Don't brake! Pedal through!

My buddy Pat, with whom I’ve done ton of great road biking, got a used hard tail mountain bike about a year ago. He wanted to give trail riding a try. He’s a strong road cyclist, able to do well on long rides with tough climbs.

But, like I did when I first hit the dirt trails several years ago, he found out pronto that mountain biking is a very different animal than road biking. The novice has to master a few new bike-handling techniques that aren’t likely to be expected going in. But starting out, everybody finds out that learning them is part of the deal.

Because if you don’t, one thing will happen: You’ll fall off the bike! Which, I can say from experience, gets really old, really fast! But because I’m a slow learner, I fell off the bike far too many damn times when I started mountain biking!

Now Pat likes to take videos of road bike rides with his GoPro. So he rigged it up for one of his early rides on the dirt. He had it running last year on a trail ride with Marc, a fellow cycling buddy. Marc is an experienced mountain biker, and rides technical trails as strongly as he regularly does challenging road bike routes.

They rode on a foothill trail on a rainy day with muddy conditions. Pat followed Marc, bombing down a mud and rock trail. He was having so much fun he let out a whoop. But the whoop flashed to panic when he suddenly encountered a bunch of loose rocks and gravel. He thought for sure he was going too fast. Uh, no he wasn’t.

Lesson Numero Uno: Don’t brake when you hit rough shit!

But he hit the brakes thinking that would give him control.

Check it out:

Pat made it back on the trail roughed up a bit. But he was OK and so was the GoPro, so no harm no foul. In fact, it was a, uh, a learning experience!

I remember well having to re-learn my reaction to technical patches on a trail. And that is, speed, not braking, helps you get through the rough crap! I learned, as Pat did in the video, if you brake in those spots, more often than not, you’re gonna eat it!

Now, Pat’s away for three months, and he was nice enough to lend me his mountain bike in his absence. Mine was stolen a few years ago, and instead of using the insurance money to get another one, I got a road bike. The guys I’d ridden trails with either didn’t ride anymore or had moved away.

So recently I’ve been on a couple great trail rides on Pat’s bike with Marc, and all the fun I’d been missing hit me like a brick. I was also reminded of a few more tips that made the rides great:

Lesson Numero Dos: Stand up, centered on the bike, elbows and knews out while descending.

It gives you a strong center of gravity and much better balance to handle the trail. I had to learn not to tuck my knees and elbows in while descending. That narrows your balance point and makes you more vulnerable to falling. With elbows and knees bent outward, downhill balance is a lot easier and you’re in a good position to make the moves you need as you ride.

Lesson Numero Tres: Keep your cleat clips loose enough so they’re easy to kick out of.

For the longest time, I’d fall attached to the bike when I couldn’t get my foot out in time to block a fall. Finally, (I’m embarrassed to say how long this took) after realizing that if I loosened the cleats with a hex wrench, I wouldn’t fall nearly as regularly! Brilliant! Much less pain to be endured!

Lesson Numero Quatro:  Look where you want to go up the trail, relax, breathe and pedal through. That works wonders to keep you going. In my early days of trail riding, more than a few times, on gnarly technical climbs, I’d tense up because I was tired. That worked against me and I’d sometimes give up and stop. But on my last two trail rides, I climbed through some seriously nasty loose rock by relaxing, pedaling and keeping balanced traction. Needless to say, I’m no trick mountain biker. But just mastering a nasty spot on a trail to me is just as fun as blasting down a fast single-track descent.

But on my recent rides, I was also reminded that I’d never really mastered climbing and descending smoothly through steep switchback turns. I have to get smarter on taking the right line and not slowing down too much.

Oh yeah, another big thing that I remembered on my recent trail rides was...

Lesson Numero Cinco: Keep the bike in a granny gear when there are a lot of ups and downs on the trail. That lets you get up sudden steep parts without being in too high a gear. It’ll let you continue forward instead of being forced to stop and get off the bike because you’re in too high of a gear. Easy to do, but just as easy to forget!

Pat has been a bit discouraged by the harsh learning curve for mountain biking, but I keep telling him, once you learn a few of the basics, it’s a blast!

So Pat, thanks for lending me your mountain bike. It’s major fun to ride. And take heart. When you get back, keep on riding it! You’ll eventually get the hang of it and experience the major highs of a good ride in the dirt.  And you’ll want to keep hitting the trails.

‘Til next time, remember to always put on a helmet before every ride. And once you’re on the bike, make sure to keep the rubber side down!

-- Mark Eric Larson

Mark Eric Larson has written two books of essays, "The NERVE...of Some People's Kids," and "Don't Force it, Get a Bigger Hammer. To read, visit: 
http://www.scribd.com/Mark%20Eric%20Larson/shelfHis blog of personal essays is at: http://marksmuzings.blogspot.com/