Finding Joy and Self-Love on the Trail

I’ve been trying to find ways to articulate my intuitive knowledge that riding a bike on the trail heals us. 

Too much of the emphasis has been on an aggressive, dominator approach to mountain biking. What happens if we shift our perspective from slashing, ripping, and subduing the trail to seeing the trail as our dance partner?

It’s not a perfect analogy, but it’s something that came to me more than 20 years ago riding in Fruita, Colorado on Horsethief Bench during the Fruita Fat Tire Festival. If you’ve never been there, Horsethief Bench is a beautiful example of Southwestern desert riding- ledgy, loose, with sections of deep sand and gorgeous slickrock features. 

Riding this trail requires strength, timing, precision, and balance. On this particular day, I seemed to be lacking in all of these. But the person I was behind, a guy by the name of Pete Weber, had them in abundance. For every ledge that I mistimed and smashed my chainring into, he seemed to float  over. Each rocky descent that I struggled to keep my tires rolling over he just flowed through like water. 

It occurred to me that while I was watching a dancer in the joyful expression of their art, I was fumbling through basic steps with two left feet!

I had been cursing the trail, my failing skillset, my bike… you name it. Now, with that image of the trail as my dance partner, my attitude changed. I was able to be kinder to myself- I did race the day before; I had only ridden this trail a couple of times, and there had been close to a year between those; Pete was a much more skilled rider than me and quite frankly put in a lot more saddle time than I did. Viewing the trail as a partner challenged me to do better if I wanted to keep up, and removed a great deal of the sense of adversity that I had been experiencing. 

This new perspective has brought me a great deal of happiness and joy on the trail, more than I would have thought possible. It has not only changed my approach to riding, but it has improved the communication and connection I’ve had with other trail users. 

Ask yourself: is fighting the trail bringing me more fun, or more frustration?