My Perfect Kind Of Sport

I’m on my way back to Armenia, but not in too much of a rush. This morn­ing I woke up, had break­fast and headed out with noth­ing less than an epic mountain-bike ride in mind.

I climbed quiet, steep moun­tain roads through cool and fra­grant pine forests to the upper slopes of the Aus­trian Alps, near the Italian bor­der, and decided to go for an exten­ded loop of the val­ley. I rode rocky, rooty single-track trails past high alpine mead­ows of brown and white cattle, scorched down the moun­tain­sides on dirt tracks through shady woods, stop­ping only to water the occa­sional tree, and even­tu­ally end­ing up back at the vil­lage, five hours after I’d left, feel­ing utterly invigorated.

Mountain-biking is my ideal pas­time, really. It’s got a little bit of everything I want from a sport. Today I climbed a thou­sand ver­tical metres along around 40km of off-road trails. It was fant­astic and made lunch taste a hun­dred times bet­ter than nor­mal. It also helped me come to an agree­ment with my body about my cur­rent level of fit­ness, which I’ve been strug­gling with since I stopped drag­ging 50kg of bike and lug­gage around deserts for months on end, and it re-ignited my appre­ci­ation for off-road mountain-biking; argu­ably the one thing that got me through uni­ver­sity and out the other side with a decent degree!

Mountain-biking is actu­ally far more than an endur­ance exer­cise of repet­it­ive ped­alling, as racing or tour­ing can be, because your whole body is put through its paces. This isn’t neces­sar­ily obvi­ous to the observer. But tech­nical trails require all man­ner of skills. As well as bal­an­cing on the bike and turn­ing the ped­als, your weight is con­stantly shift­ing front to back, com­pens­at­ing for sud­den drops and loose gravel climbs. You have to be ready to spring out of the saddle to let the back end of the bike roll over an obstacle without pro­ject­ing you over the handle­bars, with your elbows ready to absorb sud­den bumps ahead.

Your pedal pos­i­tion is con­stantly being tweaked to avoid catch­ing on passing roots and rocks. Your brak­ing must be inch-perfect – front and rear both – to nego­ti­ate tricky obstacles, and well-controlled on high-speed des­cents so you don’t hit a corner too fast or lose too much speed. You have to be entirely in tune with the way your chain, sprock­ets and ped­als inter­face with each other, so you’re never caught out in the wrong gear on a sud­den steep uphill sec­tion, for­cing an abrupt dis­mount and a long walk to the top.

You’re scan­ning the trail ahead of you for haz­ards. You judge the depth of the stream that crosses your path, how much it will slow you, how much momentum you need to make it across, the sta­bil­ity of the rocks beneath the water, and what you’ll be doing after you’re through – all in the split second before you hit it. Map­ping your route through the next ten metres of trail has to become second nature, else you’ll spend hours pick­ing your way through the obstacle course. You need to be able to judge your map and the trail mark­ers and know how much water, food and energy you’re going to need to take along with you, and you need to know how to get the most out of the bike in all con­di­tions, given the effort you’re put­ting in.

For plain fit­ness, it’s a com­plete workout. Your whole-body strength is needed dur­ing the viol­ent bal­an­cing act you’re ded­ic­at­ing 100% of your atten­tion to when you’re rid­ing the trails them­selves. Your endur­ance is needed for this too, but also for the ride to and from the trails, which is as long or short as you want it to be. Some stick their bikes on the back of a car, or hang them from the out­side of a cable-car or chairlift, and skip the hard work (for wimps and pro­fes­sion­als only!). Your whole body must be an exten­sion of the bike itself.

And while you can do all of this in an urban set­ting and get a free and var­ied audi­ence for your reck­less high-speed escapades, it’s out in the rel­at­ive wilds that the sport comes into its own. You can get away from the cars, up into the world’s most spec­tac­u­lar land­scapes, and immerse your­self inde­pend­ently, respons­ibly, and at a pace that hikers can only dream of. With the feel-good factor you’ll get from those endorphins, you’re likely to enjoy the exper­i­ence a whole lot more as well. And it’s all human-powered.

If you’re really ser­i­ous, it’s enough to war­rant edu­cat­ing your­self in emer­gency first-aid and in more thor­ough bike main­ten­ance and repairs. And if you’re will­ing to sac­ri­fice a little man­oeuv­rab­il­ity and put in the extra effort, you can turn an off-road ride into a very simple and ver­sat­ile exped­i­tion, with envi­able scope for get­ting well and truly out into the wil­der­ness in the know­ledge that only the most determ­ined hiker or biker could get so far off the beaten track. The week I spent off-road in the High­lands of Scot­land with Andy and Mark in 2006 was some­thing like this, and remains to this day one of the most mem­or­able and sat­is­fy­ing weeks of my life.

Last but not least, every red-blooded male needs fancy gad­gets and shiny things to repair, coo over and pol­ish obsess­ively, and in this regard moun­tain bikers are utterly spoilt!

If you’re start­ing out mountain-biking, or think­ing about it, I can heart­ily recom­mend the Lanai from Kona as a great first moun­tain bike with loads of poten­tial for upgrade once the tempta­tion of shiny bits in the mountain-biking magazines becomes too much. Andy and I have both gone for this bike to get our other halves star­ted in cycle-touring. It’s sim­ilar to the bike I hired today – solid, simple, afford­able, highly rated, highly cap­able and will take all the abuse you’re likely to throw at it.

(If you’re more inter­ested in the fancy gad­gets and shiny stuff, you could always sal­iv­ate over the utterly ridicu­lous Kona Supreme Oper­ator…)