Issue 157 Last Word – Catastrophe!157

After a dozen years of incident-free mountain biking, luck ran out for my wife in October and she found her foot pointing sideways after an innocuous slide-out into a gravel car park. Thanks to the wonders of the French health service, her foot was swiftly returned to the right direction and the additional broken ankle was plated and bolted. Ten weeks later, she did her first off road ride post-accident and, along with some stern physio, is showing every sign of returning to her previous form.

However, one side effect of her crash is that her active imagination insists on catastrophising just about every situation. Root on the trail? Then it’s bound to catch a stray wheel and throw her onto the ground. Random rock? It’s going to leap under her tyres and – bam! – down again. And it’s not limited to bicycles. While I was making coffee in some smart new mugs, she admitted that she was already imagining myriad ways in which they could throw themselves onto the tiled floor and shatter. 

Luckily, the sensible bit of her brain knows that it’s just imagination and it hasn’t affected her riding, but it did get me thinking about how differently everyone perceives risk. 

Many riders, especially newcomers, can’t help but fear every off-road obstacle, and persuading them that ‘speed is your friend’ is always a battle. At the other end of the scale you have massively talented riders who can always visualise a successful run through the rocks. In their mind, there is no obstacle to a fast and smooth run down the hill. Every risk is measured against their known abilities mental spreadsheet. If the drop or jump is similar to a previously successfully ridden problem, then it gets the green light, no debate. 

As always seems the way, I fall somewhere between these two extremes. I’m moderately risk averse, yet I can get down some reasonably technical trails. I’m aware that some trails have edges and drops off the side, but I choose not to think about them while riding. I figure that if I randomly ping across the trail and find myself pointing into thin air, then I’d probably have a go at working something out there and then. Every trail situation is so different that there’s no learnable magic move to keep you intact, you’re better off riding the time-stretching wave of adrenaline as you paw at random twigs on the edge of the drop. 

I did manage to sail off one drop due to a lack of forward planning. There was a simple drop-off into a small grassy clearing, hip-height and with a steep and loose enough run-in that you were committed the moment you turned onto it. After a bit of psyching up, I committed to the drop and landed intact, but I’d been so focused on it, that I hadn’t given any thought to the rather small landing zone and what I was going to do when I got there once I’d landed. Turns out there was a second drop at the edge of the clearing and my panicked weight-back throw upon landing saw an impressive manual turn into a full backflip attempt as I bouncing-bombed my way across the grass on my backpack, only to disappear out of view, having thrown my bike somewhere into a tree. 

Like many mountain bike offs, it seems the more dramatic the fall, the more likely it is that you’ll emerge unscathed. In my case, I found myself stood upright at the bottom of the second drop, absentmindedly dusting myself down. And in my wife Beate’s case, her biggest dramatic launch was big enough to be seen from Strava Space as her trace disappeared off a grassy, Patterdale descent, to come to an unharmed and upright stop, some five metres off the side of the trail. 

Sometimes, it seems better to keep on the gas, despite the misgivings of your disaster-brain. Ignore the big risks, the big drops and the big consequence moves – you’ll just make it up when you get to them, no problem; instead, concentrate on coming to a smooth and predictable stop at the end of every ride. Get that mastered and the massive bits in between will look after themselves.