Reset To Zero

Old dogs, it is said, are not so good at learning new tricks. After getting dropped into the maelstrom of Whistler during Crankworx then evacuated out to the North Shore as part of some hazing ritual that Pete and Cam had been scheming, I can confirm that there may be some nugget of wisdom in that old chestnut. I feel old, dogged, clumsy and stupid. But at the same time, I feel like I might have learned some things. Maybe.

Complacency is a comfortable old blanket to wrap around oneself. It smells familiar, the texture is reassuring, and you know full well whether it’ll fit past the toes on a cold night. With regard to trails and the kind of riding we choose to live around, familiarity leads to a certain known competence. I had become very complacent with my riding life back at the poison oak farm in California. It was janky and weird at the ranch, but I had built almost every inch of it and knew exactly what it had in store at all times. The other riding around there was not loaded with features that presented much in the way of mortal threat or skillset challenge, and so I was pretty content to just pedal around, smell the flowers, and not really question my ride competence or the atrophy of all the little controller muscles and synapses that a more dynamic riding environment might otherwise keep honed.

Then I moved to Colorado, and had to step up my game. Trying to rediscover some sharpness of reflex and skill while simultaneously coming to terms with living at altitude was a rude awakening, and made me acutely aware of the march of time. Not so much a matter of “I’m getting too old for this shit” as it was a reminder that the elastic resilience of youth really is wasted on the young. Slowly but surely, though, I began to figure out my ass from a hole in the ground.

Or so I thought. Until last week. Until Whistler. Until my first chairlift ride in 22 years. Until I found myself every day on a different bike, with different tires, in terrain so alien and confounding and challenging on every single sensory level that it just didn’t matter that the bikes were unfamiliar or that I couldn’t read the tires or that there were sometimes even little electric motors to try and help overcome the massive paradigm shift that was beating the tar out of me. I flailed. I flailed hard. I flailed for days on end.

“It takes a little adjustment, but you’ll get used to it.” I heard those words a lot during the last week. Maybe they are true, I don’t know. I spent so much of my riding time swinging between paralyzing fear and swooning rushes of adrenaline that I can’t say that my riding leveled up in any measurable way. There were moments where I felt like maybe I was getting used to it, when I began to feel some rhythm and could push my hips back and get the front wheel up and avoid getting pummeled by the relentless roots and holes, almost feel in control, but they were fleeting. A long winter and spring of Zone 2 noodling did absolutely nothing for my upper body conditioning, nor did it prepare me for any of the many, many sharp jabs of power needed to survive just a few kilometers of old school jank. I was not riding the bike, so much as the bike was riding me. I was a passenger, perched atop 180mm of unfamiliar travel, suddenly incredibly grateful for all that travel and all those brakes, but never really able to get on top of things and take charge.

The bike park only served to further emphasize just how narrow my band of mountain biking reality has become. Hammering the o-rings clean off the shafts at both end of the bike, simultaneously trying to remember everything I have forgotten about ass to the outside, knee to the inside swings, getting low, staying bent, trying for all my life to stay on top of the bike as it accelerated away from me through chunked out berms, desperately trying to keep my fingers from squandering my speed with nervous little flutters of the brakes on the face of Every Single Fucking Jump, hands shaking with a combination of fatigue and giddy nervous exhilaration at the bottom of every dust-filled run. Who is this old kook in an open face helmet and no goggles anyway? Why does he look so scared?

One of the jokes that I continue to reinforce at nsmb.com is that I am the token short travel guy. It’s incorrect to assume that I am an XC guy, because it is clearly evident by my growing waistline and diminishing wattage that I am not tilting at that particular windmill with any perceivable vigor. But I have been pretty open and up front about the self-imposed terrain/style/whatever parameters that I’ve set. It should be pretty obvious to most everyone by now that I can’t jump for shit. But, god damn, I used to believe I could still ride some tech, had enough residual skills left to survive a few days of real chunk. One week up north blew that house of cards all the way down.

Things I learned: Mullet bikes exist for a reason. There is no such thing as a too-big brake rotor. Even though there’s no such thing as too much brake rotor, try not to use them at all in the park. 180mm of travel is not excessive. Buying a used bike in Whistler is probably a bad idea. When someone says “Yeah, this trail’s a bit kicked to shit right now,” what they really mean is your forearms will explode sometime in the next 15 minutes. Beware of small women dressed in pink.

There were moments of progression that broke the surface of the oily adrenal skim, about as rare and as difficult to process as a sighting of the Loch Ness monster rippling the calm lake waters on a foggy day. They would bubble up, add some dopamine to the fear sweat, briefly buoy my confidence; a reflexive launch off a rock drop, a long slab roll ridden without hesitation, skimming the tops of a series of holes in a minefield of rocks and roots. Then seconds later it would all fall apart again, rear tire jamming into my ass, handlebar punching chest, momentum awkwardly and abruptly ceasing as yet another duffy cavity ate the bike and me whole. Back to square one. Reset to zero.

There are matching scars on both my thighs. In a mirror, they would spell out L-E-A-T-T, as if I had been branded by enthusiastic purveyors of South African apparel. There is an odd bruising on my scrotum. It might have been from when I nutted myself somewhere down Million Dollar in the park, or it might have been when I executed a perfect rear-tire-to-ass-buzz-groin-to-seat reaction right as I dropped off a perfectly innocent set of planks somewhere uphill of the dumpsters. That latter one necessitated a little sit down and cry moment. The nutting hurt, but what really made me want to cry was being so completely owned by a trail that wasn’t as harsh as what I’d been riding for the previous four days. My hands hurt. My legs hurt. My shoulders hurt. I feel rickety and old. My lifelong struggle with imposter syndrome isn’t doing my psyche any favors.

I’m listening to the rain patter gently on the window of a hotel room in Lonsdale. Seagulls are screaming at crows. The coffee is really good. In a few hours I will be back across the border, and in a few days will be back in Colorado in my now familiar, buttery smooth by comparison alpine environment. I am leaving here completely beaten down.

I am already itching to come back. Cedar scent lodged in my nostrils, taste of huckleberry lingering on my tongue, a million different trail puzzles dissembling and reassembling in my head. I’m not done getting schooled. Old dogs can learn new tricks, it turns out, but the lessons can get a bit ugly and may need to be repeated many, many times.