I still remember my first mountain bike ride.
I showed up with a cheap Huffy. Flat pedals. Brakes barely worked.
my friend took me out to City Park trails. He was an incredible athlete. Strong, fast, experienced. Coming out of triathlon season, mountain biking felt like a good off-season challenge.
I don’t think I’ve ever crashed that many times in 90 minutes.
It was chaos.
It was frustrating.
It was a little scary.
And somehow… it was one of the most fun things I had ever done.
I was hooked immediately.
A few days later I found a used bike in the paper for $150.
That was it.
That was the start of something that ended up taking over a big part of my life.
In triathlon, effort mattered.
From a training and physiology standpoint, everything made sense.
I had strength. I had power.
But out on the trail, it didn’t always show up that way.
I could push hard… but that didn’t mean I could ride fast.
Something wasn’t lining up.
What pulled me in wasn’t just the riding.
It was how different it felt.
You had to focus.
You had to move with the bike.
You had to adjust constantly.
If your attention slipped for even a second, you paid for it.
Usually by hitting the ground.
At first, I was terrible.
But I kept going back.
There was something about that process that pulled me in.
Figuring out how to get over a rock cleanly.
Learning how to shift my weight without thinking about it.
Feeling the bike start to respond differently.
Little things started to click.
Eventually I signed up for my first race.
And I got destroyed.
But I didn’t really care.
I remember finishing completely empty, nothing left, and feeling like I had done exactly what I was supposed to do.
After that, something shifted.
I started paying closer attention.
Not just to how hard I was working… but to what was actually happening.
What felt solid.
What fell apart.
Where I lost time.
Where things flowed.
I didn’t always have the answers.
But the more I paid attention, the more direction I started to feel.
And over time, things started to change.
Not all at once… but consistently.
I moved from beginner to sport… and eventually into the expert category.
That meant consistently placing in the top 5 across multiple races in a season.
What I was doing in training finally started to show up on the trail.
It felt like something had connected.
I remember feeling like I had finally bridged that gap…
between what I understood from a training and physiology standpoint…
and what was actually happening in real life.
Not perfectly… but enough that I could rely on it.