3 Responses to “Mountain Biker learns the hard way”

1. 1 Mike  on Jun 16th, 2005 at 10:48 am

   I couldn’t figure out why my legs weighed 400lbs all of a sudden. And why at age 10 I could spend a better part of a day on my bike and at age 19 a half hour was the limit.

2. 2 Jonathan Maus  on Jun 16th, 2005 at 12:40 pm

   I learned how to ride better by falling more. When I first got really into mountain biking I would always push myself downhill. I figured if I’m not falling, I’m not getting better. In races I found out that it was faster to bomb downhill, crash, and recover, than to be timid and slow but stay on the bike. Yep, I went down a whole bunch at first but improved quickly. Now I don’t crash as much…but of course that could be cuz I’m just getting old and slow!

3. 3 TheBarqsMan  on Jun 17th, 2005 at 2:04 pm

   I started to ride the mountains seriously when I finally bought a bike worthy of the terrain - a 1996 candy blue GT Karakoram with a Mag 21 shock. I went out with my friend who had been into mountain biking for a while and I was amazed at how fast he went down hills. He said “going down hill is like skiing, speed actually makes it easier”. Well he said nothing about the FEAR of speed and how to overcome that… but all it took was a few good crashes to learn that you just get up, check the bike first, then check yourself for injuries, then get back on and keep riding. Our motto became, “if you don’t crash you’re not riding hard enough”. That rookie year of riding with my friends was great. You get better when you ride with people better than you. Then came clipless pedals… It was like learning how to ride all over again.

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