Originally Posted by
beng1
I think early in the thread, the gentleman who had years of Judo practice, building an instinct and reflex on doing it with no injury, is about the best training so far.
As far as losing the bike on a slippery surface goes, I think it makes a lot of difference which end of the bike slides out first, the front or back. Which end of the bike loses traction first depends 100% of the cornering style of the rider as long as the entire surface of the road is equally wet and slippery, this of course does not apply to a small oil-slick etc..
A group of kids in my town, one of which is a very good friend of mine, trained themselves to throw their bicycles into sideways slides on dry pavement at will in either direction, just as an ice-skater will throw their skates sideways and skid to a full and fast stop. A former Grand-National champion dirt-tracker in the USA named Carroll Resweber used the same method to bring his Harley-Davidson KR dirt-tracker to a slower speed or to a stop, throwing the brakeless machine sideways on the dirt-track to scrub off speed in a 100% controlled manner.
Anyone can ride 7000 miles without crashing their bicycle, their automobile, anyone can go through life without getting any STDs, trying LSD or getting their stomach pumped from alcohol poisoning etc.. I sure as heck don't want to be one of them or even hang out with any of them either. I have a friend who just about died climbing ice-cliffs a year ago, broke his whole body and is full of pins and took many months to get back on his feet. He is going back to ice-climbing this winter 100% for sure. And I am going to try that section of trail on my MTB I did not have the guts to go for last season after I walk it a few times and train myself as to what it needs and what it will take.
This thread is for people who are interested in living, not being the walking dead.
As someone who (as I mentioned earlier) pushes the boundaries on my MTB and have accepted crashes as an accepted part of the game, I had
some empathy towards your point of view.
(I should also mention that I broke my back snowboarding, yet continued to ride at a higher level for years after that All this to say that I am not particularly risk-averse)
Then I read this post and realize that you simply do not differentiate calculated risk taking from immature, adolescent stupidity. To put an ice climbing injury in the same category as alcohol poisoning and getting an STD is quite telling.
There is nothing life affirming about getting alcohol poisoning, STDs, or wrecking your car. Yes, some of us did stupid things in our adolescence, including me, and it was perhaps just dumb luck that I never got my stomach pumped and never had a serious accident. But that was me being a stupid young man. To be in middle age and still be proud of that sort of stuff or think it makes someone cool is pretty sad.