Picking A Good Line

I began a series of Essays, I guess you could call them, about the parallels I see between Mountain Biking and Spirituality. Here is Essay #1 called "Picking A Good Line"

I’ve been a mountain biker for the last six years advancing from a casual weekend rider to a competitive Cat 1 racer. I’ve also been spiritually awake for the last nine years. And in the overlapping time I’ve found many parallels and insights that some times bring more clarity, and sometimes bring further distraction and confusion, to what is really important in life. This is a bit about that.

“Picking a Good Line”
One of the first things I did after my first mountain bike race was get a copy of Mountain Bike Like a Champion by Ned “The Lung” Overend. The two things I have always remembered from that book are how to take a turn with all your weight on the outside foot and how to use your eyes to navigate the trail.

If a rider is to really rail a turn there has to be commitment. There has to be courage in his loins (I love that word). I love what G.K. Chesterson says about courage,
“Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. “He that will lose his life, the same shall save it” (quoting Jesus) is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers (or mountain bikers, if you will). The paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or quite brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if he will risk it on the precipice. He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it…(he) needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine.” –italics mine.

And so we riders find ourselves faced with this at, literally, every turn. Will we have courage to rail the turn or will slam on the brakes, put our foot down and loose all momentum? Or will we throw our weight to the outside, lift our finger off the brake and for the sake railing the turn, risk tumbling into the thorn bushes and possibly get a greater taste of our potential?

The second thing “The Lung” teaches is a rider must look where he wants to go. Don’t want to his that stump ahead? Then look at the line around it! A smooth rider must keep his eyes looking ahead, spot the obstacle and the clear line around or over it and point his bike that direction while continuing to look past it for the next line. The peripheral vision is used here. We always keep our eyes on where we want to go. Identify the obstacle and line and do it over and over and over again through the course of a ride. When the focus is brought to the root immediately in front of the tire, the momentum is lost and we find ourselves on our face in the dirt.

So many of us have been hurt by others or seen someone hurt others and made promises in our hearts that, “I will never be like that person.” This is an example of focusing on the stump on the trail. Focusing on the negative does not usually get us to the positive. And so the challenge is to focus on what we want to become or achieve and to have the courage to commit while risking failure. For me, I remember a passage in an ancient text, “Fix your eyes on Jesus”, who called himself “The Son of Man” or the spitting image of what humanity was meant to be. And as I navigate the single track I am reminded that by focusing on him I am becoming more of the kind of person he would be if he were me.