Mountain Biking: Yellow Shirts Beware!

I love mountain biking. Hang around the Niagara Escarpment on any given weekend and you’ll see me put putting around, my teeth clenched whilst I try to navigate a slew of rocks. Most likely you’ll see me fall. Most likely you’ll hear me curse. Most likely you will laugh at my folly.

It’s a fairly new passion for me. It started 2 years ago when a friend (from here on out known as Shortstuff) asked me if I wanted to go along and ride some back trails near some lime kilns. Bored with nothing better to do (Smoke and Origination was slowly being rebuilt at this point) I opted to go. I had this crappy Canadian Tire 18 Speed Supercycle which I rarely rode.

As a kid, a bike was more of a means of transport, not so much a fun vehicle to play with for me. When I went out with my friends to the kilns for the first time, it was a blast. Despite being terrible and unable to reconcile the shifting, the act of riding filled a void I was ignorant of in myself.

Shortstuff and Prison Pot

My partners are an interesting lot. Our first fearless rider is Shortstuff. Shortstuff is short, obnoxiously super motivated when it comes to any sort of athletics. It can get grating and warrants a sound thrashing. He enjoyed at this time a good beer or 2 while riding.

Second partner, and for the most part, leader, is Prison Pot. Very nice fellow who looks like he was in prison and has extremely good pot. Always a little `cloudy’ while riding. Extremely experienced rider and a great motivator. Miscellaneous characters would pop in from time to time like Porkasaurus (Prison Pot’s nick name for this fellow and is comfortable with said name) and this absolutely obnoxious fuckwit from Newfoundland who needs to get acquainted with a plague. The last guy who occasionally rides with us, Ghost, I will talk about later on. He has an interesting story.

The Regimen

I started riding 3 times a week. 2 times with Shortstuff and once with Shortstuff and Prison Pot. The initial rides would be on Sundays and Shortstuff would bring beer. After an hour we would drain one or two then go back riding. This particular ritual did not last long for I found the beer to slow me down and hard to breathe. Rides would range from fair to poor based on my raging temper and inexperience.

A ritual that became all too commonplace was fixing the Supercycle after a ride. I would spend maybe 2-3 hours every other day fixing the bike so it was ready for the next ride. This included re-aligning the derailleurs, tightening brakes and adjusting the spokes in the wheels to get the warps out. With a real bike, you don’t have to do this as often.

The Inevitable N00b Injury

Not long into my riding exploits I bruised my ribs. incapacitated 7 weeks. Ugh. I remember it fondly.

We were in Hilton Falls, Short Stuff and myself. I borrowed my neighbor’s Tim Hortons Coffee bike. (Supercycle was `in the shop’ so to speak) Neighbor won it in one of those `Roll up the Rim to Win’ contests. Yes non-Canadians, it does sound rather saucy.

Anyhoo, the terrain of Hilton is fairly technical for a new rider. Naturally I didn’t do so well and the Tim Horton’s loose suspension didn’t help. One of the curiosities of this day was this guy walking around the bike trails (no hikers allowed) and he refused to get out of our way. We saw him 4 times on 4 different trails, just walking around. I was suspicious and had much contempt for him. Go to the waterfalls with the other walking plebs, man. “Fall over and tear your rectum”  I thought nonchalantly. As the day ended, we went to the exit. The exit is a fairly steep downhill which ended in an area that is populated by a lot of stupid clumsy children and innattentive uteruses with cell phones. So you have to take to the brakes going down.

I started going down and there was that fuckwit again walking blithely down the hill. Shortstuff, with a better bike and skills, navigated around the guy and warned me by yelling that someone was there. I went around the bend and saw the fucker near the bottom. I was accelerating too quickly. I yelled for him to get out the way. He didn’t. My rear brakes overtook my front brakes; the rear wheel started to wobble and inevitably slid to the right of me. It seized the motion of the bike and I was catipulted over the bike.

