New Horizons

I'm still buzzing a little from the Singlespeed Punk Bike Enduro at the 'Shed last weekend. Riding up there - and getting broke in with a lot of super strong folks on singles - pretty much blew me away. There were more rocks than I could have imagined. Given that rocks and hills are kryptonite to my weak-ass Superman impression, I was over my head pretty much all day. It was good though. I spent most of the spring and summer pushing my limits outwards just a little bit at a time. Each ride usually had a little feature or two where I stretched just a touch. By diving so far into the deep end in the company of excellent riders, most of whom ride the 'Shed constantly, I had to stretch hard all damned day. No crashes, even rode decently in a few places. A couple times, on some very long twisty descents, I had to stop though - just to let my mind unspool a bit. Technical mountain biking is only a little bit difficult physically. Mentally though... it's hard. It's all about reading the trail, processing your options, picking lines, and putting all those inputs into context using the feedback that the trail and bike are giving you.

"Skill" on a mountain bike does have a physical component to it, but it isn't really a physical thing. It is mentally being able to process all the inputs, make good choices, and to be able to adjust on the fly dynamically as the bike slides or the trail throws you into different places or as trail features get closer and become clearer and more detailed. Each time the bike or trail adjusts your trajectory, the thousand little calculus operations performed by your brain have to be re-run to reflect the new angle of approach. After a while this becomes mentally exhausting and on a twisty, rocky trail strewn with babyheads, sharp rocks, logs, drops, trees and tight turns, you can feel the formulas and vectors backing up in your head the way the keyboard buffer on your old computer would fill up when you typed too fast. You have to pause for 30 seconds, let the buffer empty, then begin again with a clear head.

Mountain biking skill, in some ways, is nothing more than having ridden enough features to have built up a ready vocabulary that allows to you intuitively read the trail. A "skilled" rider glances down the trail and quickly understands how particular little chunks of the trail will ride, where the front wheel will get tossed to the left a few inches, where the rear will slide out a bit, which line looks good but will ride bad and throw the bike into the weeds, which pile of rocks looks deadly but actually offers three or four good angles of attack. I am not a skilled rider.

I'm looking forward to riding some rocks at Patapsco tomorrow. Should be a lot easier in a lot of ways than it has been in the past. The flowy easy bits will seem exceptionally easy in comparison to most days.

It's good to blow through your limits once in a while. It opens up new horizons. I'm definitely going to make it a priority to spend more time at the 'Shed and Gambrill.

In honor of Joe Whitehair and the whole crew on the SS Punk Bike Enduro, Watershed Edition... Have Some Punk.

A Lisa Salerno Fb comment put me in mind of this one.



The Minutemen are a band that just doesn't get as much respect as it deserves. RickyD was playing this on the boom box during the ride and I immediately recognized it... So nice. A little chunk of the mid-80's in the middle of a very tough ride. So comforting.



This is a pretty good song too. I have no idea what it's supposed to mean, but it's tight.



Then you got Black Flag. I have no idea why I liked this so much at the time, but I really likede it. It's possible that as a young man I had some issues with rage.



I liked the Ramones a lot too. They had a different sort of energy, a little more upbeat.



Then there's one of the more underrated punk bands of all time - the Dead Kennedys. Listening to these guys now, I realize that they are really tight musically. This song is a pretty good example of it. Looks like they were 25 years too early for the Occupy movement, but a bunch of dudes who toured in a van would have fit in better with (upper middle) class warrior protestors than that rich cockroach Zack de la Roche.



They weren't just transgressive. The DK's had a fine sense of humor, and they were pretty happy to skewer political correctness wherever they encountered it. In addition to Penis Landscape - a scatological album cover (then insert) for their Frankenchrist album, they came up with this little video - an all midget version of Rawhide.



Yeah, that's a tall glass of WTF right there. Here's something that's a little more conventional, and a version of a classic song that fits the amped-up version of Las Vegas that we're familiar with.



There is other good music lurking around there in the punk movement. Seminal garage punk / psychobilly band The Cramps were pretty good. I think that most of the early rockabilly stars would have been surprised to find a groundbreaking punk act relying on their stuff. But hey, you get good music where you find it, and you shoudln't discriminate against genre. If you like it, you like it. Be happy.



You know who they remind me of a little bit? These guys:



Wait, am I saying The Trashmen invented punk? Maybe. And I have The Authorities on my side.



Maybe Dick Dale had something to do with it. That California surf music scene was pretty dynamic. It's really not fair to call it surf music - that ghettoizes it. The influence of songs like Dale's "Nitro" was much more widespread. You see the roots of LA punk, speed metal, hardcore, all sorts of modern musical forms in his driving guitar riffs.



And check it out - a 1960's version of a mosh pit.



And with that I'm outta here.