OK, maybe make that bumps, bruises, scrapes, scratches and strains.
Today I went for my second mountain bike ride on real terrain. Last weekend on the north shore of Lake Grapevine felt like a bit of a challenge, but this morning on the trail at the Oak Cliff Nature Preserve was far, far more difficult. I was with R today. R is one of those guys that you might see on the cover of Men’s Health magazine. He and his wife C are long term world-wide adventure seekers that do this sort of thing for a living with their travel business. In addition to knowing what he’s doing, R is also a really cool guy that has helped countless newbies like me pick up new adventure sports over the years. Good thing as it turned out.
Lake Grapevine’s trail is pretty rugged and even rocky, but on most of the trail’s length the slopes are gradual. The steeper inclines are certainly there, but they are not spaced all that closely together. They also do not quickly reverse themselves from going downhill to back uphill again. This turns out to be a very, very important difference. The trees on Lake Grapevine’s trail also factor in quite a bit less. This was also material.
At first Oak Cliff seems benign by comparison. The densely wooded trail has soft earth and leaves underneath heavy tree canopy in most places. Many of those stretches ride like silk. If Lake Grapevine was a rutted old dirt road then Oak Cliff was often the Autobahn. But then came the challenges.
Unfortunately, all those nice shady trees have trunks, which from the relative safety of a sidewalk stroll you might have noticed before. Such a pleasant stroll might lead you to believe that trees are purely good and passive organisms that accept whatever fate we dole out to them – becoming shade trees, firewood, memos, junk mail or paper cups. You might be forgiven for thinking that, but you would be wrong. Trees are actually very calculating, and after today I’m reasonably sure that the ones we leave standing are out for revenge. They know precisely how close they can get to a mountain bike trail so that you will be convinced – incorrectly – that you can easily and quickly pass through without harm. I know what you are thinking – hearing stories about somebody running into a tree on a bicycle probably sounds funny at some level. I mean, after all, it’s not like the tree is moving. How hard can they be to miss?
As it turns out, when you are moving very fast downhill and going around sharp curves on leaf covered ground, hitting a tree is really not all that hard to do. In fact, it’s easy enough that I was able to do it myself a couple of times over the course of 8 miles. One word – ouch.
Far more painful still was “pancaking” at the bottom of a small ravine with a floor of solid rock. I’m still not sure exactly what happened, other than to say that when you are heading down a 45-55 degree incline which quickly reverses itself and then goes back up just as fast, it’s a great idea to already have some notion of what you are doing. In my case, riding a bit too far forward on the seat – and then losing control of the handle bars when the shock of the uphill started – resulted in me continuing to proceed downhill. Directly into the rock floor. My helmet was the first thing to make contact, my shoulder the second. The bike (they may be in conspiracy with the trees I think) somehow ninja’d up into the air and came down on top of me after that. Maybe it bounced. I didn’t.
Anyway, the sound of the impact must have been pretty impressive. I could hear the alarm in R’s voice when he said “Stay down! Don’t move!” and rushed down the hill to look into my pupils. He wanted to make sure that the gouges on my helmet had not translated into anything worse underneath. It was at precisely this moment that I suddenly realized why you meet so few people like R who look like they could be on the cover of Men’s Health. The rest of them were obviously eaten by trees and rocks.
I was fine. I just hurt like @#$%& @*^& +#$@% for about five minutes. Now, ten hours later, I only hurt like @#$%, so things are getting better.
All of this is not to say that I won’t be mountain biking anymore, but you can be sure that I’ll be a bit more judicious about which trails I select until I get a little better at it. I think I’d prefer trails where the trees have been tamed a bit better, and the downhills aren’t solid rock half pipes.
Who knows? Maybe I’ll live long enough to make the cover of Men’s Health.
