For about five years, just at the peak and over onto the downslope of mountain biking’s popularity in the ’90s, I was so much into dirt that I almost never put wheel to pavement. I was writing a lot for Mountain Bike magazine, and the editor there, Nelson Pena, asked me to start a column that would reflect my experience with the sport as I progressed from novice to skilled rider. I don’t think I ever quite got to the skilled rider part, but even so the columns — which at their best focused intensely on a single basic technique such as doing a wheelie, or ratcheting your pedal to get through a rock garden — were popular. Occasionally I still meet people who remember that column and tell me I helped them learn how to bunnyhop or something. I guess I had a knack for describing physical action in clear, memorable ways that actually translated into useful skills. Somebody who must have been extremely junior at McGraw-Hill thought so, too, and suddenly I had a book contract in my hands. I think I was paid a $4,000 advance, and just a couple years ago I finally started earning money beyond that. My first royalty check was around fifty bucks. • The book is horribly out of date now, not only in terms of the equipment described, but in style. I learned to ride before suspension was popular or, really, even effective. And the guys I learned to ride from had this ethos: Speed through smoothness. We rode, as dumb as it sounds, to be graceful. • Basically, I’m a candyass by today’s big-hit, high-speed standards. • There’s still some stuff worth reading in the book, I think. Certain ways of describing rides or the ways people sit, little phrases that perfectly capture the sport — some of it sticks in my head. And the illustrations, by John Hinderliter, a mountain biker who lived and rode around the hard trails of western Pennsylvania, are funny and informative. Anyway, cheap used copies are about all you’ll easily find, so it’s hard to go wrong.
