Grip It and Rip It
Twenty minutes into my first run on a Bowhead mountain bike, the front wheel caught a root, and I went down. Dirt, elbow pads, and a crack I felt more than heard. The throttle housing had snapped clean off.
First run. New gear. Already broken.
For a second I just sat there in the dirt at Powder Ridge, hands still gripping bars that weren’t doing anything anymore. Almost fifteen years in a chair has taught me that equipment seems to fail at the worst moment. You almost expect it, although you never learn to like it.
Cesira walked over, looked at the throttle, and said we’d have to head back to base — she could replace the handlebar in thirty minutes. I rolled downhill and was pushed across the flats the rest of the way. When we got there, she went to work. Half an hour later, we were back out for round two.
We started on turns, working up some berms, then progressively bigger ones, one after another, seemingly rapid-fire, though it never quite was. From there, we moved onto a track shared with teenagers on mountain bikes: berms, a run of bumps, and a few tight bridges I definitely didn’t want to misstep on.
Just Hands is the brainchild of Torsten Gross, who hasn’t let his wheelchair slow him down. He’s a legit race car driver, sponsored by Volkswagen, competing on equal footing alongside able-bodied drivers wherever he goes. A few years ago, he offered the race car experience at Lime Rock, CT, to anyone in a wheelchair who was pining for it. Last year, he added mountain biking. This year, he brought the biking to Powder Ridge. Cesira is an occupational therapist who’s been around dirt bikes most of her life, making her the ideal person to work with Torsten and drive his vision forward.
My good friend Aaron joined me again this year, as last year: moral support most of the time, physical support when I needed to be picked up off the dirt.
Learning the technique meant fighting through some counterintuitive instincts. The first: the urge to go slow. Natural, but wrong. Sometimes you just have to trust the Bowhead to do its job: hold the turn.
The next: push the hips into the slope while throwing the hands and the handlebars in the opposite direction. It isn’t a natural motion. It’s the only way to get the hips pushing into the hill to actually bite. None of it works without engaging the abs and core muscles I only have partial control over. It’s a lot to process, and for a while I overthought every inch of it until something like muscle memory started to take hold.
We took progressively tougher trails. First, short cutouts off the main service road. Then a green. I knew I could handle greens. I wanted the blues.
And there I was, looking out at Skulk, not the misspelled Burban black trail next to it. I headed down Skulk. Wasn’t covered in glory. Covered in dust and dirt instead after I wiped out on the second of three rapid-fire curves. Cesira grabbed the roll bar and righted me.
Frustrated, not defeated. I wasn’t willing to let the day end there. That’s not really about mountain biking. It’s about every new thing I’ve tried since the accident: LeanOnWe, public speaking, driving with hand controls, rowing, marathons, and relearning how to use a body that doesn’t work the way it used to. The first attempt rarely goes smoothly. The gear breaks. You fall. You get back on, or you don’t.
It’s the same message Bruce invokes when he exhorts, “No retreat, no surrender.”
When we reached the bottom, Cesira reminded me again. Hips and hands. Opposite directions. Hard.
This time it stuck. Three more runs down Skulk, smooth as silk, the machine holding its own, my hands finally holding up mine.
Twenty minutes into the day, I’d been sitting in the dirt with a broken throttle and hands that weren’t doing anything. By the end of it, those same hands were the only reason I stayed upright. The Bowhead only holds the line you give it. The learning was always going to be mine to do.
Way cool!
Great ride.How are the Shoulders ?