I’ve heard it said that you should do something every day that scares you a little bit. Not stupid, dangerous stuff, mind you, but activities that push you outside your comfort zone. While I certainly don’t accomplish this on a daily basis, I do try to make it a habit.
Trials biking certainly gives me the opportunity to push myself, to try things that are a little scary. This past weekend, I decided to try a move that was a little beyond my comfort zone, different from things I’d done before, that required doing things a little differently. For a pro trials rider, it’d probably be nothing, but for me, it was a little scary.
The gist was to ride a skinny used as a ramp and do a rolling pedal gap off the end of the skinny to land on the edge of a pallet about 3-4 feet away, balanced on my rear wheel (see below for loose definitions of the terms). I did crash a few times, but I also got the thrill of doing it… not quite perfectly, but still close. I had to fail the first few times to figure out how fast to go in order to clear the gap, when to lift the front wheel before the pedal kick, etc. The only way to do it was by working through the fear and failing until I got the hang of it.
I captured it on video, which you can see in the first few minutes of the YouTube video below.
Terms:
- Gap: (n) A set of obstacles spaced a ways apart. (v) To hop from one obstacle to another without touching the ground between them.
- Pedal gap: (n) To hop across a gap using a kick of the pedals while rolling.
- Skinny: (n) A narrow obstacle that the rider traverses lengthwise (e.g., riding along a rail or beam).
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