Back to the Bike Park, This Time With My Son

Last Christmas, my wife gave me a trip to a bike park.

I don’t really know why.

I hadn’t been mountain biking in a bike park in more than 20 years. Not since before I moved to Germany.

When I first moved to Potsdam, I did ride mountain bikes. There were plenty of trails around, but most of them seemed to be two meters wide and completely straight.

Eventually, I more or less gave it up.

What I discovered instead was that the road riding around Potsdam is fantastic. So rather than wishing Potsdam had the kind of mountain biking I wanted, I decided to take advantage of what it did have.

And for the next 20 years or so, that’s pretty much what I did.

Mostly road. Sometimes gravel.

But hey, a trip to a bike park sounded like fun.

And actually, it wasn’t quite true that I hadn’t been to a German bike park. I’d ridden at Rabenstein near Chemnitz and on the MTB trails around the Ochsenkopf in the Fichtelgebirge. Rabenstein in particular was really nice, probably the best mountain biking I’d done in Germany.

But this time I wanted to do something different.

I wanted to take my son Alexander.

He was nine, and I actually couldn’t believe it had taken me this long to expose him to some really fun mountain biking.

Better late than never.

There was just one problem.

He didn’t have a bike.

Alex’s New Bike

My new intern Cody was starting around the same time, and building Alexander a mountain bike seemed like the perfect project to get him started.

It wasn’t exactly an easy first frame. The bent tubing made things a bit more complicated.

But Cody got it finished, and it turned out really nice.

I decided to just clear coat it so you could see everything underneath the paint. I don’t actually recommend doing this, and the frame has since been powder coated, but it looked really good.

Alexander had a bike.  Here are some photos of how it turned out….

My New Bike

Now there was another problem.

I didn’t really have one either.

And then I had an idea.

How awesome would it be if Alexander and I went to the bike park together, both riding our own Big Forest Frameworks mountain bikes?

I’d been wanting a new MTB for probably eight years. A hardtail with 140 mm of travel up front. Something that could do just about anything I wanted it to do.

There was just no way I was going to get one built before the trip.

Cody!

Cody’s second frame became my new trail MTB.

There wasn’t enough time to get mine properly coated either, so I painted it myself. I planned to clear coat it to match Alexander’s bike, but somehow blue came out instead of clear.

So the top half is blue and the bottom is clear.

I think it came out pretty nice considering.

There was almost no time left before the trip. Eskil was building the bike up for me and we ran into one compatibility problem after another. Wrong driver for the cassette. A derailleur that didn’t work. At least two emergency trips to the local bike shop.

Somehow, they had what we needed.

We got it done.

The next day, we were off to the trails.

Alexander and me, riding our Big Forest Frameworks mountain bikes.

A dream come true!

Learning to Jump

We’d booked an apartment in St. Andreasberg in the Harz. The bike park there was supposed to be one of the more family-friendly ones in the area.

The weather was perfect. Sunny and warm, but not too warm.

We took the lift up.

At the top there were some small jumps where you could warm up.

Alexander loves jumping.

And I realized pretty quickly that I REALLY like it too.

I’d never really jumped doubles before. Well, that’s not entirely true, but certainly not very often.

These weren’t actually doubles, though. They were tables. Basically two bumps connected by a flat section, so if you don’t jump far enough, you land safely on top rather than crashing into the second bump.

At first you’re scared, so you don’t go fast enough.

You jump.

You land on top.

Then you go a little faster.

And a little farther.

And eventually, instead of bumping down onto the top, you fly all the way across and land smoothly on the other side.

What a feeling!

It is SO much fun.

I definitely understand why Alexander likes it so much.  Here’s a little video of me on the warm up small jump line so you know where things are at.  Just baby jumps, nothing serious here.  But still it really is so much fun!

Oh My God, We’re Going to Die

I was a little worried that Alexander would crash early in the weekend and then not want to continue.

He tends to be the kind of kid who just goes for it without worrying too much. Which is awesome.

But it’s also pretty easy to go too far.

And once you’re scared on a mountain bike, things don’t tend to work very well anymore.

Fortunately, that didn’t happen.

The highlight came when we decided to increase the difficulty a little and try a harder trail.

There were some North Shore-style sections where you’re riding on wooden structures above the ground.

We came to a series of big sweeping wooden turns.

I looked at them and thought:

Oh my God. We’re going to die.

Meanwhile, Alexander was out front.

He was already riding them.

At this point I was beginning to question myself as a father.

But we’d ridden similar things before. I knew the trick, and I think Alexander did too.

Keep riding.

Keep your speed.

It’ll be fine.

And it was.

Then came the third one.

Another banked wooden turn, except this one was much steeper. The radius was probably only three meters.

I looked at it.

Now I REALLY thought I was going to die.

The problem was the speed.

Too fast and you could fly off the top.

Too slow and you could fall off the bottom.

So I did the best I could.

And made it through.

What a feeling.

I had been genuinely scared. I really thought I might get hurt.

And then I rode it.

I came out the other side feeling absolutely amazing.

I rode over to Alexander, and he felt exactly the same way.

That might have been the best part of the whole weekend. It wasn’t just that I’d had this incredible experience myself. I got to share it with my son.

We had both been scared. We’d both made it through.

And we both knew exactly how awesome that felt.

What a weekend!

And I have to thank Cody and Eskil for helping make it happen. Without them, those two bikes wouldn’t have been ready.

Twenty years after more or less giving up mountain biking, I think my wife might have known something I didn’t when she gave me that Christmas present.