What happened to mountain biking?

Ripping a berm at the Don dirt jumps. Photo by esteemed photographer, journalist, and friend, Mansoor Tanweer.

I began mountain biking in 2006. I was 12 years old, and it felt as though I was late to the party – not because everyone else had entered the sport ahead of me, but because it felt so natural that I knew I should have discovered it years earlier.

Every aspect of mountain biking felt as though I had been doing it for my entire life. I revelled in the speed, the air, the control, the lack of control, and even the crashes (especially the crashes). My proudest moment mountain biking was at 14, when I finally convinced my parents to drive me up to Hardwood Hills (now Hardwood Ski and Bike) in the farmland north of our cottage for long enough that I could finally attempt “Radical.”

The menacingly named trail was the longest and most technical in the network. My friends spoke of it in hushed tones, not yet having ever experienced the 12 kilometres of serpentine single-track first-hand. I was to be the first of us to attempt the trail marked by the ominous black signage.

My trusty (read: terrible) white $350 Norco Pinnacle and I beat through the unrelenting ups and downs that are endemic to the Ontario mountain biking scene, struggling and often failing to maintain the tenuous grip afforded by the bike’s $10, street-ready budget tires. By the final third of the ride, the late summer skies had opened in a warm but obfuscating crush of fat raindrops.

Towards the end of the ride, I walked up more hills than I rode, and I had to make repeat attempts at many of the descents before finding success in the face of the slick earth and clay. I probably descended at least as many miles on my ribs as I did on my tires.

In the car ride home, I was exhausted and bruised. I didn’t sit in the back of the teal Toyota Avalon so much as I melted; a jellified mound of skin containing what wouldn’t be a capable athlete again until considerable rest and Band-Aids had been applied. I was extremely satisfied.

I trudged directly into the shower upon my return to the cottage. As the dried mud softened, the bottom of the tub turned first brown, then deep red as the thick layers of dirt rinsed clear of the fresh wounds. I barely noticed the colours; I was still reviewing the highlight reel of my ride in my mind’s eye.

Since then I’ve spent the last decade riding trails from Hardwood to the Don Valley to Hornby Island, but like any junkie will tell you, you can never reclaim that first high. And I don’t expect to – my current bike is a more capable, robust sample of American engineering (and Taiwanese manufacturing) than that white Norco, and my skill has increased exponentially since that August ride in 2008. But there’s something more at work…

The core of mountain biking, for me, has always been the challenge and the danger. If I wanted to insulate myself from any hazard or pitfall, I could take up road biking, or gravel riding, or jogging. Or golf. Mountain biking is an escape from the mundane and unyielding predictability that life offers. It’s the only place I can feel a sense of danger, and that’s what I love about it. And it’s not synthetic danger, or theoretical danger; I experience the thrill to the fullest because I’ve seen the far side of control.

It’s not something I expect most people to understand. When I try to explain that I can’t enjoy mountain biking without the very real possibility of grievous bodily harm, people look at me… well, exactly like you’d expect. But just as you can’t have happiness without misery, you can’t feel the full impact of the trails’ exhilaration unless you’ve also felt the full impact of the trails on your face. The pain is a reference point, and it’s a repercussion. It’s the thought that presses on my adrenaline glands when I’m struggling to keep myself upright. This is why a good crash isn’t a bad thing, in my mind. It’s a story, and the scars are merit badges.

My first “real” mountain bike, purchased at Toronto’s 2009 Fall Bike Show. Photo taken a month later with the shaky post-ride hands of a 15-year-old Josh.

This is why I’m so disappointed in the current state of mountain biking. Having worked in bike shops for years, I’ve heard the company lines about inclusiveness, and how “more riders is good for the sport.” But it’s not. It’s a clever marketing line to sell expensive carbon bikes to people whose doctors only recently informed them that golfing isn’t a sufficient form of cardio.

So I’m not the slightest bit sorry that I don’t want to give up my source of vigour so that Phil the golfer and his buddy Pete (who nearly ran a 10k that one time) can feel a bit adventurous for the three rides they go on before realizing that they’d much rather be at home watching the game. I don’t accept that the trails I bled into as a kid should be sanitized so that people can feel safe while participating in a sport that, by all rights, should be anything but.

Unfortunately, it’s not up to me. Forces larger and more powerful than I am have steamrolled my local trails to the point that I can (and have) ridden them on a ‘cross bike with slick tires and a 53/39 crankset. I passed a businessman on a carbon Santa Cruz down one of the descents, and nothing about the experience was the slightest bit exciting. My local trails are dead.

I wish I had some conclusion here, but I’m out of answers, and nearly out of hope. The trails I grew up on are insipid simulacra of their former selves, and they no longer seem worth the 20-minute ride to the trailhead. Maybe your trails are faring better – I know I enjoyed Hornby, and Hardwood has managed to retain some of its charm – but the mentality that dictates huge bikes on increasingly tame trails has me wondering if this sport will ever recover. This is more a requiem than a call to action, and maybe that’s the point. For me, mountain biking is worse than dead – it’s a reanimated corpse dressed in Lycra.