Sometimes it’s just not your day. You start out with intentions for a good, fun ride. You’re fit for the ride you have planned. It should be easy enough: go out, turn some pedals, twist some turns, sweat some sweat, maybe attack some climbs and finish with a blistering downhill. Fun!
Then it happens. You hop on the bike and BAM, you feel like a turd. You have little to no power in your legs. Maybe your lungs don’t want to work too well, and you suck wind on every climb. Or, if it’s a really unfortunate day, it can feel like someone installed a rock magnet in your front tire by the way you seem to hit every rock on the trail, bouncing around in a frustrating, ping-pong-ball-like lack of control.
The problem is that just having one of these things happen can snowball into the others. If your brain gets grumpy from, say, the lack of power in your legs, it could set off the rock magnet in your wheel, then get hung up on the lack of enthusiasm from your lungs!
How did you get here? It should have been just another ride. Did you stay up a bit late? Eat poorly? Are you stressed? I mean, you’ve ridden under less-than-ideal conditions plenty of times and had a blast. So why, oh why, poor me, did this ride on a beautiful day, on a beautiful trail full of sweeping turns and rolling dips and rises, turn into, “If I can only keep my cool and not toss my bike into the bushes, I’ll get through this, and I can go home and lick my psychological wounds?”
Sorry to say, sometimes it just happens. Sure, if you really got into analyzing it, you could maybe say that the second adult beverage you had, the big bowl of ice cream, or the dog waking you up in the middle of the night to go pee is the root cause of your mediocre performance and general feelings of ineptness and disappointment. But, like I said, you’ve been through all that before, so you should just accept that this, too, is part of mountain biking (and life at large, really). Sometimes the stars don’t align, your chakras aren’t in place, or you’re lacking Zen in your life. It could even be that the mountain biking gods want to remind you how great this pastime is because you’ve started taking it for granted. Perhaps you need a bad ride occasionally to really appreciate the many good ones you get to have!
Even professional riders have bad days, and, incredibly, they can bounce back the very next day! You can do it too, if you don’t let the negative thoughts that brew when a ride goes wrong get in your way. It’s not always easy when you’ve banged into the umpteenth rock that made you stall and almost tip over, but if you focus on the few things that do go right, you might even have some fun by the end.
Look! A butterfly! A pretty flower! Oh wow, I just made it through that rock garden without putting a foot down! A positive attitude is a wonderful thing that perpetuates itself and can turn a bad ride into (at least) a decent one.
Face it: if you’re on a bike, you’re probably going to have fun. So if this ride doesn’t work out, there’s a fair chance the next one will. Get out and pedal and prove the bad ride wrong!
Health & Fitness
ABOUT THE AUTOR: Mountain bike veteran, amateur filmmaker, and lover of long rides, Jay Bartlett has been riding trails in Southern Utah for over thirty years. Jay has over a decade of experience as a bike mechanic at St. George’s oldest bike shop, Bicycles Unlimited.