Adrenaline Fix: My Introduction to Downhill Mountain Biking

Long before I was a cyclist, before I ever threw my leg over a 29'er or a road bike, I was a downhill skier first and foremost. In my later teen years I got into freestyle skiing. Big jumps, big drops, and most importantly shredding downhill fast. I pretty much stopped skiing after my sophomore year in college, but I still dabble from time to time, at least once every other winter, I still have most of my chops. My number one problem with being an East coast skier was that the season was short, and being in PA, I was too far south to really get the snow for great skiing unless I wanted to travel. I moved around a bit and ended up in the South for a while and didn't do much skiing at all during that period of my life.

When I returned to PA, I picked up road cycling, and then eventually XC mountain bike racing and trail riding. I always related descending on a bike to skiing. the mechanics of executing a good turn is the same as it is on skis. Yet even with my background, I never had decided to see just how close the two were by trying downhill mountain biking.

My friend Jon was an experienced Downhill and Freeride mountain biker and was guiding me through the process of getting comfortable with the new style of riding. I had taken him out bikepacking for the first time a few weeks before and now it was his turn to show me something new. The one of the best things about not being cliquey as a cyclist that you get exposed to some many new and different things just by hanging out and exploring other riders' interests. Actually, scratch "cyclist" and "riders" from that sentence and replace it with "people." The point is, get out there and try something new, it makes life more interesting.

Jon getting rad. Really rad.

Mountain biking disciplines these days seem to be broken up by the ratio of climbing to descending and the weight placed by the rider on which end the bike is most optimized for. XC mountain biking for instance is very climbing oriented. XC bikes are designed to handle technical climbing very well and are very reliant on the skill of the rider to descend through technical terrain. Trail bikes are more balanced bikes for this same sort of riding, with a little more emphasis on descending. They have a little more suspension travel than an XC bike and slacker geometry to make them handle steep rough terrain on descents a little better. All Mountain/Enduro bikes and riding are descent oriented, with even slacker, longer travel bikes, up to 6" suspension travel. These bikes often have lock-outs for the suspension and are still quite capable of technical climbing, though not ideal. The most descent oriented discipline of mountain biking is fittingly called Downhill.

Downhill mountain biking is typically lift served or shuttle served riding and is done on similar terrain to downhill freestyle skiing. The most common bikes have at least 8 inches (200mm) of travel front and rear, dual crown forks, and extremely slack geometries. Compared to other bikes, they just soak up small bumps and impacts. They do it so well that you actually need a fairly decent sized feature to get them off the ground. They are extremely heavy, many weighing in at over 40 pounds and extremely unpleasant to impossible to climb on. Downhill trails are typically either designed to be ridden at high speeds or is extremely rough and treacherous. We get plenty of rough and rocky on my home trails so I focused on riding the flow/freestyle oriented terrain, which adds difficulty with features such as jumps, ladder bridges, drops, wall rides, and tight turns with generous berms.

An advanced downhill trail

The same trail section from the top.

I borrowed a downhill bike from a friend and we loaded up the car with our sleds and lit off into the rising sun. I had never had much experience jumping bikes or 'hucking' as downhillers call it. Big drops and ladder bridges made me nervous and I wasn't even sure if I was going to be able to get air on a bike without crashing and burning.I was pretty nervous actually.

Up before the sun for mountain bike adventures

Are we there yet?

We got there and suited up, got our lift tickets and headed for the top of the mountain. I was excited, nervous, and loaded up on caffeine, which was not helping. I would soon find out that nerves were unjustified.

Full-face, check. Goggles, check. Attitude, check.

My first run I rolled over all the jumps without catching any air just getting a feel for the bike. I was initially kind of uncomfortable with how much was going on with the trails. It was one berm after another, into a table, to a drop to a small set of whoops into a steep bermed turn, etc. At the end of the run there was a set of three ladder bridge progression drops. the smallest one was only about a 1 foot drop, the medium one was about a 2 foot drop and the big one was about a 4 foot drop. Then next to that was a 'real' drop that was about 8 feet to a transition. For my first 3 runs I hit each progression drop, the final of the three hitting the four footer. Jon hit the 8 footer right off the bat, and I was pretty impressed. I didn't think I'd be hitting that today. We did a couple more runs and  we played around a little on some wall rides. Here's Jon showing me how it's done:

When we got to the bottom, I asked him, "How much harder do you think the 8 foot drop is than the 4 footer?" He responded "It's pretty easy, you don't need a lot of speed or anything, you just have to stay to the right 'cause the landing is a little messed up on the left side. Why, are you thinking of hitting it?" I told him that we'd see. I hit a few tables and was now feeling a lot more on top of my game, popping off of bumps in the trail, riding some of the elevated ladder bridge features. My skiing skills were definitely transferring over. I rode down to the deck for the 8 foot drop with Jon and we scoped it out and he explained to me how to hit it. He told me to wait so he could get to the bottom and take a picture of it. I watched him hit it from the deck. I was still on the fence. Another rider came up and scoped it out and then decided against hitting and rode away for more practice at the progression drops. I couldn't blame him. It looked really scary from the top! I decided to roll up to the take off and just get a feel for it and stop, I rolled up and told Jon I was just scoping it again. I forgot to tell him I was definitely going to hit it and rolled back, turned around, and rolled it!

