daleyy

Back in the early 90s when mountain biking was just starting to take off, my mom worked at Deer Valley ski resort in Park City. A rather ritzy place where all the rich snobby people would go play. With her working there I got free lift passes whenever I wanted. It was neat, all I had to do was just show up and walk up to the lift and have a seat with my bike and I'd ride the lift all the way to the top of the mountain and ride down. Riding a bike down a mountain is VERY different from the riding I was used to. You can build up TONS of speed in no time at all. It's more like riding a motorcycle than riding a bike.

But anyway, this was right around the time that the MTB scene was taking off and I knew there'd be a lot of people there who had already situated themselves in the scene rather well. When I showed up there I saw all these pro riders with big names and stuff and was pretty nervous. Even though I was a pretty damn accomplished cyclist n racer myself, I just felt really out of place and was pretty nervous. Especially showing up with a bike that wasn't what was normally seen around there. And to boot, I was wearing full motocross gear. Them mountains are covered with rocks! No way in hell was I gonna go 60mph down a mountain wearing a tiny ass pair of spandex shorts and a lil spandex tank top. Fuck that! I went there with full gear on, full faced helmet with goggles, full padded motocross jersey and pants, chest protector, plastic n leather knee high motocross boots, full total body protection. Man, you shuolda seen the faces I got from people. That wasn't helping things for me to feel more out of place and just make me feel like i was in a really unfamiliar place.

Of course when you're in a totally unfamiliar environment and you're sure that there's people there who are very familiar with it, the natural thing to do is to follow everyone else. Which I did, following them to the lift gates and all that. When I got to riding down the trails I wasn't sure where to ride either. I'd never done this before and wasn't sure if I like had to stick to certain trails or what the deal was so I just went where along with the flow.

Now in off road riding, racing especially, the fastest way to go around a corner is in the rut. Dirt doesn't have much grip to it and as someone goes through a corner for the first time they push dirt up into a tiny little wall of dirt. As more people slip and slide about through the corner they'll go from the inside sliding toward the outside until they reach that lil wall of dirt which holds them in place. As more keep riding that rut it builds and builds until it's a big berm that you can basically go any speed you want and it'll hold you from sliding out.

Usually after a while there will be a few different ruts that form throughout a corner. Once you get used to riding in the ruts you can pick and choose wich rut you want to use and use them to REALLY go a lot faster. Of course I learned that rather early in my racing so it would be almost insane for me to think to ride on anything but in the ruts when I go around corners out there.

But when I was riding out there one thing became quite clear right off. These people that were riding out there? They had NO fucking clue at all how to ride. They had no idea where they were going, same as me. And what was much worse? They didn't even know how to fucking RIDE!

Every time I'd get to a corner I'd look at the ruts and think "Dude, that doesn't look right. Oh well, I'm sure it is. Remember, you're the noob here, you probably don't know how to ride around these trails as much as these guys. WRONG! EVERY SINGLE rut on almost every corner led straight into a tree. About half way down the mountain probably after 5 er 10 corners of that I was still thinking "ok, well they can't ALL do that, those were just the first corners. Surely the noobs who don't know what's going on gave up by then er something." Wrong. The whole way down there I would keep thinking to myself "Ok let's just follow those who have done this before" and EVERY time it put me into a fuckin' tree.

I learned a lot that day. Learned that just because someone else thinks that they're awesome and know what the hell they're doing (or talking about) doesn't really mean that they do. The best way down that mountain was to just let everyone else do whatever the hell they wanted and stay clear from them and go my own path. It was the only way to keep me from slammin into the fuckin' trees. Not to mention it was I was the fastest one there.