Your letters and photos, including camaraderie and conquering your demons and lots more of your best riding snaps
Having met my friends – seven almost-in-shape middle-aged men who love riding bikes– at a local trail centre, I found myself last in line as we came to the most modest of features: a short, wooden pallet-type thing ending in a decent drop with a gap.
The way to tackle such a feature is to relax, hold your speed and line, and just ride over it. My method, however – that of the slightly sleepy 50-year-old man who hadn’t bothered to scope the feature properly – was this: spy it coming, panic, feather the brakes, ride onto it too slowly, panic again on seeing the gap, kill my speed, roll onto my front wheel, go over the bars and land face-first in the mulch of the forest floor.
The little guy in my head wouldn’t shut up for the rest of the morning, wittering things like, ‘You could have made that!’ and ‘What’s wrong with you?!’ After the others left, I went back for another go. I set off at a good pace, determined to face my fears, but bailed at the last second and took the ride-around. Fail! After the ‘walk of shame’ back up, I decided to scope the feature out from above – for 10 minutes. This achieved very little, but during this time two new riders entered the scene and began to give the feature the once-over.
Aware that I was still hiding in the bushes like a peeping Tom, I called out and we got chatting. After a bit they hiked up and then expertly rode the feature. Inspired and slightly humiliated, I had no choice but to point my own bike at it and let gravity do its thing. I rode down the hill, thudded onto the wood, didn’t touch my brakes and kept breathing. The bike sailed out of the shadow into the sun and landed smoothly. In my head, that little guy began doing the dab dance in celebration.
After a bit of a debrief (it turned out they were almost as nervous about the drop as I was!) my new friends rode off and I decided to hit the feature one more time just to be sure the first run wasn’t a fluke. Having established that it wasn’t, I rode back to the van firmly in my happy place. That’s the thing about bikes: they are, in their essence, a mode of transport. One that takes you places, not just literally, but figuratively, too. That morning mine got me out of my bed and into a forest. It brought me to friends old and new. And it took a failure that seemed like a big deal and distilled it down into a shiny little nugget of personal growth. Kieron Black, Northern Ireland
Glad to hear you managed to conquer your demons, Kieron. And at least your initial failure inspired some great artwork – we love the cartoon you sent us capturing the aftermath of your ill-fated first attempt! (Head to The Art Of Kieron Black on Facebook to see more of Kieron’s work.)