urbaindk
March 21st, 2006, 03:03 PM
Hi all, glad to see that More is interesting in us freeriders.
I've been riding MTB's for 15 years now (and bmx before that). When I started riding, I was attending the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and living down town in the heart of the city. On the weekends we'd load up a crappy college cars with bikes and head to the nearest singletrack and ride our little xc hearts out. But that wouldn't do during the week. It was either too far to the single track, nobody had gas money, or if it was winter - dark at 5 pm. So to get our fix we took to the streets. A couple of us were little skate punks so we knew where all the cool skate spots where and we'd head there across the city and ride the night away on our mtbs. We'd look for ledges, drops, concrete embankments, whatever, just to see who could get the biggest air, or ride up the wall the highest, or jump the furthest. We'd tear down hills through the city parks, ride trials style, whatever, we were free to do what ever we felt like. It was a very communal experience with all the riders pushing and coaxing each other along. Now a days we call this urban trials, or urban assault, or just plain street. We didn't have a name for it back in 1991, we just did it.
Fast forward a couple years and two or three broken bikes later. I'm living in Chapel Hill NC now and going to grad school. I'm riding more traditional xc style, lots of miles, mostly for fitness, on what I consider fairly tame trails compared to some of the rocky hell trails in East TN. Lots of my friends start racing. I never felt that need to be competitive so I don't bother. A lot of my friends start to shun me because I don't race. I could no longer relate. I was bored. If I broke a part I might put the bike down for 6 months at a time and not even care.
Somewhere along the line I picked up a whitewater canoeing habit. I'm traveling all over the east coast paddling class IV and V rivers and totally addicted to adrenaline. I particularly liked running small technical creeks and waterfalls. After a nice long weekend of boating some boating friends ask me if I want to tag along for a MTB ride. Sure I say, why not. I get out the bike and dust it off, fix it up a bit. I think by this point I hadn't really ridden it in like 2 years.
Anyway that was the spark that go me going again. I started picking up the magazines in the grocery store, started surfing the web, etc. Pretty soon I figured out that the MTB world had changed while I was away. There was this new thing called "the northshore." (I naively thought they meant there was some weird stuff going on in the northshore of Hawaii and couldn't for the life of me figure out what a world famous surf break had to do with MTBing) After a little googling I figured it out. There's this new thing called "freeriding". People going out to the streets and to the woods to just ride and push themselves, and jump off stuff, up stuff, over stuff, create technical lines, build crazy Ewok-esque ladder structures, and push themselves and their riding partners.
Seeing all this happening really pushed me back towards my roots as a rider and to what I enjoyed most about riding in the first place. I've also found that unlike most xc riders that just hammer away the miles immersed in their own personal reverie, this new type of riding encourages interaction and camaraderie, with everybody pushing each other along.
The beauty of it is that the equipment has progressed so much that now all the stuff I could have only dreamed about (and stuff I never would have considered possible at all) 15 years ago is possible now. It only took 10-15 years to catch up to me.
I'm not the best rider out there but I continually push myself. The point is that it doesn't matter. Almost every time I ride I find that I can do something new; ride a technical rock garden clean for the first time, hit some new drop that's been haunting me, hit a jump faster and further than the last time out.
So that's my story. That's why I ride. The name "freeride" is really only a badge. It means nothing, and everything. Just ride.
Hey - this post is probably longer than most people's attention spans and definitely longer than 90% of the articles in MBA. Ha Ha. Congrats if you got this far!
I've been riding MTB's for 15 years now (and bmx before that). When I started riding, I was attending the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and living down town in the heart of the city. On the weekends we'd load up a crappy college cars with bikes and head to the nearest singletrack and ride our little xc hearts out. But that wouldn't do during the week. It was either too far to the single track, nobody had gas money, or if it was winter - dark at 5 pm. So to get our fix we took to the streets. A couple of us were little skate punks so we knew where all the cool skate spots where and we'd head there across the city and ride the night away on our mtbs. We'd look for ledges, drops, concrete embankments, whatever, just to see who could get the biggest air, or ride up the wall the highest, or jump the furthest. We'd tear down hills through the city parks, ride trials style, whatever, we were free to do what ever we felt like. It was a very communal experience with all the riders pushing and coaxing each other along. Now a days we call this urban trials, or urban assault, or just plain street. We didn't have a name for it back in 1991, we just did it.
Fast forward a couple years and two or three broken bikes later. I'm living in Chapel Hill NC now and going to grad school. I'm riding more traditional xc style, lots of miles, mostly for fitness, on what I consider fairly tame trails compared to some of the rocky hell trails in East TN. Lots of my friends start racing. I never felt that need to be competitive so I don't bother. A lot of my friends start to shun me because I don't race. I could no longer relate. I was bored. If I broke a part I might put the bike down for 6 months at a time and not even care.
Somewhere along the line I picked up a whitewater canoeing habit. I'm traveling all over the east coast paddling class IV and V rivers and totally addicted to adrenaline. I particularly liked running small technical creeks and waterfalls. After a nice long weekend of boating some boating friends ask me if I want to tag along for a MTB ride. Sure I say, why not. I get out the bike and dust it off, fix it up a bit. I think by this point I hadn't really ridden it in like 2 years.
Anyway that was the spark that go me going again. I started picking up the magazines in the grocery store, started surfing the web, etc. Pretty soon I figured out that the MTB world had changed while I was away. There was this new thing called "the northshore." (I naively thought they meant there was some weird stuff going on in the northshore of Hawaii and couldn't for the life of me figure out what a world famous surf break had to do with MTBing) After a little googling I figured it out. There's this new thing called "freeriding". People going out to the streets and to the woods to just ride and push themselves, and jump off stuff, up stuff, over stuff, create technical lines, build crazy Ewok-esque ladder structures, and push themselves and their riding partners.
Seeing all this happening really pushed me back towards my roots as a rider and to what I enjoyed most about riding in the first place. I've also found that unlike most xc riders that just hammer away the miles immersed in their own personal reverie, this new type of riding encourages interaction and camaraderie, with everybody pushing each other along.
The beauty of it is that the equipment has progressed so much that now all the stuff I could have only dreamed about (and stuff I never would have considered possible at all) 15 years ago is possible now. It only took 10-15 years to catch up to me.
I'm not the best rider out there but I continually push myself. The point is that it doesn't matter. Almost every time I ride I find that I can do something new; ride a technical rock garden clean for the first time, hit some new drop that's been haunting me, hit a jump faster and further than the last time out.
So that's my story. That's why I ride. The name "freeride" is really only a badge. It means nothing, and everything. Just ride.
Hey - this post is probably longer than most people's attention spans and definitely longer than 90% of the articles in MBA. Ha Ha. Congrats if you got this far!