Wheeee! The Carver Lake Mountain Bike Path

I rode the new off-road/mountain bike trail at here in the `bury today for the first time. 

It was the first time that I’ve really ridden off-road for any significant amount of time in probably 25-30 years. 

Oh, sure, there’s the jaunts onto the manicured lawns to avoid oblivious pedestrians or their menacing looking dogs and things of that nature, but nothing where I’d spend 2-4 miles on unpaved, undulating terrain.

I wasn’t sure of what to expect and, due to the length of time I’d been riding on things designed by civil engineers compared to things designed by the Grand Engineer of All, my main goal was to get through the ride with everything mechanical and bio-mechanical still in some semblance of working order. 

Still, I pretty much grew up riding in the woods that separated my house from the school football field and had been doing a lot of road riding to get the legs into good enough form.

Here’s what I did know before I got there.   

• It was single track...which means it wouldn’t be wide. Maybe two to three feet at most, so bike handling skills would be at a premium. I felt confident since I’d been practicing “holding my line” and taking tight turns, setting them up properly, keeping my body “quiet” on the bike, et cetera.
• Anytime it the path went uphill, it would be worse than trying to go up a similar climb on a road. First, the road provides an excellent surface to transfer the energy from the pedals to the wheels to forward motion.  It’s just the right “grippiness” to do that in comparison to sand, rocks, and whatever else might be on the path.
• There would be no letting the mind ponder other subjects.  Nature is not my normal environment, the road is.

I wasn’t even sure where in Carver Lake Park the path was. It’s so new that the online maps don’t show it. (The starting point is at western edge of the big parking lot, if you’re interested.) Granted, I was familiar with the park due to many years spent pushing my daughter in a stroller through it on walks or riding bikes with her through it.

So, I find the start, spent time reading the tips and the ominous sounding, “Trail is closed when wet”, which turned out to be as much for the protection of the ecosystem as the riders.  

I didn’t feel a lot of nervousness as I looked at the path in front of me. It didn’t appear ominous or frightening. The start looked a lot like the entrance to the woods across the street used to when I was growing up...before almost all the kids in my neighborhood suddenly became my age and the undergrowth began to win the battle with the paths.

The path started off going downhill. The width of the trail did not disappoint.  Perhaps two feet of space, sometimes less greeted me with the uphill side of the hill on one side and a rather precarious looking steep drop on the other.  There would be no wide, sweeping turns that would maintain momentum and not much “rocking” the bike from side to side to generate power.

It was at this moment that I learned how much I still needed to learn about being a better bike handler.  There’s a not-so-subtle difference between riding on the road and riding off-road. The road is far more forgiving, even if traffic is zooming scant feet from you.  It’s one thing to take a curve when you’ve got shoulder on one side and no traffic on the other compared to hill and drop.

Adding to this bit of fun and excitement were the rocks, branches, and concrete (concrete?) that were a part of the path...presumably either as things to make it more difficult, slow people down, or to avoid erosion. Of course, a few branches seemed low...probably seemed lower than they were, much like things seem closer on a roller coaster.

On the road, there’s also very little that your pedals hit. Of course, if you have the wrong pedal down when you take a sharp turn, you can find yourself crashing (I did THAT as a teenager), but there’s an amazing amount of stuff, like the aforementioned rocks, branches, and concrete, that you can whack with your pedals off-road.

Quickly, the lesson of keeping oneself in the lower gears became apparent.  With the terrain and terra firma making climbing any incline more difficult, the lower gears proved invaluable in efficiently powering the bike.  On the flats and downhill sections, the low gears made it difficult to pedal into a speed faster than one should be going in the first place.

Then came the turn. Or should I say, “THE TURN”.  From what it looked  like, it was a left turn, followed by a short climb, followed by heaven-knows what.  If I over-cooked the corner, there was the steep drop to contend with, so in my infinite wisdom, I under-cooked it. Branches, rocks, yetis, and woodland creatures all grabbed different parts of my bike and pulled me over into the brush.

It was a rare crash that didn’t happen in slow-motion. 

Suddenly, I was down on the ground and the branches, yetis and woodland creatures weren’t about to let go of me. Doing a quick mental inventory, I discovered that all my parts still worked and responded to orders from the brain. That’s always a plus.  

Wrestling the bike away from the woodland creatures and pulling little sticker-thorn things from my hands, I got back on and began to ride.  There was a slight problem. 

The handlebars were kind of cattywampus, so off the metal steed I climbed, steadied the front wheel with my legs and pulled the bars back into true, just like I’d seen those famous cyclists in Le Tour do. 

In hindsight, it’s probably a good thing I did, because it was at that moment that I noticed that my water bottle was still in the clutches of the woodland creatures. Considering that I had to come up with a funny photo caption for a Facebook contest to win it, there was no way that any chipmunk or squirrel was going to abscond with it.

The rest of the ride was full of “little lessons”, not the stupid falling ones, but the ones where a light goes off in your head and you say, “A ha! There’s a better/safer/smarter way to do that if I see something similar!”  

Oh, and a little bit of panic with the 2 foot wide wooden bridge, although it wasn’t much of a drop if one missed it.  

All in all, very mentally taxing, less physically so.  A lot of thinking involved in trying to figure out how to attack the course without putting oneself into danger of crashing. With all the challenges and even with the fact that I hit the deck, I know one thing for certain...

If it’s not raining... I’ll be back there tomorrow.