Sometimes you gotta go huge to discover where your limits are.
Thupthupthup. A flat trail tyre makes the saddest sound when you’re walking your bike down a hill.
Minutes before, I had psyched myself back up for the fifth and final stage of a small enduro race in a tiny town 15 minutes from my home – in other words, the most important event of the year.
Unwilling to admit how much this race mattered, my friends and I had been pre-riding the course stealthily for weeks. Race day brought the heat and humidity characteristic of that time of year, making the rocks sweaty. I’d struggled all morning over rocky sections I usually cleaned, each dab causing more panic as I pictured those seconds piling onto my total time.
I decided to salvage my day on the final stage. At the start, I cleared my head, swiped my timing chip, and charged down the trail. I couldn’t believe how fast I was going.
Too fast. About 90 metres down, my back rim went kunk! on a rock. The tyre deflated – and so did my new-found positive attitude.
My enduro career had started with more promise. The previous summer, on a whim, I’d tagged along with some friends to a two-day enduro and won the second race. I leapt into my friends’ arms, elated, when I saw the result. I had found my thing. In enduro, riders are timed on stages that are primarily downhill, with neutral ‘transfer’ stages in between. It is a test of the best all-round rider, not just the fittest.
This made sense to me. Suddenly, I made sense to me. I’d always been more inclined to descents. As a kid, I amused myself for hours by repeatedly riding up my parents’ steep driveway on my blue banana-seat bike, just for the exhilarating whoosh of coming back down. On the trail, I gravitated toward steeps, rocks, chutes, and lippy takeoffs. Enduro rewarded daredevilry, and I liked that.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der September 2017-Ausgabe von Bicycling South Africa.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der September 2017-Ausgabe von Bicycling South Africa.
Starten Sie Ihre 7-tägige kostenlose Testversion von Magzter GOLD, um auf Tausende kuratierte Premium-Storys sowie über 8.000 Zeitschriften und Zeitungen zuzugreifen.
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