The Bike Geek: What went wrong?

Howdy mountain bikers! I hope you are enjoying our new content and live videos from MtnBikeRiders.com, as you can see, some of our posts are tongue-in-cheek and if some of you are offended, oh well.

Last week I posted about a buddy’s having a close and personal encounter with a fence. Well guess what? WE HAVE THE VIDEO!!!! Yeah, our buddy was wearing a helmet cam so here it is for our amusement analysis:

As you can see in the video, our buddy lets go of the brakes, gathers speed quickly, sees the ruts, panics and goes for the fence. Before we start hurling insults at him, please note that this was his first time riding a Cyclocross bike on this type of terrain, in fact, it was his first time riding this particular bike and it was also the first time he was clipping in.

So with that said, how could he avoided this mishap? Yeah, don’t let go of the brakes is the logical response but we all been there, we get a little courage and let go of the brakes and we get in trouble. Here are other suggestions:

1. Look ahead and scan the trail. Easier said than done as our instinct is to look at what is right in front of us but if you look ahead, you will be able to analyze what path to take and how fast you should be going.

2. Target Fixation. If you ride a motorcycle, you are probably aware of this. Target fixation is an attentional phenomenon observed in humans in which an individual becomes so focused on an observed object (be it a target or hazard) that they inadvertently increase their risk of colliding with the object. But target fixation could have also helped our buddy here, simply focus on the clear path instead of the rut or the fence.

4. Learn to bunny hop. Cx bikes are really light so jumping over the rut was very doable.

Any other suggestions?