Opinion: No Bad Rides

How many mountain bike rides have you been on in your life? 50? 400? 2,000? I was thinking about this the other day, trying to do some rudimentary arithmetic to figure out the number of times I'd thrown a leg over a bike and headed for the hills. My math skills aren't the greatest, especially a few hours deep into a ride, but by my calculations I'm probably somewhere around the 2,000 ride mark (100 days of riding a year over the course of 20 years). It's a very rough estimate, but factoring in days off the bike due to injuries or other obligations it's probably pretty close to accurate, and even if every one of those rides was for only two hours, that would still equate to riding all day, every day for five and a half months straight. That's a lot of pedaling. And the strange thing is, I'm still just as addicted as the first time I put knobby tires to dirt.

Even stranger is the fact that when I think back, I can't remember having a bad ride. That may seem odd, an overly optimistic, glass-half-full type of sentiment, and I wholeheartedly agree. Except that it's the truth. Part of me thinks I may have some sort of amnesia that causes my brain to erase rides that didn't go as planned, because I really can't think of one I wouldn't go on again. Sure, there have been countless less-than-ideal situations – torn off derailleurs, flat tires, bee stings, missed turns that lead to hours of bushwacking, freezing rain, sweltering sun, you name it, but I still wouldn't say that any of those rides was actually 'bad.' At the end of the day, those mishap filled episodes end up being even more memorable than the ones that go off without a hitch. Of course, there are abrupt endings to rides that I have no desire to relive – the time a tree put itself in the path of my elbow, or the evening dirt jump session that ended with a flight in an air ambulance – incidents that are not high on my list of 'things that are fun,' but even those rides were great up until the moment of impact, and I'd gladly repeat them, just without the trip to the hospital at the end.

With trails like this, how can you have a bad ride?

One of the benefits of not being able to remember bad rides is that it makes it that much easier to find the motivation to head out the door for a spin. As much as I love mountain biking, there are still those days that the grey sky and pissing rain makes venturing outdoors a little less appealing than spending some quality time sprawled on the couch. But then I remind myself that every ride I've been on has been worth it, and that's the little kick I need to start getting geared up to hit the trails. For me, mountain biking is like sandpaper for the brain, smoothing, erasing the burrs made from the worries and doubts that arise from the strangeness of daily life. There's nothing better than a long ride for pushing aside that mental clutter, providing a clearer view of the world, like scraping a thick layer of frost off a frozen windshield.

At times I've tried to broaden my horizons, dabbling in rock climbing or backpacking in attempts to feel less like an idiot savant who's incapable of doing anything non-mountain bike related. But those efforts have all failed, and before long I'm back in the forest careening around and over roots and rocks, the satisfied grin of an addict getting his fix plastered across my face. Maybe once hoverboards or personal jet packs come onto the market I'll have a replacement sport that will take priority over cycling, but until then I'll be sticking to what I know best – riding bikes in the woods.