While most of the crew struggled to do anything during this ride, Scott threw himself at everything with persistence, even after half the crew was done riding. He demonstrated a combination of successes, near wins, and spectacular fails, all of which were fun to watch. Aside from Scott, the rest of us pretty much rode lower consequence lines that were pretty chill. But even that stuff can be challenging and fun to ride.
Coming into this ride, one of us (actually not me) started out with a bit of a handicap due to a hard fall a day or two prior, unrelated to trials, which lead to some pain while riding. Being trials riders, that often doesn’t stop us from being on the bike, of course, but the pain does tend to throttle back the riding, even if unintentionally. Though you would not necessarily notice it – some people seem to have a high pain tolerance.
This particular location (Haley Farm State Park) is located where there are mountain bike trails, so we occasionally see mountain bikers pass through. In some cases, we know some of them (most of the crew rides MTB also), but other cases we don’t. Sometimes, like on this day, the mountain bikers stop to chat, watch us ride a bit, and maybe even get on a trials bike. That aspect of this location makes it a great place to provide public outreach. Any opportunity to interact with other bikers is an opportunity to attract more riders to the sport. Interestingly, I believe that since most of us in the local group are not expert riders, what the mountain bikers see is probably more relatable. I believe it’s good to have a combination of skill levels to demonstrate – the experts wow the public by showing what is possible, but the beginner and intermediate level riding is probably more relatable to the non-trials public.
Typical for our group rides, there was a good level of witty banter and commentary. One of the funniest little discussions from the ride went like this:
Tim: If my brakes weren’t slippy…
Scott: And if I didn’t suck so much.
Jim: For some reason, and I don’t know why, but not sucking so much really helps a lot. That’s one of my biggest problems is I suck so much.
Tony: It’s not cuz we suck so much, how come we suck so long? Right? We’ve been, like, shit riders for years.
Jim: That’s because we only ride once per week. And don’t maintain our “vehicles.”
We might not be champion riders, but we were in the woods riding bikes, and hanging out together. That in itself is a win in my book.
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Rocks and Logs, We Ride It All - This Is Bike Trials! · December 28, 2023 at 7:44 am
[…] There was also a good bit of humor throughout the ride, which is one of the magical ingredients of the group ride experience – at least it is with our crew. One of which is the reason for the video title. If you’ve watched many of our group ride videos, you probably know that even after years of riding, Jim still has not been able to wrap his brain around doing pedal kicks. Tony provided some good ribbing to Jim about not doing pedal kicks, which included the phrase that became the video title. One of the other examples was Tony’s reaction to Scott doing lines that can be a bit ridiculous. In Tony’s words, “Scott’s ability to fear is broken.” Some of that apparent lack of fear shone through during the prior week’s group ride. […]