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By walker on 12/27/2006 on walker's blog Have you ever worked so hard at a trick that you thought its completion might never happen? Have you picked yourself up from multiple crashes with contempt and anger building for the next attempt? Is there a trick that is so hard to accomplish that doing so would land you a signature spot in the mountain bike hall of fame? I'd like to share one of my trick-attempt stories. Hopefully, you'll read my story and develop the drive to write one like it. It was one of those nights. I had been around to a few bars with my friends. We had a local riding crew and during the weekends we would ride around on our mountain bikes. Our objective was pretty much ride as many urban spots as we could. We stopped at a friends house for a snack. I knew I would have half an hour to kill, so I decided to try the 360 again. I asked if my friend wanted to join me. He was excited to watch me fall on my butt, again. We walked our bikes to a ramp and we began to review trajectory, speed and distance. We both agreed that a fast approach would create optimal trickness. I rode my bike to the far side of the entrance to the ramp. I threw my fist in the air, took a deep breath and started to pedal. I'll never forget looking to my right, as I rode toward the ramp. In lock-step were three hot ladies heading over to my friend's house. It was obvious they saw me and knew what I was up to - they had seen us attempt tricks of this ramp before. Suddenly, the pressure was on! I knew I had to go big. One of the girls screamed, "Go Walker!" I hit the ramp perfectly. However, I had a slight tingle in my mind that I had hit it a little too fast. I swung my back wheel around and turned my upper body. OK, all seemed to be going well. Then, as my eyes caught my landing, I felt the speed I was worried about. My back wheel hit the ground and because I was a little too straight up and down it slipped. I landed square on my back. There was no mistaking the crunching sound of bone on pavement. The girls were the first to hear it. My friend was the first to laugh. Since then, I've never really mastered the 360. I don't really even try it anymore. It is too painful a memory. |
What is the hardest trick to do?
mgersib says:
 ouch. i feel the pain of your story. i'm pretty well known for my wheelies, but my tailbone has definitely paid a price for my mastery of riding the rear wheel. one of my most embarrasing wheelie incidents happened back in 1995. my friend chad devall (then fellow expert-class xc racer, now owner of red barn cycles in montana) had just built up a new AMP B-3. as anyone whose ever ridden an amp knows, they were hurtin' for rear brakes, so what do i do immediately upon hopping on chad's new ride? a wheelie of course. so i get right to the balance point -- time to grab a little rear brake to moderate the rotation. only i'm on an AMP, so there is no rear brake. so in the presence of chad and about 12 of my other riding buddies, i unceremoniously went over backwards, landing on my tailbone extra-hard, and slamming the back of chad's brand new flite saddle into the pavement, ripping the cover. yeah, i was embarrassed... |
MikeG says:
 I've had enough problems with getting used to clipless pedals. I could give you a number of stories, and one of them that sticks in my mind involves my family, my wife and two kids...we were going for a little family ride while camping. We were stopping to re-group, when I lost my balance and fell... on my wife, and her bike. Needless to say she was really impressed with those fancy new pedals and shoes, you know the ones that I kept on harping about before I got them? Ya those ones, that cost a lot of money, but were going to improve my riding? Sooo embarassing. MikeG Either riding or Thinking of Riding... The madness of MTB, I love it! |
mgersib says:
lol... yeah there's a trick to clipless pedals in themselves. i remember telling my wife how awesome she was doing to not have fallen in the first 10 miles of her first ride with clipless pedals. of course i should have just held my words 'til we got home. she fell twice after that, once pretty darn hard. i promptly backed the tension all the way off the pedals. i had reduced it about two bolt rotations from full-tight, which was clearly not sufficient for her in the learning phase. once i backed the tension off, she had no more problems. i could write endlessly about my trials and tribulations with jumps. suffice to say my jaw has 7 screws and a titanium plate on each side of the bone from coming up short on a double back in 1994. my girlfriend (now wife) laura was the only first-hand witness to it too. our local bmx track was about 8 blocks from my house in college, so of course i still had a bmx bike. it was nothing fancy, a steel redline proline, but it was good enough for the urban thrashing and occasional 19 and over intermediate bmx racing i occasionally did (i was always better on a mountain bike). so i get home from work at the bike shop and laura was already over at my house. "wanna go for a bike ride?" of course was about the second thing out of my mouth. she was game. we decided to ride over to the bmx track. it was about 70 degrees with a pretty strong southwest wind. it was a beautiful day, but the wind was all wrong. as i approached the largest doubles on the track (heading west), the wind came at me as a crossing headwind. i'm not sure why, and i don't remember the actual event, so to this day i've been left guessing as to why i still chose to hit that jump on my first lap around the track... it was stupid. but even though i don't actually remember it, i know full well my momentum totally stalled once i got into the air -- the wind will do that to you. perhaps the crossing wind took my front end wide -- i don't know. all i know is that i hit the ground, face-first, from about 15 feet in the air. nighty night... next thing i know, there's all these people swarming around me in the emergency room and i keep asking laura "what happened to me?" over and over... it still brings tears to my eyes just typing that. she was, and still is, incredible. but i digress... as i came to the foggy realization that i not only had a broken jaw, i was also working through what would prove to be a pretty major concussion. after a week in the hospital and a 5 1/2 hour surgery to plate my jaw, i was sent home to recover. coming back from that brain injury was one of the hardest things i've had to overcome, and i feel deep empathy for those going through similar or worse trauma. i wasn't wearing a helmet that day, and though i don't think a helmet would have helped my jaw, i guarantee i wouldn't have had the same brain trauma had i been wearing a lid. some of the most basic lessons in life are the hardest to learn -- wear a helmet! i've ruined more helmets than i can count just sitting here over the past 17 years of riding and racing mountain bikes all over the US. and most of them have been ruined on my local trails, on normal, everyday rides. so today's lesson kiddies, is to wear your helmet. no tricks are worth turning yourself into a incoherent, incapable vegetable. the fear of not being able to ride ever again is enough to get me to strap it on every time. word, |
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.thumbnail.jpg "My 1995 Specialized M2 Stumpjumper FS")
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