Where the Adrenaline Hides

By Chris Dannen

Last week I had the fortune of engaging in one of those most plastic of conversations: the interview chat. Meeting a job recruiter at a coffee shop off campus, I had been prepared to swallow my contempt for ass-kiss small talk. I wasn’t really worried. Questions about the local weather, about my major, about my “plans for the future” hardly equal the verbal torture occasioned by little-known-family-member small talk or even ex-girlfriend small talk. I could do this chat. Get pumped. No problem.

Not usually a problem, at least. But this one, this one threw sand in my pudding like I never would have expected. In a moment perhaps unique in the history of small talk, the woman with whom I spoke said something I found damn close to being disagreeable.

“This column is looking dumb,” you might be saying; “it’s not even about mountain bikes.” Well yeah, it is. Keep going.
“It says here one of your hobbies is mountain biking,” she had offered.

“Yes, it is. I like it a lot.”

She continued. “My fiancée mountain bikes. He asked me to go with him one time and I said no. I’ve never really understood it.”

[Was that rude?]
“Well you should really try it sometime,” I said, deflated.

“Well actually I figure I don’t need to try it. I mean, I’ve been skydiving, which was a lot of adrenaline. It’s probably like that.”

“Uh-huh… yeah.” The affirmatives dribble out of my mouth. They’re out of propriety and I don’t mean them. I think she’s way off.
We’re talking about something else now—community service or English literature or some such thing. But I’m stuck on this skydiving comparison. The first thing that comes to mind is that riding my bike isn’t nearly as fun as I imagine skydiving would be. In fact, biking is sort of hard work. Skydiving is none. You just fall out of a plane. You don’t even have to pull your own parachute; the altimeter on your pack releases the chute by itself. You could be a week dead and be a skydiver.

Now, I’m not going to pull a Rob Story here and start deriding other hobbies. Skydiving, road biking, Conservatism—whatever your bailiwick, it’s fine by me. But god damn it, we deserve some credit. Our sport is a tough one. We endure scrapes, cuts, breaks, crashes, grit in the mouth, bugs in the eye, sweat-stained car seats and gut-searing post-ride Mexican food. You can’t just fall somewhere and become a mountain biker. You blow several paychecks at the bike shop, so you can fall somewhere in the woods. Then you’re a mountain biker.

But there’s no use in trying to explain the virtue of the sport to the lady sitting across the coffee from me. She’s going on about hard work or focus or team ethics or why she can’t tell me the starting salary just yet. I want to bring biking into the conversation again but the ‘hobbies’ section of the small talk is passed.

It’s not that I don’t believe her. I’m sure skydiving is a rush. But when you ponder it, it is a safe rush, like roller coasters or protected sex; you’re more likely to be hit by an errant chunk of SkyLab than to have the situation go awry. But what are the chances that, when I try that new ladder-drop off thing some lunatic built over an angled slab of rock on my local trail, I’ll bite it, and end up with less skin (and less pride) than I came out there with? You probably know the chances. And you probably care as little as I do.

But this isn’t a competition of badass factors. There is certainly something gnarly about freefalling a couple of miles to earth, but once you’re up there, you have to do it. There’s no turning back. By contrast, there’s no one forcing you to go faster, try a new descent, a new jump, or a new techie section. It’s up to you, and you know you might trainwreck in front of your riding buddies. But you also know you’ll try it again (intact bones permitting) and probably conquer whatever the hell you were attempting.
So what of this lady, this sky-diving potential boss? She’s a planner. She has her amusements in controlled doses. Nothing unexpected, no ancillary challenges along the way. She likes knowing just how her experiences will conclude. Great. But that is not fun. That’s not how an interesting life is made. It’s a cop out.

This all comes down to self-confidence, as far as I can tell. We (and roadies too) want the unexplored challenge, the new ride. We want the lunatics to keep building new obstacles. We want to ride the long loop to see if it won’t kill us. We know we want what we don’t know. Because that’s where the adrenaline hides. Because we won’t be content if we don’t find it.

This is not simply a meat-headed mantra. We are cognizant that every time we step over the bike, that things will not go as planned, that the unexpected parts might hold as much pain as they hold amusement. The confidence is knowing that if they do, you won’t care. You will still be glad you went riding. You will still go riding again next time. It will all work out.

“So it says here you write a weekly column for bikemag.com?” She continues.

“Yes, it’s called The Dixie Drift. I’d be delighted if you checked it out. I’ll have a new one up next week,” I reply.

“I will,” she follows. “I’ll read it first thing on Monday. I’ll write a reminder in my planner. What is that, October 24th?”

Like I said. It will all work out.

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