3CogBlog.com

  While I'm still injured seems like a good time to cover the topic of crashing. Normally I wouldn't want to mention it. I treat crashing and injury like "He who's name shall not be spoken." As if talking about the subject will cause it to appear. This is part of the superstition and mojo that I believe in. It's the same reason no one should say " Let's make this the last run and head on down." Calling it the last run puts a serious hex on that run and drastically increases the probability of a crash. My friend Rex will say, "Two more, skip the last." And another friend Gurion will call the final run a 'Victory Lap.' Both are ways to make the call without summoning the bad omens.   The last trip down the run can also be a way to break a hex. If you suffer a crash towards the end of the session, you should try everything in your power to complete a run after that without crashing. Ending the day on a crash taints the mojo of the ...

        A friend in California was telling me about one of his weekly surf sessions. He said that a shark had been spotted at his regular beach. Then he explained, "A shark only swims about 15 miles an hour, so we went to a beach 25 miles up the shore. I figured that would give us a solid hour before the shark could even get there."     I know his math is faulty, and yet, I understand his logic. Every thrill sport enthusiast creates their own twisted logic to convince themselves and others that whatever they're doing really isn't that dangerous. I mean seriously, you can get hit by a bus just walking across the street. Yet, if I jump my mountain bike from this dirt pile to that one over there, it's impossible that I will be hit by a bus. Therefore dirt jumping is basically safer than walking. Me and my old friend, The Ground    Surfers have sharks. Backcountry skiers have avalanches. Sky divers and mountain bikers have the ground. As an antag...

   Bikes are so hot right now! The global pandemic has brought massive popularity to a thing that many of us already knew about. Bikes are cool. Riding Bikes is fun. It's conceivable that social distancing has killed many sources of recreation that people had come to rely on and enjoy. Obviously bowling isn't a sport, but it did provide entertainment to many people, and now bowling alleys are closed.    It would have been great if bowlers had taking the sport back to it's rough and tumble roots. I'd be interested in watching some gritty, underground 'street bowling.' I picture it in an abandoned warehouse run by bowling gangs. But that didn't happen. Instead everyone in the country said, "Hey don't we have some bikes still in the garage? We should ride those." or even better, they said, " You know, I think I'd like to try mountain biking, that looks fun!"   And so the Golden Horde was unleashed on an unprepared cycling industry. B...

     I've mentioned before that I suck at ball sports, but I did run cross country and track all four years in high school. Of the two, cross country was a lot more fun. Each race began with a mass start, then the racers would funnel into a dirt trail through New England forest. I wasn't very good, but I could just keep putting one foot in front of the other. Both the boy's team and the girl's team had some very fast runners. A few of my team mates were top runners in the state. All I had to do was cross the finish line, and they would qualify for the podium.   This arrangement led me to develop a whole new racing tactic...The Decoy.  An underclassman named Joey MacRitchie and I would toe the line with all the best runners other schools had to offer. Everyone would put on their game face. A starter gun would go off and the group would lunge forward. That's when  Joey and I would jump into action. We would explode into the 3.1 mile course at a pace that wa...

  I knew John Biro. I was lucky to meet him early in my short time in that part of the mountains. At his service lots of people told great stories about him. Lots of people knew him better and new him longer. My Biro story is just a tiny scrap in the mountain of stories that could be told about him. But I want to tell it anyway, because I feel like one day his boys might be looking for new stories, little stories, everyday stories, about  their dad. I don’t want to tell a story about myself, I want to tell a story about Biro, but I just happen to be in it.   I first met Biro on his birthday in 1998. Shane and Marvelous Marvin led me up to his cabin. I had been sledding up Kebler before, and into Robinson basin. But I had always skirted around the townsite. The town site was forbidden, unless you had a reason to be there. I was excited to finally enter this mysterious place where smoke trickled from the chimney's of odd little cabins covered in snow. I stayed all day at t...

  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 ...