I have a love-hate relationship with mountainbiking. When things are going great there's nothing more exhilarating than bailing off a hill fast, sliding around corners just barely missing the tree, or catching the board across the water just right. When things aren't going so good, well I always swear I'm not attempting the lunacy anymore, no-way no-how, yet I always find myself back out there battling the trails yet again.
That being said, I absolutely hate sections of our local trail, I swear the guys that built it made it too difficult on purpose to keep everybody elso off. It didn't help matters any that it had been almost 2 months since it had been dry enough to get out there and ride without tearing it up. Yeah, I was a little out of practice.
A friend describes the trail as very technical and as I've written before that's fancy talk for too damn many rocks. I don't think I'm ever going to get over my fear of the rocks, esp. on the downhills. Keep seeing them as a fasttrack to another broken bone. Didn't help any that James endo'ed right at the beginning, he ended up with scrapes and cuts on his nose, shoulder, and a swollen arm. Didn't stop him from getting back up and riding though, lol.
1. Black (or blue) racer snakes are scary fast! We interrupted one hunting and I'm still surprised it didn't come back at us
2. Catching your front brake lever on vines will stop you immediately. Especially if you have disc brakes.
3. Don't try to go straight thru the middle of a small body of water even if you made it across it in February--mired in mud up to my ankles, ewww.
4. Wear insect repellent! James and I both have a mess of tick bites right now and we both grew up here so we knew better.
5. Blackberry vines are not any fun to scrape up against.
6. Shin guards are very, very, very nice to have, esp. when you ride over a stick that stabs straight up into your leg (in my case the guard stopped it but not after pushing it up my leg an inch or 2)
7. It's ok to walk down an exceptionally technical area, just move over to let other people by so they don't yell at you.
8. Be nice to the turtles or box tortoises and help them across the road if you can stop and do so--Good karma :-) as long as you move them over in the direction they were headed.
9. Carry a cell phone if you're riding with a couple of daredevils that are building new creek or hazard crossings as they go (actually I was kind of wishing we had our flip cam!).
Hmmm, maybe Monday was more fun than I thought at the time, still hate the Searcy trails though, LOL.
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