The Plunge

Hello everyone... Meet Ben Haldeman better known to those in professional bike racing as "The Hammer". He is getting married next week so a couple of us piled into the van and headed up to kearnville for a bachelor party to celebrate his commitment. We figured we would celebrate true hammer style by spending a day rafting class IV section of the Kearn River and then the next day riding an epic 30 mile mountain bike trail with over 9000 feet of decent.

Lets just say that the trip was pretty epic. I had rafted this section of the Kearn river earlier in the year but there almost twice as much water flowing then, which made the river completely different. There were A LOT more rocks popping up and this was our guides second trip down the Kearn with an actual group.

There were a couple close calls when Matt and Zach got tossed from the raft and sucked under a bunch of rocks into a cave... We were all shaking a bit when we saw Matt pop out the other side but Zach was no where to be seen. Turns out they were both OK and survived with just a couple of scratches.

I was pretty anxious about the plunge the next day, so nervous that I actually decided against it. Heights are not generally my cup of tea and add my amateur Mountain bike skills and you got a potential recipe for disaster. My saving grace was that Marco Fanelli would also be riding and I would imagine our skills level to be about the same. But he bailed morning of. When I realized I could not get a refund I just decided what the heck... It is Ben's Bachelor party can't really bail now.

The group split at the top, with the majority of the crew climbing an additional thousand feet or so up to the peak. I headed right down with one of Ben's old room mates because I was certainly not going to be railing the descents as fast as the other guys. The first 20 miles or so of the trail was EPIC. It was rolling sections of single track through totally remote pristine wilderness and had a little bit of everything to offer from awesome single track climbs to rocks shoots, to hard pack winding descents... The whole gamete. It really reminded me of how much I love Mountain biking. The best part about the ride was how long it was... because typically you would find a couple of sweet sections on a ride that were like that but NEVER 20 miles of seemingly never ending awesomeness... All that was followed but a descent known as "The Plunge". There were a couple section that were "pretty" exposed but nothing like it was hyped up to be. I was a lot more scared in my mind while were being shuttled to the top then I was on the actual descent. I tend to psych myself, given the opportunity and I miss out on a lot because of that fear. Yesterday was a perfect example of how important it is to walk through fear. Now having ridden (and walked) through it I can't wait for the ride.

Fear comes in a thousand forms and can really be debilitating at times. It is such a liberating feeling to experience the fear, acknowledge it, but decide that you are not going to let it run your life and prevent you from getting the most out of life. There is a tremendous amount of presence and concentration in the mind that occurred during that ride, especially the decent. If that is not meditation, then I don't know what is.

Man... I need a mountain bike.