Today I will delve into the vocabulary side of these posts with a favorite of mine, “Lawn Dart”. You may be old enough to remember what a lawn dart actually is. These fun little projectiles were an outgrowth of the sport of “horse shoes” and other similar games. The reason we don’t see lawn darts anymore should be obvious, as I’m sure your devious little minds are already conjuring up images of pain and suffering inflicted from the skies! This post isn’t really about that though…

No, this post is about how that term came to be related to mountain biking. To be sure, it still is about pain! Now some of you might be thinking, “Ah, isn’t this the same thing as a face plant?” Well, it is and then again, it isn’t. It is sort of like how all squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares.

A true “lawn dart” is a direct spike of one’s body head first into the dirt/rocks/or whatever your soil type might be. It usually happens so fast that flailing arms, efforts to try to alter the flight path, or even any sort of “expletive deleted” doesn’t have time to occur. It is probably the worst type of “endo” that you can endure. (Well, that is if you endure it.) Oh yeah, speaking of “endo”, that is a term that can cover all sorts of crashes. It refers specifically to “end over end”, which mountain bikers turned into, (or borrowed, I am not sure of the origin here) “endo”. A “Lawn Dart” is therefore a type of “endo”.

A “face plant” is like a “lawn dart”, but isn’t as sudden or catastophic. It too is a type of “endo”.

There…..now you know!

Lawn Dart: It is pretty rare, actually, and let us be thankful that it is!