A friend is trying to get me into mountain biking, so I went to the hill with him last week. It turns out that in order to ride down the mountain, you must first ride up the mountain. Our two hour ascent (probably 45 minutes for someone in any shape at all) nearly killed me.

We took a double black diamond run back down, because my friend apparently hates me, but I took it slow and had a lot of fun. It’s definitely something I’ll look into pursuing, but I’ll need to get in much better shape for it. I haven’t really used my biking muscles (i.e., legs) in over ten years, so I find it exhausting. By the time I get to the top of the hill, I’m almost too tired to enjoy myself on the way down.

Halfway down the hill, someone behind us took a six foot drop and landed chest-first on his handlebars. He didn’t seem to have any broken bones, but he must have been fairly bruised the next day. This incident really didn’t help my mental well-being for the second half of the ride, but I made it all the way down without falling. I had a minor incident where my shorts somehow got caught on my handlebars and I ran into a tree, but nothing serious happened.

When we got to the bottom of the hill, I rode my bike onto a wooden platform about three feet in the air, fell off the side of it, and landed head-first on the gravel, scraping my shoulder up quite nicely. I made it all the way down the bloody hill, only to eat dirt in the parking lot. Figures.