I slid 25 feet on that gravel. My entire left side of my body was ripped open superficially. My helmet split mostly in half. In my dazed state I still managed to get up to throw the helmet, throw the bike and start screaming at the guy who should not have been on that trail. No response. Little fucking bomb making child rapist. I’ll never forget your mousy face and your anthrax in the envelope glasses. I hope your prostate has a weight problem.

Shortstuff helped me to his truck, got the bike in and we drove home. Tried to clean the wounds with the first aid kit as best as possible. Got home to be greeted by a most worried missus who spent many hours tending to my wounds. Painkillers and a fine beer got me through that night.

Then the next day the pain in the ribs started. Walking was a pain in the ass because from my ankle to my chest was one big scab. As you know, scabs are stiff. By moving I was breaking them open.  And from there I did the whole x-ray/doctor/get rest crap. Shortstuff and Prison Pot were relieved to hear that I still wanted to go back out biking despite my experience.

Death of the Supercycle

The Supercycle did not last the summer. On a downward ski trail in Kelso I kept wiping out going down the hill. This hill was the BIG PAYOFF man. The last rush before the end of the ride. I wiped out going around the curves more due to 2 asshole experienced riders behind me who were kind of pressuring me to go faster to accomodate their fucking speed needs. By the time I got down the hill (much later than my partners) I got off the bike and kicked it over and over again. I’m a queen of misplaced anger. Well, I snapped off one of the gear shifters. So the bike was stuck in a super hard gear. I was unable to find the right replacement gear shifter for the bike so I scrapped it.

Metaphysics and the Yellow Bike

Shortstuff was generous enough to lend me indefinitely his yellow Kona frame with an assortment of mutt parts. 21 speed and unknown to me infinitely better. Shortstuff got a fancy pants $1500 Garry Fisher bike. As soon as I got on that Kona I felt like a better rider. All that time on the Supercycle, that unreasonably heavy beast that felt impossible to get up a hill, built up my strength and technical skills. The rest of the summer was filled with rides with minor scrapes and cuts. I started to see the metaphysics of riding a bike and would lose myself in all sorts of thoughts and finding correlations between riding and some modern occult thinking. Stuff like `walking metaphors’ and such. Yes readers, there are times where I deserve to wear a black turtleneck, smoke clove cigarettes and a richly deserved beating.

The Hills Have Thighs. Big, meaty, ham smelling ones.

The difficulty of riding up steep hills I take very personally. If I can’t get up a certain hill, that will definitely put me in a sour mood. I see hills as very legitmate metaphors for daily life. If I cannot overcome a hill, how can I overcome other obstacles in my life? To add to the frustration, the Kona derailleur had some serious issues in the low gears (aka granny gears.) If you needed to go to the lower gears the chain would skip and whatever momentum was there is gone. For good. You walk up the rest of the way. On top of the physical inability to get up certain hills, I have the mechanical problems as well.

But I learned how to get around that thanks to Prison Pot: Stay in Middle gear. Always. Never drop to the lowest cog (granny gears) and just plow on. The gears are more stable though more friction is present. I adapted and now…hills aren’t so bad, with few exceptions.

My best ride of that year was when I got fed up with my baggy shorts and rode in my underwear. Much to the disappointment (or secret enthrallment) of my partners this just had to be. Perhaps my `enhanced’ performance had to do with the reality that if I fell, it would not feel like a stripper pillow fight.

Yellowshirts: 

You fucks with your yellow short sleeve spandex shirts and Santa Cruz bikes: Open your mouths in front of a shit gun* You are insipid sewage. You bring annoyances and traffic to this sport. Your Extreme energy drink Sales and Marketing Weekend Cock Bonding is a pox upon riders. Go back to your condo where you can be a harmless blight to the skyline. Get off the fucking trail.

*Thanks lil Jimmy Norton. And to close off with an anecdote from the great comedian:

2 riders walk into a club after a ride. One had a number 5 on his back and the other the number 11. Jimmy Norton tells them:

“I hope numbers 6 through 10 are dead.”

~ by ikonowerk on October 23, 2007.