road tour and don’t shower the entire time.
• Enter a trials competition.
• Explain to your grandma why you shave your legs.
• Go to a World Championship.
• Get your chain sucked.
• Ride the first trail you ever mountain biked-and if possible take your first bike.
• Get a case of giardia.
• Feel invincible.
• Feel miserable.
• Walk your favorite trail.
• Walk your favorite trail, get buzzed by mountain bikers and notice how quickly a temporary hatred flares.
• Catch yourself looking at your legs when you walk past mirrors.
• Go riding when there’s a foot of snow on the ground.
• Wean yourself from purple-anodized parts.
• Suckle from another rider’s CamelBak when you run out of water.
• Get fast.
• Remember a few lines from a great poem atop a high mountain.
• Stick the big ring inches deep in your calf.
• Eat breakfast at the Bakery Cafe;.
• Go at least a week without driving your car.
• Jump from high cliffs into a swimming hole during a rest break.
• Float through a chest-high field of wildflowers when the sun is bright but not steaming.
• Get lost.
• Come from way behind after a terrible start to pass your friends near the end of a race.
• Learn to build a wheel.
• Find a mojo on the trail.
• Reach the summit of a climb just as the sun rises or sets.
• Learn to ride over one-inch logs without touching your chainrings.
• Be so afraid of doing something on a trail that you cry.
• Soothe your body in a natural hot spring.
• Try disc brakes.
• Learn to pee while you ride.
• Pull a tick off your body.
• Do a group ride while singing “Climb Every Mountain” in ensemble.
• Ride naked in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere.
• Stop inches from a fatal drop-off.
• Come to the realization that you’ve wasted far too much time on a bike, but that you’ve learned too much to turn back now.

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