My heart was pounding in my chest but as soon as I was in air I felt completely natural. I had done this exact thing hundreds of time on skis, many times from much greater heights, but doing it on a bike was a little different. On the landing instead of the harsh slap of skis on snow and sucking up the whole impact with my legs, the 8 inches of front and rear travel swallowed up the impact. It felt downright gentle compared to hitting something like that on skis. I got down to Jon and excitedly asked "Did you get that!?" and he replied "No man! I thought you bailed when you stopped at the edge the first time!" I was a little disappointed, but we could always get more pictures next time down since it was at the very bottom, right by the lift, we could hit it almost every time down the mountain. I did hit it again, and again, and again. On the way up the lift, he said "I definitely didn't expect you to hit that today! I'm stoked that you tried that!"

We kept hitting the trails hard was getting more comfortable with higher speed and I took my first tumble, I was glad I had knee pads on. I messed up a wall ride and went down, but I escaped my crash unscathed. I broke the zip tie holding the brake line to the fork so I had to slowly roll down to the shop and get a new one. After a few more runs the rear brake on the bike I was borrowing from another friend had a melt down, and we couldn't fix it on site, and didn't want to pay the mechanics to fix something that I could fix at home, so I rented a bike for the rest of the day.

The rental was set-up much better than my friend's bike for me and there was an immediate improvement in my riding. The rental had a lot more pop than the previous bike and I found myself getting a lot more air and having much better take offs on tables and step-ups which was awesome. Suddenly I was jumping off the lip of one berm directly onto the next berm, The rental bike's suspension set up was a revelation to me compared to my friend's bike. I was finding flow where I previously though the trail was too busy and was having fun catching some bigger air. I started feeling a lot more comfortable in the air and was hitting more stuff instead of just rolling over it.

It rained briefly, twice, in the afternoon giving us an opportunity to stop for some food and chill for a minute while trails dried out. After the second shower the place was deserted. Everyone had left thinking the rain was going to last longer I guess or the trails would be too muddy, but after two runs the trails really firmed up except for a few muddy spots and we had hero dirt pretty much everywhere else and the place pretty much to ourselves. The weather was the nicest it had been all day after that with clear blue skies ready for us to launch into.

I spotted a ladder bridge drop and and pointed it out to Jon. It was maybe a little taller than the 8 foot deck drop, but it had a better landing. The added degree of difficulty came from the long ladder bridge that you had to stay on to get out to the landing of the drop. I asked him if I should try it. He said the trail that led up to that was really cool and that it wouldn't be much harder than the deck drop so we tried it out. I had found a new favorite trail that was basically an intermediate jump line at the with about 6 or 7 table tops and a few assorted other jumps at the top of the mountain and then a swoopy super steep bermed section that lead into a few more small jumps. Then we bombed down around hit the new trail which was a cool swoopy berm section with a bunch of step ups and then we got to the ladder bridge drop. John went first and got my picture as I dropped in.

Then the next run I got an awesome photo of him on it. I'm seriously as excited about how this photo turned out as I was about nailing the drop.

I think that photo probably best captures what our day was all about. We were just having a blast. I can't remember the last time before that I had such a flood of adrenaline going all day. I loved it and I'm lucky I don't have a bike park nearby. I'd be even more broke than I am now. For our last couple of runs we were just crushing it. We tried one of the more gnarly rock and tech oriented trails, and I almost OTB'd a full on downhill bike, which is not an easy thing to do, but I was astonished at how crazy gnarly and rough the trail was and how well the bike handled it. I have a lot of experience with rock riding and I think that helped too. After that trail I told Jon that we could stay away from that stuff and stick to the 'groomers' and he was just fine with that. We shredded a few more runs, but my legs and forearms were taking a beating. Downhill is very physically intense and great workout. It will really test your grip strength and will let you know if you've been skipping leg day. So after 25 runs we called it a day and packed up and headed home.

I'm so glad that I let Jon talk me into coming out and trying Downhill. It's a completely different experience from the XC/Trail riding that I normally do and I think I'll be making a few more trips to bike parks this summer. Downhill is great for developing a flowy riding style and awesome for working on bike handling skills and body position. I can't wait to go back again!