3CogBlog.com

  Last year, riding up the road from the parking lot to the trailhead, reminded me that I absolutely sucked at a riding wheelies. After decades on a bike,I could hold the front wheel up for 10 ft at most. Even back when freeride started several of my friends learned to manual, I still had nothin'.   Then a year ago, my friend Zane started making FB posts, declaring that he was going to learn manuals, by practicing 30-40 minutes a day, every day. By the end of the summer he posted an amazing video of an endless manual down a hill. This gnawed at the back of my mind, he's over 40, I'm over 40. Maybe it is possible. Maybe wheelie skills aren't something that only the gifted are born with.   So around Christmas I started messing around popping wheelies in front of my house. I wanted to follow Zane's technique of solid repetition. I've read Malcolm Gladwell, I believed in the 10,000 hour rule.   So I tried on my own in the culdesac and got nowhere. Then I watche...

   I love to jump my mountain bike, it's my favorite part of riding. I could never ride with headphones, because I love to hear the silence when my tires leave the dirt. I guess it used to be silence, now it's my hub going RZZZZZ. If you jump big enough you actually feel like you've taken a land vehicle and briefly made it into a flying machine. Now you need to pilot it safely back to earth using only momentum and two huge gyroscopes.    I started out riding XC. Then I turned my back on it for a long time. The only climbs I would do were from the bottom of the dirt jump line, back to the top. As I neared forty, I knew there was no fitness to be found on the XL line, so I begged XC to take me back. Luckily singletrack doesn't hold a grudge.   Last season I heard from several riders who told me they'd like to jump, but they really don't know how to do it. They feel like they freeze up when their tires leave the ground, and jumping just hasn't had a place in ...

   It was naive of me to think I could just sit down and throw together a post about murders in Left Hand Canyon. I'm not into true crime shows or podcasts. I don't know how those writers do it. With each new detail I read, the stories just became more sad and bleak. I felt like a ghoul as I uncovered each new tale of a life lost.   So why even bother? Shouldn't things in the past just stay in the past? The blood on the trail has long since faded into the dirt under our tires. When we go out in those woods on our mountain bikes we experience pure joy and happiness.  Should that be tainted by the notion that on the very same spot, some people experienced the brutal last moments of their lives?   I don't have any of these answers. But I started to feel that if we are going to dance on graves we should at least be aware that the graves are there. Ok, maybe not graves, but at least crime scenes. I'm not going to get into the details of each crime, you can click t...

  The process of using high voltage electricity to attach two pieces of metal together was first developed in the ancient land of Eternia by a master swordsmith named Heman. Heman would craft the blade of the sword and the hilt as two separate pieces of refined steel alloy. Then he would set the hilt onto the blade and hold it aloft during a lightning storm. His muscular build would serve as the ground point for the current flow and through this process, he would create a metal arc weld, fusing the two sections into one solid piece of sword .   Ok, some of that might not be true. But, it was more fun than writing this... Twice upon a time, all the major nations of the world engaged each other in bloody conflicts that spanned the globe. During the second one of these conflicts all production of fun things like bikes was halted and manufacturing focused solely on the assembly of weapons. In order to build bombs and torpedoes faster, new techniques for electric arc welding wer...

   Monarch pass isn't the scariest mountain pass in Colorado. That title belongs to Red Mountain pass out of Ouray. Red Mountain has a monument dedicated to snowplow drivers on it that reads, " This monument is dedicated to those who have given the supreme sacrifice in the maintenance of Red Mountain Pass. The lonely vigil of the night is known only to those men of courage .'' On the plaque is a list of drivers who have died, and it's easy to notice that there is still room left at the bottom to put more names.    No, Monarch isn't the scariest, the highest or the most remote, but I like it. Either side has passing lanes going up, so you don't have to be stuck behind tractor trailers slowly grinding up it, or terrified tourists crossing their first high mountain pass. Traveling from east to west is nice, you get to hug the mountainside. But the real fun begins when you start to climb up from Sargents and tackle the pass the other way. Driving the outsid...

  " You know, years ago when people were fired up about something they did, they could show it. Give a fist pump or the full-on hands raised, whatever. Look at team sports, they still go nuts. But somewhere along the way, in all action sports, outside of competition, it was no longer cool to look stoked, even if you just did the sickest thing in your life. You had to contain it, and look all nonchalant. Because apparently, doing that showed you were 'so good' that you felt like 'ya, that's pretty standard for me.'  'Who came up with that one? Well I say, screw the cool-guy standard procedure, because when I'm fired up to be in a certain place or I just pulled off something sick, I'm not going to be afraid to show it. I'm gonna let people know. I'm gonna Claim !"  These are the words of the skiing legend Shane McConkey , spoken at the beginning of the greatest ski movie ever, Match Stick Production's 2008 film CLAIM. If you don...

   It's hard to believe magazines have taken such a nose dive out of relevance. Now the only magazines I encounter are on the table in a waiting room. There was a time when  that glossy stack of paper folded in half and stapled together was like a portal to another dimension. I could gaze for hours into this other dimension and see the place where I belonged. I could see my tribe.    In a bike magazine, the world existed for bikers. I could see bikes blasting into the air out of huge half pipes. Or I could see bikes doing flatland tricks on Hollywood Boulevard. It was proof that this biking thing existed.    The first bike magazines were formed out of the BMX racing culture. BMX racing had peaked before my time and was established as good clean All-American fun. It was fairly easy to explain to Grandpa that you like to race your bike around the track and go faster than the other guys. In a magazine like BMX Plus, every rider wore a full factory ra...