Sometimes when you ride trails your momentum is symphonic and your body moves in harmony with your bike. Your bike performs as it should; just as it did the day it rolled off the show room floor. Your senses become heightened and your mind's eye enables you to transcend the obstacles immediately in front of you and you feel as if you know what is around the next corner long before you get there. You develop somewhat of a sixth sense which facilitates a relaxed response and subtle reactions to whatever is coming your way at great speed. But it is not always so.
Sometimes, despite your best efforts to the contrary, you demonstrate all the competence and composure of a train wreck. Instead of using the perturbations in the trails to propel you from one corner into the next, those same perturbations seem to just propel you from one obstacle into the next. On days like these there are a number of things you should remember. Your bike weighs about 115 kg and the crushing force caused by inertia increases exponentially with an increase in speed. Though the sand, loam or clay on the track may be soft like a baby's bum, the underlying sandstone, quartzstone, granites, bauxite or ironstone is neither flexible nor malleable. Tree trunks are immobile and fallen logs are very cryptic. When you ride you paint a target on your back and you invite any and all of these exigences to take you out.
When we are having a good ride, we feel like we are pretty accomplished riders. We don't crash very often and we feel like we cut a pretty quick pace through the scrub. We have been doing it for a while, we have all the right gear and we pilot pretty decent bikes. It would be safe to say that, for the most part, we are satisfied with our own ability.
And then it happens: we cross paths with a couple of other riders that look the same as us, ride the same bikes that we ride on the same trails that we ride; but they ride so very much better than we do. It shouldn't be humbling or disheartening, but it is.
Riding a tight twisty single track in Mundaring just recently my buddy and I were pulled over track side when two such riders came upon us. We chatted for a while exchanging trail tales and bike settings, We sniffed around each others machines like dogs smelling each others backsides. I took them to be no different to us in any way; as riders I did not anticipate their being any better or any worse than us because, in our minds, we are good enough to be average and average enough to be good. I could not have been further off the mark.
When they launched away from our track side pow wow I shot off in hot pursuit. I felt my light, agile KTM Freeride was easily the bike most suited to the trail we were riding and I felt like I was riding well. Thus I imagined myself nipping at their heels for as long as I felt the desire to put the wind up them. I could not have been further off the mark.
They vanished. It was like Blair Witch. Within meters, along the thinnest and most contorted single track a dirt bike was capable of negotiating these two guys literally vaporized. It was only that the shrub was impenetrable in every other direction that I could even conceive they had disappeared along the very same trail I was on. The only evidence of their presence was the faint odour of four stroke exhaust and freshly turned soil.
From this encounter I conclude the following: the ability to be a good rider is solely dependent on only one thing; a complete disregard for self-preservation. As to how these guys, and girls, can function like this with a helmet on and then function normally in society with their helmet off is beyond me, but I admire them for it.
This little log hop could be considered a rather skillful maneuver, but the track marks left by those two riders that went before us suggest that they did not even slow down to consider how they would negotiate this obstacle. Respect!
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