Weakness Leaving The Body

It was vertigo. A heady, insuperable longing to fall. We might also call vertigo the intoxication of the weak. Aware of his weakness, a man decides to give in rather than stand up to it. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Milan Kundera.

Is vertigo the fear of falling or the desire to fall? I’m speeding along the new Mogo trails on my mountain bike feeling that almost overwhelming desire to go faster and faster until I crash. That’s mountain biking, the play between how fast you can go and how fast you should go. I heard about another casualty of the new trails yesterday – broken ribs and a broken collar bone – another old person like me tugged along by the pull of gravity mixed with desire.

My big goal is to ride 1000 metres of vertical in a day. That’s not really a big goal as I’ve hit the mid 700’s without really trying; but I’m leaving my 1000 metre goal for summer when it is too hot to rock climb and too busy to travel.

Mountain biking is a good sport for old people. It’s like that sticker on cars “objects in mirror are closer than they appear.” Obstacles and challenges come up quickly when you are mountain biking which means you have to react just as quickly and, as we age, our reaction times get longer and longer; some because of a reduction in fast twitch fibres, some because we stop doing things which require fast reactions.

There’s also the riding uphill which is a good leg and lung workout (no E bikes), and unlike running or walking (where you can slow down but still move uphill), to keep the bicycle moving you must go at pace uphill. An afternoon on the trails can become an interval workout. That’s the other thing we lose as we age, the ability to push your lactate threshold out. Without specific training, older folks get good at endurance and poor at power and strength, which is why so many older folks become MAMILS (or the female equivalent), though women seem to just drop out altogether.

Mountain biking is the closest I’ve found to backcountry skiing in Australia. “Earning your turns” we used to call backcountry skiing back in the old days when people still earned their turns. Most of a big day out in the backcountry was spent skiing uphill breaking trail through fresh powder. It might take an hour to gain 300 metres which was descended in the blissful joy of powder turns in about three minutes. Mountain biking is like that, most of the time I’m riding uphill but, there are descents where the bike and I float down buoyed by gravity. Weakness leaves the body the moment you decide to enjoy the uphill as much as the downhill.