Why the Shore? (June, 2000)
An ode to the Shore

I was a mountain biker before I started riding on the North Shore - or so I thought. There were no actual mountains involved for the most part. We usually rode in the University Endowment Lands near UBC - often following long forgotten game trails or perhaps, I sometimes thought, they were once used by the Salish people. We would practice getting over logs and riding the few downhill sections and it was a gas. But it was no passion. It had me grinning but I would rather have gone snowboarding.

When we first started out on the shore my buddies and I were cross country purists. We did a little racing and we rode (like everyone else just about) long stemmed, straight barred chromoly thoroughbreds with the saddle all the way up. An endo is a much nastier thing when you ride over the bars with your thigh pressed against 9 inches of seatpost. We saw the odd freak with knee pads on and some wankers with saddles down at the bottom and we called them wimps. We should have known.

I held out for awhile with my awkward set up but I started to realize that the armour clad, seat down gang was having more fun. My next hold-out was my hard tail - a lovely tangerine Dekerf that was so nimble and foregiving that I saw no reason to jump on the long travel bandwagon. Carrying a crumpled bundle of tubes out from the GMG cured me of that folly.

Now I have sold out completely. I have a tough full squish rig with flat pedals and a rock ring and I don't leave home without my pads and baggy shorts. And I am having more fun, riding more obastacles and grinning like never before. For me this is what riding is all about. Riding the shore is often what gets me out of bed, keeps me pumped about life and sane when everything else is in the shitter.

There are certainly other styles of riding that are alot of fun and I have tried most of them, but from my perspective they all ask less of you; less commitment, less focus, less nerve and a less varied bag of tricks. When I manage to find that elusive zone when I can ride above myself and conquer new obstacles everything else disappears and there is only me, my bike and the trail. Rarer still are the moments when even my ride seems to leave and that 12 year old "I finally figured out how to fly" dream feeling washes over me. I don't mean literally flying like Dangerous Dan, Wade Simmons and some of the other local rock stars. Unfortunately no; more often than not I am a flailing foot down plumber with a nasty case of the grips but I love it all the same. Dorothy was right - there's no place like home